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| Animation | A filmmaking technique where the illusion of motion is created frame-by-frame. |
| Animator | The person who draws the moving character in an animated film. |
| Background | A flat piece of artwork that is the setting for a moving character in an animated film. A background could be a picture of a forest, a sky, a room, or a castle. |
| Cel | A clear piece of plastic on which the animator's finished drawings are painted. The cel is clear so that when placed over the background, the animated characters appear to be in a setting. |
| Frame | An individual still picture on a strip of film. 24 frames equal one second of a motion picture. |
| Frame-by-frame | The filmmaking technique in animation where each frame is exposed one at a time and the object being photographed is slightly altered for each picture. |
| Ink and Paint | The step in cel animation where the animator's drawings are placed on cels to be photographed. A drawing is outlined on the front of the cel with black ink, while the back of the cel is painted. |
| Kinestasis | An animation technique using a series of still photographs or artwork to create the illusion of motion. |
| Model Sheet | A reference sheet for animators that shows a number of different poses of an animated character. The model sheet also shows how characters relate in size to other characters. |
| Pixilation | A stop-motion technique in which life-size props or live actors are photographed frame-by-frame. When viewed, they appear to be moving at a fast speed. |
| Script | The written story of a film that supplies dialogue, camera moves, background, staging and action. |
| Squash and Stretch | A drawing technique used by animators and originally developed at the Disney Studio to show exaggerated movements in characters. For example, if you wanted a character to jump, you would draw him close to the ground as if 'squashed' and then you would 'stretch' him out as he went into the air. |
| Storyboard | A "storyboard" is a visual representation of a story. Pictures can be sketched on pieces of paper and pinned to a large board, or they can be drawn on a large piece of paper, comic-book style, to represent scenes in a film. |
| Zoetrope | An early animation device that spins drawings in a revolving drum to create the illusion of motion. |
| Inbetweens | Drawings that are inbetween the drawings that are at the beginning and end poses. |
| Extremes | Drawings that are at the beginning and end of a particular pose. |
| persistence of vision | As the eye sees a series of still images very quickly, our eyes have sensors that retain each image for a moment, making us perceive the series as one continuous image. |
| Tweening | Also known as "morphing" is filling in the frames between important key frames in an animation so that the transition is smooth and is correlated to the number of frames per second required for a particular scene. |
| Key Frames | Frames containing important changes in the subject of animation; i.e. changes in the drawing, changes in the set up, important stages of movement, etc. |
