Process and production: method progress over time

We have progressed a lot from producing animations using traditional methods but there are limitations to how much traditional methods apply when making an animation, as for digital animation there is no limit to what you can create and achieve which has improved traditional methods of creating animations. For example traditional methods such as creating effects has changed with the advanced of different editing skills from programs we use today such as after effects which has evolved to become a handy tool for make animations look better by adding effects to the animation, I now have many ways to achieve the effect that i want rather then be limited by a few methods which had to be created, there were no presets available and all effects had to be created.

One example of how traditional methods are limited was when trying to blur the foreground and background of a scene, the way to achieve this before when it was at cel animation stages was to us a camera and changing the focal point which blurred the foreground and background, its a long process to get the camera at the right height and make sure the cels were in the right place so that you could achieve the effect of a blurred foreground and background. These days we can easily achieve these effects from many programs such as flash, Photoshop and after effects because we can easily set the blurriness on each layer and is more tie efficient.

here's an example:

this was how they produced this effect in the time of cel animation, they had a camera that had to be placed on this stand which blurred the background and the foreground, as you can see each bit of the landscape had to be on different cels at different heights.

with the advance of computers and programs we can easily produce this effect by using the same principal but we can control everything on scene. this can be done on after effects, we could also include effects that enhance the scene which could of not been done traditionally or would of been hard to produce.