Animation can be recorded with either analogue media, a flip book, motion picture film, video tape, digital media, including formats with animated GIF, Flash animation and digital video. To display animation, a digital camera, computer, or projector are used along with new technologies that are produced.

Animation creation methods include the traditional animation creation method and those involving stop motion animation of two and three-dimensional objects, paper cutouts, puppets and clay figures. Images are displayed in a rapid succession, usually 24, 25, 30, or 60 frames per second.

This guide has been years in the making, although not actually in the written form as you see it now, but through our work on the “Production Guide”. If you have never spent too much time in that guide, it is highly recommended you at least slightly familiarize yourself with it, specifically the “Animation Process”, before diving too far into this one. Most animation these days is now drawn using computer tablets, and although the techniques used in digital animation are essentially the same as traditional animation of the past, the true art of animating on paper and celluloid sheets is now a mere memory. This guide is meant to honor and display the artistic styles of these men of the ink and paper days, and not just entirely to judge them.