September 13, 2019 • 55 mins
What's the process of animating a film with hand-drawn animation? Who patented the process of cel-based animation? What was Disney's multiplane camera? Join Jonathan and Chris as they ink the answers to these questions and more.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production of I Heart Radios
How Stuff Works. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with
How Stuff Works in my Heart Radio and I love
all things tech and his time for another classic episode
of tech Stuff. This episode is called How hand Drawn
(00:26):
Animation Works, and it originally published on October two thousand twelve.
And I'm a huge fan of animation. I love animation.
I think when it's done well, it can be an
incredible art form. One of my favorite films of the
recent past is Into the Spider Verse, a truly gorgeous
(00:50):
animated movie. Although not necessarily talking just about hand drawn
animation in that respect, but I thought it would be
good to look back on this and kind of get
an appreciation on how this stuff works. So let's listen
in as Chris and I go down the path to
understanding hand drawn animation. Today, we wanted to talk about
(01:11):
the traditional hand drawn animation process, what goes into it,
why does it work, and how has it changed over
the years. Uh. And we were specifically focusing on hand
drawn animation because I think we may have I know
we've talked about computer animation in previous podcasts. I don't
think we've done a full episode on it, but but
the two disciplines are different enough where I think it
(01:35):
warrants two different podcasts. Yeah, the I have done some
research on it, just by accident, just because I was
interested in a topic from time to time, and I
started thinking about it the other day when I saw
something and suggested it. Um. It's uh, it's very different
in quite a few ways from from computer animation, and
(01:56):
Jonathan and I like to talk about how old styles
of tech have affected us and uh, the kinds of
things that people used to do. Um. You know, there
are some very famous studios that have have gone computer
only these days, but um, some of the very same
studios were pioneers and some of the amazing tech that
went into making a piece of hand drawn animation look
(02:19):
very realistic. UM. And I thought, you know, it would
be really fun to kind of touch on that. Um,
which is which is why I think we decided to
go ahead and make an episode of it. We should
probably already attach this into our movie making tech series
of stuff, just because we haven't done one in a while.
And then now we can say we have. Yeah, I
(02:39):
think it's been I think it's been like a year.
Um yeah, okay, that that that's fun with me. This
belongs in our movie Magic Technology series. It really does.
It's just that I wasn't thinking of it that way.
So before U, before we get into the actual process
of making a hand drawn animated project, whether it's television
(03:03):
for television or for film or whatever, um, we should
kind of explain the whole concept behind animation. It's the
idea is that it's an illusion, obviously, an illusion of movement.
And this is because the way our our brains and
our eyes work, we have this uh, this sort of
it's it's almost like a visual memory in a way,
(03:24):
and we're able to fill in enough information where if
you have a sequence of images of an object that
appears to move because it has a different um orientation,
or you've slightly changed the location of the object from
one page of of a like a pad of paper
(03:46):
to another, and then you move those at a fast
enough clip, it gives the illusion that that that's actually
an object that's physically moving through a space. Yeah, persistence
of vision, Yes, you might call it. Yes, in fact,
that's its name. That's and that is reason to call
it that. And so I mean, anyone who has played
with a little notepad or post it notes or whatever
(04:07):
and have created their own little versions of this knows that.
You know, you you get a uh, you know, you
create this illusion of movement, You move the figures, you
you draw the next figure a little bit further away
from the first one, or you give it some other
form of motion. Uh, And when you flip the book,
then it looks like something's happening. I used to do
(04:29):
this all the time with post it notes. I went
through so many packs of post it notes, drawing my
own little cartoons, which almost always ended in violent mayhem.
They usually began innocently enough. Yeah, I'd be like, okay,
and now he's jumping over hurdle, and now he's opening
up a door, and now he's hit in the head
with an ax, and now he's running away from a monster,
(04:50):
and yeah, things fell apart pretty quickly for me. If
you're if you've ever read the comic strip Calvin and Hobbs,
where Calvin is uh, you know, coming up with these scenarios.
