30 Different Types Of Animation Styles And Techniques[Updated]

Animation can be defined as the creation of an illusion of motion & change of shape by rapidly displaying sequenced static pictures or images that are minimally different from one another. We can see animation everywhere, in the movies, the TV commercials, the cartoons, the videos that we see on our phones.  The traditional form of animation was discovered in 1887 when Emil Reynaud introduced to the world a machine or apparatus that can make drawings move. 

At present, motion graphics and animation are both out of the box and great ways for marketing and advertising. Be it easy to understand, interesting to watch, or the eye-catchy factor,   easy and vibrant techniques always have a wizard-like feel. Smooth animation techniques and vibrant animation styles make the videos flow like MAGIC. Using the right animation technique and style makes it more appealing to the audience. In order to make a video connect with the audience, digital animation techniques play a vital role.

Digital animation now has a worldwide demand. This technique is being used for various purposes along with business promotion. So, its demand is increasing with every passing year. Graphic designers and animators have become one of the busiest jobs presently.

As per the contemporary trends, the designers are to create new and engaging designs and animation. They are to be trendy and fresh and for them to remain fresh we need to excavate the options available. There are multiple animation techniques available to explore and learn.

Thus, find below the top 30 animation styles and techniques one can use to make his/her videos MAGICAL and also give you a broad idea of animation techniques and types.

Stop Motion Videos

Stop motion is a way of animation where a huge number of photographs are stitched together to create an illusion. It is an animated filmmaking technique that involves physically manipulating in small increments between individually photographed frames so as to make them appear in independent motion. The motion for these videos can be varied by playing the video back and forth in various ways of sticking.

Fat City Reprise – Long Gone music video was created from 45,000 Photographs taken by a Nikon D200 DSLR. These photographs were stitched together to create the illusion of video.

Conventional Animation/Celluloid Animation

As the very name suggests it is a classic 2D mode type of animation. Here it is rather old-time use animation where each frame is hand-drawn by animators. After drawing or coming up with frames they are fed to plastic cells which are subsequently hand-painted. To add to the effect cells are projected towards a painted background. All the classic notorious motion movies like Peter Pan, Aladdin are an example of this conventional 2D animation style.

Digital 2D Animation

The Digital 2D animation method is used for animating 2D house figures. One similarity it has to the conventional methods is that their frames and other non-digital fashion are drawn. A whole bunch of animated drawings are imparted momentum. Complementing to the work and making it easier for the creators are software like Adobe Flash. Body price, shades, and various other attributes can be modified immediately.

Digital 3D Animation

Pretty obvious to come next in the line after 2D animation! Digital 3D animations turn you into creators if you want to turn unreal characters into real ones 3D animation gives you that power. Due to their ease in creation, they are widely used in the movie-making industry. These days 3D animations are not just limited to short films but are used in full-length movies, TV commercials, and many more. It has become a separate career line. Compared to 2D animation types, 3D is more realistic.

Mechanical Animation 

Videos make it easy to grasp things and understand how they work. For example, instead of robotics, machines can be animated by using Mechanical animations. Without causing any loss in the product and having a larger vision over the machines these types of animation can come in pretty handy for animators to understand the working of the machines. These also make it easy to explain the functionality of the machine.

Double Exposure

One of the most often and seamlessly used graphic design or animation used in the industry! In this animation effect, the motion artist creates this effect by adjoining two different objects in one picture. The adjoining objects can be that of a person, an object, etc. These effects create a high end, fascinating, and unimaginable graphical presentation.

Seamless Transitions

Talk about trending and the latest graphic design effects (motion graphic), seamless is all there for you. This is the latest and most loved type of transition because of its beautiful, flawless, and professional results. They are great when it comes to creating products show reel. Alongside giving wonderful results it also helps save time as they are much easier to come up with.

To know more about this effect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OaCX-Ni_MQw

Keyframe Animation

Going by technical terms, a Keyframe is a drawing that defines the beginning and ending factor of any clean animation. The drawing we are talking about above is nothing but frames. Their time is measured in frames on a strip of videos. The number of Keyframes defines the time the video is going to run for and the long sequence of the run decides what the viewers would be watching.

Here is a tutorial for Keyframe animations:

Flat Graphics Animation

Widely and pretty widely used motion graphics and animation style! These animations are used mostly in presentation video and slide animation video. For an example given below video is used to put forward in a very simple yet eye-catchy way. Thus, to put the facts together and make it remembered by all these videos can be a way for you.

Motion Graphics Animation

Have you seen one of the Youtube’s most-watched song video of the year 2019? Earth- by Lil Dicky. That is a very direct proof of these types of animations popularity. This animation method is very different from the entire lot. Animated logos, film titles, and commercials employ this method. They involve moving around graphics elements. Many times they also involve pieces of text to create an animation.

Autonomatronics and Audio-Animatronics

This type of animation was started by the animation giants Walt Disney. Many of the hardware audio-animatronics are even fitted in their Disney theme parks. An animatronic is an electro-mechanically animated puppet driven by sophisticated cameras. Where-as there is some difference between the two, audio-Animatronics technology involves repeating a pre-programmed show over and over again.

Art Animation

A place where drawing or art images collaborate together to give the video a new end! In the upcoming days, this type of animation will play a significant role in the marketing and advertising sectors. Instead of using human models with limited movements, the companies would prefer these animated graphics. The very reason why anime have been on such a high rise! Giving psychological thrilling animes like Steins Gate to Super Power-full animations like Naruto are all examples of such type.

