Animating functional anatomy for the web

The instructor sometimes has a complex task in explaining the concepts of functional anatomy and embryology to health professional students. However, animations can easily illustrate functional anatomy, clinical procedures, or the developing embryo. Web animation increases the accessibility of this information and makes it much more useful for independent student learning. A modified version of the animation can also be used for patient education. This article defines animation, provides a brief history of animation, discusses the principles of animation, illustrates and evaluates some of the video-editing or movie-making computer software programs, and shows examples of two of the author's animations. These two animations are the inferior alveolar nerve block from the mandibular nerve anesthetics unit and normal temporomandibular joint (TMJ) function from the muscles of the mastication and the TMJ function unit. The software discussed are the industry leaders and have made the job of producing computer-based animations much easier. The programs are Adobe Premiere, Adobe After Effects, Apple QuickTime and Macromedia Flash .