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Another word for a cartoon is animation, which means alive or moving.

We can also use the word animate to mean we are making something look like it is moving.

Animated cartoons and films work by using lots of drawings that show something as it moves step-by-step. Each drawing shows the next step of movement. The images can be a series of drawings, paintings or even photos of models and toys.

When we watch the drawings very quickly one after the other, our brains think it is seeing one moving image or film, rather than lots of separate drawings.

This is because your brain is still remembering the first image as you see the next one, so they blend together.

One second of animation might have up to 25 images.

So how do you create your own animated films or become an animator?

If we wanted to create an animation of a mouse dancing, we need to create lots of images of the mouse. Each image shows the next step of the mouse's dance moves. We would then need to show the images in order very quickly.

There are two problems with making an animation this way.

• It takes a long time to make all the images of the mouse - we might need a hundred!
• It's hard to look at the pictures quickly enough one after the other.

We can use digital devices like a laptop, tablet or smartphone to help make our animation.

The best way is to use an animation program or app as it has all the tools we need in one place.

It will have digital painting tools, a digital camera tool and an animation player that will play the images very quickly to create the illusion of movement.

Some animations use models or objects instead of drawings. The animator takes a digital photo of the model, moves it a little bit and then takes another photo. The model is moved step-by-step through the movement and a photo is taken each time.

Finally, the animation program will quickly play all the photos in order to create the illusion of motion. You can save the animation as a film, ready to share online or with friends.

This is often called stop-motion animation because of the way the animator has to stop and start the camera to create the movement or motion.

Although a computer can help us create animations, it can still take a long time to make each image.

Animations might need 25 images for each second of film - that means nearly 1500 images are needed to make a film that is one minute long!

Computers can help us make animations without having to draw all the images one-by-one.

We can give the computer a list of instructions to tell it to move parts of an image in different ways. This list is called a program. We can use instructions in our animation program like:

• move up
• move down
• swing
• bend arm
• turn

The computer will follow the instructions in the program to make the image move quickly and it will become an animation!

You can build up the animation using more instructions. You can even write different programs for different parts of your mouse or even introduce another character!