Tween

Tweens are usually defined as girls between the ages of 8 and 14 years old, but were never really recognized as a specific age group until very recently when they have become the new favorite target of American advertisers.

Now numbering about 30 million children, tweens are considered to be one of the most powerful and fastest growing consumer groups in the nation. It is estimated that tweens directly spend $15 billion annually and influence an additional $72 billion worth of family spending. This is considered to be an ideal group for advertisers to target because not only do they have relatively large amounts of money to spend (given to them by their parents), but they are so young that they have yet to form brand loyalties and can be more easily swayed.

Brand behavior gets adopted by the group as kids express independence (as defined by their group), the freedom to look and be different, just like everybody else.

The main tactic used in order to get to these children is to appeal to their desire to what they think is the “teenage” life. They aspire to grow up as quickly as possible and to be seen as being “mature.” This results in a twisted form of adolescent sexuality being sold to the girls, full of tight leather pants, tiny tops, and thong underwear straight from Abercrombie Kids. All of it made especially cool by that goddess of the tween set, Britney Spears.

Marketers need to create brand connections with tweens by embracing and delivering what they care about - fun, friends and brand fulfillment.

Most of this is possible because most American families have two working parents and more discretionary income. With the families under increased stress, the children are left with less supervision in the hopes that they will be able to make their own decisions. Time will tell how these children will react to all of the media messages that are being sent to them. We’ll find out when they grow up, into the 18-24 demographic of course.

Quotes are taken from www.kidsmarketing.com. A great site if you want to vomit.

Tweening is a term used in the animation industry to describe the process of animating the transitional frames in between the key frames.

In a modern animation studio, work done in-house is usually restricted to key frames. Key frames are the important frames of animation found at the extremes of motion, that is, they're the frames from which all other motion can be implied. For example, a walking character's key frames would be the farthest extension of the legs in the stride. The important concept here is that the key frames represent only a small percentage of the total animation frames, but are the most important frames. There might only be a couple of key frames per second, while the animation might be made of 12 frames per second (note that this is half the frame rate of film).

Therefore, the workload on the artists drops considerably from around 6,000 frames of animation in an 8-minute short to less than 1,000 (depending on a number of factors, for example conversations require fewer key frames than lively action sequences).

Once all the key frames are assembled, the cells are shipped off to an animation studio for the much less skilled work of tweening. South Korea is famous for its tweening studios, where much of America's animation can be done with cheap foreign labor. The tweening artist looks at the key frames, decides what action goes in between them, and draws the intervening 6–11 frames based largely on copying the key frame. This is tedious, labor intensive, and very dull work. Ideally, the tweening artist doesn't include any flourishes or artistic expression whatsoever outside of what is provided by the key frames.

Because tweening is such an unskilled, tedious process, there have been attempts made to automate the process. Macromedia Flash, for example, has a built-in tweening feature to simplify the animation process. However, the feature can be tricky to use, resulting in bizarre transitions if key frames are not carefully selected. This is one of the inside jokes in the amateur Flash development parody "Powered by The Cheat" on Homestar Runner.

Sources:

Rumor, innuendo, and bits and pieces of information cobbled together from director's commentary tracks on cartoon DVDs. I don't actually have the slightest clue what I'm talking about and certainly no references or animation experience to speak of. However, I figure this is close enough to fool people who don't know any better.