Abstract：
Computer animation is a key technology for the creative industries and has strong links to many key sectors of digital economy, including gaming and post-production. Although the European Commission has established policies and initiatives for creative industries, the majority of the global animation market is shared between the US (supported by strong finance and advanced technology) and the Asia-Pacific countries (bolstered by low labour costs). In this talk I will present technologies to address the challenge. Firstly, I will present my research on automatic in-between generation for traditional classic animation, aiming to increase the productivity and reduce the production cost. The research has proposed disk B-spline to represent the hand-drawn strokes of key frames of animation and generate intermediate frames as many as required, with minimum user intervention. Then I will talk about a research project on novel animation stylization techniques, funded by EU Horizon 2020, aiming to enrich animation content but without high labour costs. The stylization techniques allow 2D and 3D computer graphics to be converted into a wide variety of expressive styles including line drawing, pen-and-ink, oil painting, mosaic, etc. The challenges on animation stylization and technologies will be presented.