And now look, the giant tanker truck full of acid
is coming toward it and meteor from space? How can
(05:10):
they avoid this? And this is the image I'm seeing
of Jonathan doing this. Yeah, it wasn't pretty. So how
do you take that and you transfer it over into
making an animated show or film? Well it's been done
for centuries now really in a way. In a way,
but the the process that kind of defines the way
(05:31):
modern animation worked throughout the twentieth century was really defined
by Earl Heard, and Earl Heard actually patented the cell
animation process, and we call it cell animation. The original
material that people drew, the drawings of figures or whatever
(05:52):
was being animated within a scene, they would draw draw
that on celluloid. Eventually the end stream made a transition
from celluloid to cellulos acetate. Part of that was because
celluloid is um yeah, extremely flammable, very flat. It's both
flammable and inflammable and also it uh, it could be
(06:17):
prone to spontaneous decomposition, so you couldn't store it indefinitely.
Are you see those stack of drawings? They were right?
They see that public goo over there? Yeah, that's snow white.
Um yeah, they would they would. It seems problematic. Yeah,
so you couldn't you know, you couldn't archive this stuff,
which in the early days the industry wasn't a big concern.
(06:40):
You know. The concern was to create this this product
and then have it shown, usually in a movie theater
in the early days. You know, this is this is
before television. So this was something where you would go
to a a like a theater and see it projected
on a screen. But there wasn't weren't too concerned about
(07:01):
storing stuff for for posterity, not prosperity. They wanted prosperity, posterity.
They weren't so concerned about um. But yeah, so, so
it wasn't a big deal. But then the move to
cellulous estate, which is essentially kind of plastic, helped take
that that problem out of the picture, so to speak. Yeah,
the reason that now this this material um, the celluloid
(07:25):
was was clear, yes, basically a clear sheet of plastic
if you will, just just for the sake of the
image in your head. Actually, most of you have probably
seen somebody working on cells for animation. It's you know,
we sort of know what this looks like. We haven't
gotten so far out from that realm that it's foreign
(07:46):
to us. Yeah, but this is this was a big
improvement because before this, uh, there were some very early
animation uh you know, moving pictures that were made with
drawings on paper, and that is so much more time
consuming because just as you know, um, there are several
(08:08):
frames of film that pass. Each second is the standard. Yes,
I couldn't remember per second of standard for film thirty
for television. I was thinking television. If you're in the
United States, I have to you have to make these
qualifiers because other other countries have different standards. So imagine
(08:32):
if you will, then you are one of the animators
and you have to draw twenty four complete drawings for
each second of film. This is very time consuming, where
using the the cell method allows you allows the animator
to make a subtle change to the original drawing and
and just change make those subtle changes and you can
see it because um again, if you watch a video
(08:54):
of somebody making an animation with cells, they are able
to overlay them on top of one another and they
can make those subtle adjustments seeing where the differences are
between the two drawings, which you you won't be able
to do as well with paper because it's especially if
you're using hand especially if you're using paper, Like if
(09:15):
there's a background image that's involved with paper, you have
to draw the whole thing each time, right, So you're
drawing that whole background because you know, again your paper
is not transparent, so you're joining the whole background. Plus
they're drawing whatever is in the foreground that's that's animated,
and then the next frame you have to draw it
all over again. Whereas with cells, what you could do
(09:35):
is you could have a pre generated background image that
is laid down in a frame, and then you could
overlay these cells on top of it, one at a time,
and because the cell itself is clear, anywhere that you
have not drawn, you could see the background. And then
you take that cell out, you put another cell in,
(09:57):
you take another picture, which represents a frame of the film.
You know, when you think about film, really is animation,
Even live action film is technically animation because you're talking
about looking at a series of photographs that are played
at such a speed as to create the illusion of movement. Yes. Uh, Now,
the granted this is we're talking about physical film here,
(10:19):
because once we get into digital there's different things to
you know, consider. But in the old film days, that's
that's really what we're talking about. So with animation, each
of those frames is essentially a photograph. You're using a
camera to photograph this drawing, and with the cells, like
I said, you take one cell out, you put another
cell in the background remains static. Uh. Then you have
(10:43):
a character that is appearing or object or whatever that
it's appearing to move on top of this background. If
it's a movement that is you know, easily repeatable, you
don't even have to draw more than the number of
cells it takes to complete one cycle of that action.
