Welcome to Active Art Animations

You have a small art display show in your gallery and are now looking forward to hosting the annual art show. However, you’ve received complaints of stuffiness and pet hair issues from some of your loyal clients. Since you don’t want to face the embarrassment during the major art event, you’re looking for ways to combat these issues. After reading through some articles, you discover the best vacuum cleaner for pets. However, since you don’t know anything about the types of vacuum cleaners, here’s a comprehensive guide to choosing pet vacuums. How to Choose the Best Pet Vacuum Cleaner When selecting the best vacuum cleaner to get rid of the pet hair issues in your studio, you need to consider these factors: The Type of Vacuum Cleaner You Need You need to be sure if you want an upright, canister, cordless or bagged vacuum cleaner. Upright vacuum cleaners, for instance, are perfect for large spaces, like your studio. What makes them the right fit is that you only have to push the vacuum in front and don’t have to bend down to clean. They also have the best turbo brushes. Bagged vacuum cleaners, on the other hand, capture all the dust in a disposable bag. The hoovers also feature larger capacities, so there’s less maintenance and contact with dust. However, you’ll have to purchase replacements frequently. Your Budgetary Options You might also want to consider your financial situation. How much can you afford to buy a vacuum cleaner? According to most experts, buying a pet hair vacuum cleaner would cost anywhere between $50 and $1000. Cordless vacuum cleaners tend to be more costly, particularly if you want one with exemplary battery life. Extra-Mini Tools You also need to consider the extra tools or accessories that come with vacuum cleaners. These

Your youngest daughter just graduated and wants to start a 3D animation studio business. However, she doesn’t have the capital required to start, and your older kids can’t help her out with the staggering economic recession. You’ve also checked your pension1savings and investments, and nothing seems to add up to the total amount she needs. You’ve seen her work and can attest to her prowess in the field, so this will be a fantastic investment. After failed attempts at getting the amount required, you suddenly get a light bulb moment – equity release. Equity release mortgage is a financial plan that offers you tax-free cash and allows you to continue living in your home till you pass on or move into residential care. To qualify for this incredible scheme, you only have to be 55 years and above, a UK resident, and own a home worth at least €70,000. Since you’re 60 and own a home in Edinburg, you only have to find out your estate’s worth since the estate market value keeps fluctuating. After some equity release advice from your financial advisor, and a visit from an independent surveyor, you discover that your home is worth €560,000. What’s the Equity Release Process? Well, now, you can start the equity release2 process and be closer to getting the cash to actualize your favourite daughter’s dream. The home equity release process is rigorous and offers you the opportunity to think through carefully about the plan. It involves several steps which vary from one equity release company to another. Nonetheless, the standard process involves: Selecting a financial advisor – Choosing a financial advisor is one of the most critical steps to take. Since you already have an advisor, you can go on to the second step. In case you don’t, you have

Now that you’ve been collecting awhile, here’s some tips for the future: Taking care of your art First of all, how are you going to store your pieces? If they are unframed, you want to protect them. For drawings, keeping them in mylar sleeves is a very good idea. The sleeves protect your art from bending, spills (!), and all sorts of hazards. Set aside some space to keep them all together. Ideally a cabinet or special acid-free storage boxes do the trick. Be careful not to stack too many cels on top of one another, or you risk undue pressure cracking your paint. For cels, mylars work well also, but have acid-free tissue against the back (paint-side) as to prevent the cel from sticking to the mylar. Having the cels stored within mattes is also a plan as when you stack them, the weight is not on the art, but on the mattes. You may also invest in an art portfolio with the pages inside. However, do remember to remove any acidic paper that is inside, or do put your pieces in mylars. If any dust accumulates on a piece, using dust-off very carefully can do the trick, but even smarter is to keep the art protected in the first place to prevent the dust from ever accumulating at all. If there is some dirt or old tape,etc. on your cel, a cotton swab in a little bit of rubbing alcohol will work wonders. Do not overuse, and do not get anywhere near the paint and/or linework. If in doubt, get the piece to your restorer. Framing your pieces is obviously the optimal way to enjoy them. Choose a framer carefully. You don’t want to spend thousands of pounds on your art to lose it all because you were