Chuckimation

These creations of “Action League Now” creators are also one of the budding animation techniques. These are a combination of live shots and stop-frame animations. In this the characters are used in particular frames, they are very much similar to the famous puppet shows.

Puppetry Animation

The first letter-Puppet should be enough to explain about such type of animations. These involve the manipulation of digital puppets and the performance of 2D or 3D animations on them. Mostly used in filmmaking and television production lately are also being used in interactive theme parks. Most widely viewed example of puppetry animation is the movie, King Kong. 

To know about it you the below-given video:

ZoeTrope

Grandpa to the upcoming trend of animated GIFs! Zoe trope stands for animated troops that came into light in 1834 all thanks to William George Horner. In this a drum-like setup is used for drawing static pictures after which the drum is trundled/rolled which produces an effect of motion of the toy/image.

Text and Background Animation

Watching the text floating on the video with a different and continuously changing background! Nothing else but an example of text and background animations. Most widely used in motion graphics animations. It can also be used to show web pages with products, texts, and other objects.

Clay motion or Clay animations

These types of videos involve the use of clods of clay for molding characters after which the animators can use these for coming up with a story of their own. Love playing with clay or want to go with some less widely used videos to get the audience’s eye, you are sure to try this. Now talking about clay the major two types of them being- oil-based and water-based. With short movements of the clay models, the whole scene is filmed. 

Cut-Out Animation

One of the oldest forms of animations in the history of animations! Cutout animation is a form of stop-motion animation which involves the usage of flat characters, props, and background from materials such as paper, stiff fabric, or even photographs. The first-ever cutout animation was created by using detailed paper silhouettes in “The Adventure of Prince Achmed” by its creator LotteReiniger.

Sand Animation

A sand artist’s dream type but for usual people like you and me, a pretty messy or untidy method to come up with an animation effect! Here a glass table is used as a canvas and the animator uses just sand to create an audience loving animation effect. By moving sand in various directions and creating an image out of it all it takes to come up with a sand animation video. But it is not as easy as it sounds.

It involves constant clearing and sketching of images which many take years mastering. These animations are so effective and beautiful to watch, that it even won Simonova the Ukraine’s got talent. A clip of her art is given below.

Typography

A to-be used type of animation effect, the Typography! Though it is still in use but it carries with it a much future scope of adding professional flavour to your videos. The most widely used Typography being Maxi and Kinetic type. These types of videos give a very futuristic touch to the videos.

Fluid and Liquid Effect

Graphic designs have always had the elements of freshness to themselves. Applying these effects to your video helps give it a soft touch. These effects can be used for commercial advertising video making purposes. Such kind of features show to us the audiences love for artic effects.

Paint on Glass Animation

Yet another art related animation, paint on glass. All it needs is a master in art artist and time lapse feature. This type of animation always keeps the audience hooked. Putting forward animated artistic drawings requires content manipulation, thus for this usually turpentine is blended with paints to make things ease. Like in the below video, simple art drawings like a horse, cock, violin along with musical effects are used to convey the content beautifully.

Experiment

Experimental, sometimes the most random of thought put together helps in coming up with a masterpiece. This involves all arts with no connection amongst them mixed and used to create a graphic artwork. It is a form of animation in which motion pictures have their own rhythm and movement. It doesn’t require a much, script or narration or proper structuring. A brand new object or frame is created each time.

Drawn on Film Animation

It uses an uncovered reel of movies. These reels are scratched and etched for producing impactful movements. These are also called as direct animations or even animations without camera. An alternating technique is to reveal the movie reel in mild variations by ways of a projector kept in a dark room.

Erasure 2D graphics

Yet another application of 2D graphics as an effect! These Charcoal erasure movies create fluidity of movement by photographing and animating for each change. These are used to display mobility. These are used to create fluid motion in animation films.

FlipBook

Pretty popular among the Gen Ys and 90s kids! There was a time before all these computerized animations, these flip books used to rock wherein a sequence of pictures are drawn on flipbook. Each page is made to complement the other and continuous and swift movement of the pages used to make it appear as an animation. This is the oldest method, despite its age it is also the one of the most fascinating.

Pin Screen Animation

Thousands of headless pins put together is all that one requires to create a Pin Screen animation. It makes use of a screen filled with movable pins. Your eye is sure to have met it in science workshops or parks during your childhood. To bring in animations through just needles all thanks goes to their inventors- Alexandre Alexeieff and Claire Parker. Below is an image to bring back those memories of the first time you encountered it.

Metallic-Effect

Giving a metallic touch to your cars, collections or be it videos are always trendy. People pay thousands to get a metallic touch thus showing the popularity of this effect. Animating the images with metallic colours is all that there is. If the images that you’re about to use have a dull or boring look try giving a metallic look to it. It is sure to make it intersecting and eye-catchy.

An animated metallic image will always shine from different perspectives and light positions. 

Watercolour Animation

Yet again, an artist related effect the Watercolour animations. As the term suggests these involve the usage of Watercolour for drawing up characters or objects on the canvas giving your videos an artistic touch. A must try.

Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhSrBFFz8RU

Vivid and Bold Color

A very useful fact when it comes to catching the human eye’s attention is though colours. The more vivid, vibrant and bold they are, the higher effect it has on its viewers. It makes the motion graphics animations more attractive. Animation with bold and vivid colorized graphics helps in making you stand out as a trendy motion graphic expert or animator.