Introduction:
Web animation has a significant influence on the World Wide
Web and is used for various roles in the creative media industry. For example
animation is used significantly in web page application such as rich media
movie websites as well as advertising products.
In the current era implementing eye catching, dynamic animations into
web advertisements is the way in which you capture your audience as the web is
full of none legitimate banners which scam the user and for someone like me I
just instinctively ignore them, so applying smooth, professional looking
animations to adds is the only way in which you can really capture your audience.
Web animation has a significant influence on the World Wide
Web and is used for various roles in the creative media industry. For example
animation is used significantly in web page application such as rich media
movie websites as well as advertising products.
In the current era implementing eye catching, dynamic animations into
web advertisements is the way in which you capture your audience as the web is
full of none legitimate banners which scam the user and for someone like me I
just instinctively ignore them, so applying smooth, professional looking
animations to adverts is the only way in which you can really capture your
audience. Web animation can be found all over the internet and therefore there
are various techniques & technologies available for people to make them.
E-Learning
Web animation was introduced to enable web site developers
to publish more complex and elaborate content onto their sites. For example in
the E-learning sector web animation enabled web authors to produce visual
learning aids in the form of animated demonstrations to help people learn. Here is an example of an interactive
e-learning animation:
Interactive animation like this are much more fun to watch
for younger audiences, and can get a message across much clearer than words or
audio can.
Web animations don’t consume as much bandwidth as a typical
video and animations can easily be incorporated with other things such as external
links, buttons and stuff like quizzes for the e-learning platform.
Overall web animation really aids the e-learning platform and
the interactive elements which can be implemented into an animation makes for a
much more fun and interesting learning tool.
Animated Gifs
One of the most common forms of web animation which can be
found on the internet is a GIF animation. A GIF animation is basically a sequence
of still bitmap images played continuously which gives the visual impression
that the image (gif) is moving. One of the key reasons why GIFs are highly used
is its vast compatibility with internet browsers. Animated GIFs can be used for
things such as banners but there are various disadvantages which would
encourage a designing to build a banner in other ways. For example the file
size of a gif can be quite substantial depending on the complexity and length
of the animation. As gifs are made up of
many bitmaps if the file size of those bitmaps is huge then the gif would also
be huge. Therefore designing high quality, smooth animations and then exporting
them as a GiF would result in really high size and if published on a webpage it
would slow the whole webpage down.
Here is an example of a gif animation:
The file size of this particular gif is 500kb which is half
a megabit and this gif is 54 frames long which is equivalent to around 2
seconds long. If a designer plans on making
a longer animated banner then they should make it in Adobe Flash and export it
as a SWF
Flash & SWFs
Flash animation is very much now the default format for all
rich media animation on the internet as the flash format enables more complex animation
to be presented, for example flash animations are actually embedded into
webpages enabling a great deal of interactivity and can also integrate user
input commands to enable the flash animation to trigger the internet browser to
perform various different tasks.
In this website flash animation have been implemented onto
various objects on the site which have had coded applied to it which trigger
functions on the browser such as open another link in another tab or perform
something on the users social media sites such as “like” It on Facebook or “Follow”
on twitter.
These types of dynamic effects and interactivity make
developing websites in Flash a more useful way to advertise media content on
the web.
Some of the key advantages of the SWF format over the GiF
format are that a SWF can have interactivity meaning that it can be implemented
with something like a click event which enables it to change state or open a
webpage. A Gif Format has no such feature which enables it to respond to any
user input or even play audio but one of most important thing for web
developers is file size and 9 out of 10 times a SWF file would be significantly
smaller than a GIF file and the reason for this is that SWF images are traced
as a vectors while GIF images are always bitmap.
Flash Banners
Flash banners can be found throughout the internet such as on
news sites and e-commerce sites. Flash banners are particularly aimed at the
same target audience as the website the user is browsing for example a website which
specialises in cars would likely have a banner advertising a new car. Here’s a
good example;