This is the first of what will be a long line of articles talking about how to go about collecting, caring for and enjoying animation art. The best advice I can give a beginning collector is to educate yourself. Sadly, as there is a lack of written material on animation art collecting, I would suggest that you ask questions, and read articles. It’s a slow start, but you’ll quickly pick up speed and make sense of it all. You may also want to visit my web site which has a page with animation definitions and one comparing limited edition art and original production art. I think it’s best that one has a clear understanding of the different types of animation art that exists as it can be quite confusing. Let’s start with a few basic definitions. There are two types of animation art. The first is original production animation art. Animation art by definition is any drawing or celluloid (cel- spelled with one “l”) that was used in the making of a cartoon. These pieces are all one-of-a-kind and involve some type of a hand process- i.e. drawing or inking/painting. The other type of art is reproduction art. These are serigraph cels (sericels) and limited edition cels. This art was not used in the cartoon making process, but does resemble the art that was. Sericels are usually made in editions of a few thousand and created by a silk-screen type of process. Limited editions are made in smaller editions of around 500. They are usually hand painted and either hand or xeroxed lined. These pieces are not actually done by the animators, although they may have had creative input. Some common questions:What makes animation art collectable? Collecting animation art is a wonderful pastime. Cartoon lovers around the world take great

Whether you are developing an app or working on a business presentation — you might want to spice things up with some animations. Animations can help you create a flow, they can create progress, emphasize or soften changes, catch the eye, and cause delight.Animations are great, but you need to know how to use them, otherwise they are just annoying. In this guide I will try to explain how to create a simple animations that never fails. Rule #1: Do not throw in childish animations I’ve seen too many dumb animations being used by good speakers.Dumb animations are easy to recognise: they do not have a consistent direction, they do not contribute to the flow of the presentation (or app) and usually we (the audience or the users) just want them to end. The fact that there are so many animation types is a trap because most of these types are not recommended. Rule #2: Select a simple movement direction and stick with it Select a direction to your software animation (or slides transitions) and stick with it for the entire show. Here’s an example of 3 elements flying in from the bottom of the screen. This is a classic animation that can be used in presentations or in your app (i.e. a toast flying in from the bottom of the screen with a short status update). Rule #3: Create a tiny delay between each animation You can spice things up by adding a very short delay between the animation of each element. I’m talking about a really short delay, something like 0.15 seconds delay. IMPORTANT: Do not wait to begin the second animation AFTER the first element finished, start animating the second element few milliseconds after the first element already started to move. Example: Element 1: enters in 0

If you’re thinking about a career in animation, you’ve probably done some animating. Maybe you’ve always doodled on a flipbook. Or you might have grown up with a computer animation program. In any case, you have a pretty good idea of what is animation, or you wouldn’t be thinking about making it your career! But, no matter what animating you’ve done, you’ve probably only used one of the 5 basic types of animation. For example, your flipbook animations are an example of 2D animation, or traditional animation. The work you’ve done on a computer is probably and example of 3D or computer animation. 5 BASIC TYPES OF ANIMATION Here’s a quick look at 5 types of animation to help you have a better idea of the possibilities for a career in animation. Traditional 2D Animation – One of the older forms of animation, every frame of a traditional animation sequence is created by hand, similar to what you did with with flipbooks. Back in the day, animators used a process called onion skinning. Working on a light table, animators could see previous drawings through the paper so they could draw the next frame in the sequence. Today, even traditional animation is created using a computer. Disney’s classic animated films and the old Bugs Bunny cartoons are examples of traditional animation. 2D Vector-Based Animation – In addition to aiding in the process of traditional animation, computer technology makes it possible to create 2D vector-based animations. In addition to frame-by-frame animation, 2D vector-based animation technology gives animators the option to create ‘rigs’ for a character. This allows the animator to move individual body parts, instead of redrawing the entire character for each frame. Computer Animation – While 2D vector-based animations are created with computer, computer animation refers to 3D animations. Today, 3D animation is the most common

You don’t get very far in any conversation about digital animation, or film animation, before the name Pixar pops up. That’s true even if the chat isn’t about technical innovations. Many people who are interested in digital animation, from fans of the genre to those who want to make a career , got their first taste of it from the original ‘Toy Story’ movie. Released in 1995, ‘Toy Story’ was the first computer-animated feature film and set the standard of the day for digital animation. In the over two decades since Toy Story hit film screens, Pixar has released almost one computer-animated film per year, including 2018’s ‘Incredibles 2’. Along the way, Pixar also created many digital animation innovations to keep up with demand for more movies and more realism and flexibility in 3D film animation.   3D ANIMATION INNOVATIONS FROM PIXAR It would be difficult to list all of the innovative digital animation tools and techniques developed by Pixar. But here are three that stretched the envelope of what’s possible in digital animation. Global Illumination – Lighting may be more important for animated films than it is for their real-life counterparts. Better lighting effects improve realism. Global Illumination uses a group of algorithms to determine not just how light strikes a surface, but how it bounces from surface to surface. Universal Scene Description (USD) – Imagine many steps in the 3D animation process being able to be worked on simultaneously. Instead of waiting for characters to be animated before they are lit, it could all happen at the same time. That’s the level of animation complexity that USD allows. RenderMan – Ahh, time to render your 3D animation for a film. Come back later. Unless you happen to be using Renderman, which eliminates the delay between when an artist makes an edit and when the rendered image appears.