So let's say that you wanna picture You've drawn a
(11:03):
cartoon kangaroo and the kangaroos just jumping straight up and
down five times. Well, you don't have to draw enough
cells to do that five times. You draw it so
it does one full cycle, one jump from start to finish,
and then you you could photograph that sequence five times
using those that same cells. So, in other words, you've
(11:24):
just cut down on the amount of work you would
have to do if this were all done on paper. Yes,
and that's one of the important points to that that
so many animators have used in the past. Um Uh.
The the illusion of movement you've got your kangaroo hopping
up and down. Now, if the background stays static, um,
(11:44):
then it looks like the kangaroos hopping up and down
in place. UM. This technique that Jonathan was just saying,
um or just talking about uh is often used to
create the illusion of movement across a linear surface from
point A to point B. Let's say the characters are
walking down a street in the city. Man, I remember
(12:08):
those old Marvel Comics heroes animations from the sixties and
all the buildings. If if you watch a lot of
these shows, um, Hanna Barbary did this kind of thing
to all the time, where you're moving down the urban
landscape and they've you've got your drawings of the city.
And after a while to build, the buildings begin to
(12:28):
look the same, which is because underneath what the characters
are doing, the same images of the city. You know,
once they've gotten uh you know, let's say twenty four
for each frame, they probably had uh, you know, a
certain number of those, and once they got to the
end of that, then they started over at the beginning,
and loops and loops and loops. So if you think
(12:50):
of if you think of like a cell a cell
is generally the size of whatever the the whole frame
of that images, right, So so one cell has the
character or object or whatever, or characters or objects or
mix of whatever. Um it has those in the center
or what has those on the on the center, it
(13:11):
doesn't really matter it has on the cell. The rest
of the cell is clear. That's what's showing you. The background. Generally,
the backgrounds are much wider than the frame on sometimes
taller as well than the frame that you are looking at.
So when you take that picture and you remove the
cell so you can put the next cell indicating the
next movement of that character, you would also adjust the
(13:35):
position of the background so that you would have that
illusion of a character walking forward. So let's say the
characters staying in the center of the frame, and the
animation is the character is making a walking motion. Then
what you would do is between the different shots you
would move the background horizontally so that it would look
(13:55):
like the characters making progress. Well, eventually you're gonna run
out of back ground. You'll have to switch to a
different background, or you have to reuse one, which is
what Chris was talking about. You also notice in a
lot of those old animations, characters have very limited movement.
Sometimes it looks like a static character who's just kind
of bouncing up and down a little bit as the
background is moving. And again, that was a way of
(14:17):
saving money by drawing fewer cells. You draw a character
on a cell, and you're using that same static image
of the character. You're just repositioning the cell slightly and
adjusting the camera's frame so that there the character appears
to be moving up and down as if they are walking,
but in fact you're just using the same picture over
(14:39):
and over and over again. Pretty get to the clutch
cargo days, where you replace the cartoon character's mouth with
a human mouth and generate a whole generation of nightmares.
