Blog Assignment #6

The animation of the popular television show, The Simpsons, has drastically changed since the show's first short airing in 1987. In the beginning, the characters were poorly drawn with very little detail and only a select few colors being used on them. As the show gradually gained more popularity and success, there started to be much more time and money available for the show to add more detail and interest to the animation. One of the first and most important advances in the show's animation was the use of digital coloring. Before that, the animation was done entirely by hand making it very difficult and time consuming to add any kind of shading or highlighting. The characters appeared completely flat and each character was only animated with three or four different colors at most, and never any variations of shade. However, after digital coloring started being used in every episode there was much more time available to spend on smaller details. The Simpsons started to appear less flat and the animation had considerably more more depth due to the added shadows and highlights. Homer's pants, for example, were previously animated using only a single shade of blue, making them appear two-dimentional. After digital coloring, Homer's pants received three layers of color; there is the primary blue color that was originally used followed by a small additional layer of a darker shade of blue for a shadow and also a lighter shade of blue as a highlight. This added use of color gives each episode much more visual interest as opposed to the previous flat boring animation. In the show's twentieth season, they began production in high definition. This made the animation extremely crisp and clear and is the most recent advancement in The Simpsons' animation style. The signature yellow hue of the Simpsons' skin is another feature that helped the show progress in animating. The more recent seasons use a brighter and more vivid skin tone for the characters so they stand out and pop more. The show's animation techniques and styles have come a long way since it's beginning.