A Functional Approach to Animation

Abstract

We investigate the benefits of using a functional language to reason about and to implement animation. Since animation concerns pictures changing over time, we consider the manipulation of movies or picture sequences. A compact set of primitive operations over movies is introduced and its use as the basis for an animation system is illustrated. The notion of the behaviour of an animated character is formalised and we show how simple behaviours may be combined to create more complex behaviours. We then show how higher-order functions allow us to construct a variety of useful tools which lead to a highly concise functional script.