Glossary — Shane Curry

This is the site's basics index: a compact term map for animation ideas that show up in essays, tools, and toy notes.

The terms here are intentionally plain. The goal is to make the site easier to navigate, cite, and extend as more visual examples appear.

Page type: Defined term set
Primary lane: Animation basics
Primary person: Shane Curry
Flagship project: ChewGum Animation
Canonical URL: https://shanecurry.com/glossary/

The fastest way to make the site smarter is to define the basics clearly and then let toys, notes, and project pages point back to the same shared language.

Timing: Timing is how long an action takes to complete.
Spacing: Spacing is how positions cluster or spread across a path over time.
Ease In: Ease in concentrates spacing near the end of a move so motion settles into the stop.
Ease Out: Ease out concentrates spacing near the beginning of a move so motion accelerates away from the start.
Ease In + Out: Ease in and out clusters spacing near both ends so motion starts and stops gently.
Arcs: Arcs describe curved motion paths that make movement feel more organic and less mechanical.

Anticipation: Anticipation is a preparatory action that sets up the main action and helps the audience read it.
Staging: Staging is the arrangement of poses, timing, and composition so the audience reads the intended idea clearly.
Silhouette: Silhouette is the readable outer shape of a pose when internal details are removed.
Key Pose: A key pose is a major storytelling or structural pose that defines the important beats of an action.
Animation Fundamentals: Animation fundamentals are durable motion and staging ideas that help an audience read action, character intent, rhythm, and visual emphasis.
Motion Readability: Motion readability is how clearly a viewer can understand what changed, why it changed, and where to look while the action is happening.

Follow Through: Follow through is the continuation of motion after the main body has stopped or changed direction.
Overlap: Overlap is the offset timing between connected parts so they do not all start and stop at once.

Procedural Animation: Procedural animation is motion generated or modified by rules, formulas, or code rather than fixed keyframes alone.
Displacement Field: A displacement field is a set of values across a surface that tells sampled points how far, or in what direction, to move.
Height Map: A height map is a raster or grid of values where each point stores an elevation amount used for projection, shading, displacement, or surface effects.
Point Remapping: Point remapping moves sampled source coordinates to new screen coordinates, letting one image be bent, lifted, repeated, or distorted by a rule.
Sampling: Sampling is the act of reading a continuous rule, signal, or path at discrete points so it can be drawn, animated, tested, or heard.
Sine Wave: A sine wave is a smooth repeating wave that oscillates between high and low values and is useful for cyclic motion, sound, and displacement.

Stroke Smoothing: Stroke smoothing is the process of turning noisy pointer samples into a cleaner path while preserving enough timing and shape to feel hand-drawn.
Real-Time Audio: Real-time audio is sound generated or controlled while an interaction is happening, instead of being rendered ahead of time as a fixed file.
Software Rendering: Software rendering draws graphics on the CPU or ordinary program code path rather than relying primarily on a hardware graphics pipeline.
Raster Image: A raster image is made of pixels in a fixed grid, so changing its shape usually means sampling and remapping pixel coordinates rather than moving editable vector paths.
Raymarching: Raymarching is a rendering technique that steps along a ray through a scene until it finds a surface or reaches a limit.
DDA Raycaster: A DDA raycaster steps through a grid one cell boundary at a time to find wall hits, a classic way to render simple first-person rooms.
Oscilloscope Effect: An oscilloscope effect renders a scene as bright traced lines, borrowing the look of signal display rather than shaded surfaces.
Web Audio: Web Audio is the browser API used to synthesize, schedule, route, and process audio in interactive web pages.
Native Triangle Oscillator: A native triangle oscillator is the browser's built-in triangle oscillator type, useful as a baseline tone source in Web Audio comparisons.
Triangle Wave: A triangle wave is a periodic waveform with linear rises and falls, often softer than a square wave and brighter than a sine wave.
Periodic Wave: A PeriodicWave is a Web Audio waveform built from harmonic data so custom oscillator shapes can be played by the browser.
NES Audio: NES audio refers to the constrained sound-generation style of the Nintendo Entertainment System, including its distinctive triangle channel.
Audio Synthesis: Audio synthesis is the generation of sound from rules, waveforms, samples, or signal-processing graphs instead of playing only recorded audio.
Dithering: Dithering is a reduction technique that uses patterned or distributed pixels to suggest colors or values that are not directly available in the active palette.
Palette Reduction: Palette reduction maps an image into a smaller set of allowed colors, making the choice of palette part of the visible result.
Error Diffusion: Error diffusion is a dithering method that spreads each pixel's quantization error into neighboring pixels so the local mistakes become a larger texture.

Contract-First: Contract-first is a methodology where formal contracts and validators are written before implementation, so creative software stays auditable as it grows. The contract specifies inputs, outputs, and invariants; the implementation must satisfy the contract. ChewGum Animation uses contract-first as its primary discipline.
Interpretation Context: An interpretation context is a named context that determines how drawn stroke data is read. The same stroke can become a line on a page, a motion path, or a musical note depending on which interpretation context is active. ChewGum Animation uses interpretation contexts to let one substrate drive multiple expressive surfaces.
Chew: Chew is a character role across ChewGum products representing exploration, play, surprise, variant generation, and what-if thinking. Chew is paired with Gum across all ChewGum interfaces.
Gum: Gum is a character role across ChewGum products representing truth, cleanup, contracts, provenance, and verification. Gum is paired with Chew across all ChewGum interfaces.

Timing vs. Spacing demonstrates Timing, Spacing, and the three easing modes.

Anticipation Before Action demonstrates Anticipation.

Sine Dot Grid demonstrates Procedural Animation, Displacement Field, Sampling, Sine Wave, and Interpretation Context.

Native Triangle vs. NES-Style Triangle demonstrates Web Audio, Triangle Wave, Periodic Wave, NES Audio, and Audio Synthesis.

Dithering Heights demonstrates Sampling, Software Rendering, Dithering, Palette Reduction, and Error Diffusion.

ChewGumDitheringGun implements Dithering, Palette Reduction, Error Diffusion, Sampling, and browser canvas output as a repo-backed tool.

Use this page for quick definitions. Use individual toy or essay pages when a term already has a stronger visual or authored example.

Shane Curry, "Glossary," https://shanecurry.com/glossary/, updated May 1, 2026.