I Linguaggi dell'Animazione: strumenti per la comunicazione visiva tra innovazione e continuità

The research explores the field of Animation and aims to connect it to the Visual Communication Design’s one, in order to depict the recent contact between the two disciplines due to the spread of digital media and tools. At first the research presents an interdisciplinary vision of the subject based upon a collection of studies rising from Neuroscience, Psychology, Semiotics and Theory of Cinema. Secondly, the work proceeds by analyzing the methods and the processes of animation-making and it focuses on the interdependences between the techniques employed and the resulting visual language; this part also underlines the digital shift’s consequences occurred to the medium. Given the theoretical-operational framework of the subject, the thesis analyzes the factors that leads the two practices to converge: here, in what we call ‘the animated product’, the overlap between new means of animating and new tools for the communication designers’ becomes clearer. The research completes outlining a specific approach to the moving image domain: by applying the paradigms of visual design, it is possible to draw a conceptual map that emphasizes the ‘functional’ aspects of the various animated formats. Further, this approach leads to the invention of a working visual-database for storing and evaluating the massive material today available: the prototype summarizes many key-aspects discussed across the research and it defines the first stage toward a ‘grammar’ of the animated languages.