I'm pretty sure though, that this this method is exactly
why he Man always appeared to be moon walking everywhere
he went, Right. Yeah, The match matching the h the
(15:00):
background movement with the animated character movement is an art
form of it's in and of itself, and if you
don't do it carefully, then you get this weird glide
e motion where the character either seems to be uh
walking too quickly but not making enough progress, or walking
slowly but moving really fast. And um, yeah, it's it's
(15:24):
a it's a form of art really. To get that
just right, we're kind of getting a little too far
into this though. I want to talk kind of about
the whole process of building an animated feature. But before
I jump into it, one other thing I need to
say is that this traditional form of animation we're talking about,
where you're drawing pictures on cells, Uh, it takes up
a lot of space. Yes, it does. The equipment takes
(15:46):
up a lot of space because you usually have to
have a table on which you are photographing all this
stuff and you're not using like a hand camera, No,
this is professional, huge camera. And generally speaking, uh, this
kind of helps cut down on the amount of materials
you need. But generally speaking, for film, most animation is
(16:08):
done where they call it animating on two's, which means
they take two pictures per h position, which means that well,
the playback is twenty four frames per second, the positions
are more like twelve frames per second. So uh, that way,
you've just cut the number of cells you need to
(16:30):
create in half. Also, the number of times you need
to adjust the background, You've cut that in half. Uh,
which makes a big difference. Now for things that are
like action that's moving really really quickly where you want
to really smooth, you might be animating on ones, which
means every single time you take a picture you have
to change it whatever you know, either the background or
(16:52):
the foreground or both between each picture. So you've just
added twice as much work. You know, sometimes even more
than twice as much because you think about all the
departments that are involved in this. But uh, it creates
a lot more work that way. It also means you
have to have storage space for all this stuff because
(17:13):
cells take up room, backgrounds take up room, the equipment
takes up room, and film itself takes up room. So
you know, you talk about film footage, well that really does.
That really does refer back to how many feet of
film you've shot? Right footage. I mean when you think about, oh, yeah,
I've got some great footage, but you don't think of
(17:35):
what that really means. Well, in the film days, that
actually meant how many feet of film you had exposed,
how many you had you had shot of whatever seen.
If you want to know how much film animated, an
animated picture takes about sixteen frames is a foot okay,
(17:56):
one second of film is twenty four frames. So one
second of film is a foot and a half. Okay,
most about half. Most cartoons are longer than a second.
So you have lots and lots of film that you're
dealing with. All right, So that's that's the space issue,
(18:18):
and we'll talk more about how we've kind of worked
around that, uh and move beyond the cell based animation
these days while still staying hand drawn. Um So, if
you wanted to make an animated film, Uh, the way
you would generally approach this is you come up with
an idea for a story. That's the best thing. That
(18:41):
the best way to start, in my opinion, I just
drew some stuff bouncing around. Is that all right? You
could do that. It's not terribly you know interesting, Um
beyond maybe a certain group of friends who are amused
by anything you My friends know who they are. Um, hey,
they like my stuff anyway. So you create a story,
(19:04):
and then you think of how you want to visualize
this story. This is where you create a storyboard. Now,
storyboard is kind of like a comic strip or a
graphic novel. It tells the story in a series of frames,
and uh, it all depends on how detailed you want
to get. Sometimes you just show a uh, you know,
(19:24):
a frame, and then you might make a note about
what is happening as far as the action goes, because
of course a frame is a still image. We don't
see movement in a frame. We can see the implication
like that it's implying movement perhaps, but it doesn't actually move.
So you might say, you know, like I have a
have a picture of a character who is holding an
(19:46):
American football, and is, uh, that's for my friends in
in places other than the United States. But holding an
American football is if they're going to throw a pass,
so their arm is cocked back they're holding the football,
and then you might draw some arrows showing that this
is the forward motion that the character is going to
throw the ball. And then the next shot might be
the football in the air, and then the next shot
(20:07):
might be a character with arms wide open trying to
catch this ball, and the next shot might be the
ball passing right between the character's arms. That would be
several frames within a storyboard. You fill out the entire
story this way, so you end up with a huge,
depending upon the length of your project, a huge comic
strip that is your story and it's told in this
(20:31):
visual format. UM. Once you've got an idea of what
it looks like and the mood you're trying to get
across in various parts of the story, the next step
UH and and not every project takes these steps in
this exact order, but in general, the next step would
be you get your cast together and you record all
(20:51):
the voice work. So it all depends on the project
of how you do that. Some some UH and Asian companies,
what they would do is they would bring in the
voice actors UH individually and they would just deliver their lines.
And they might deliver a line five six different ways
so that the director has the choice of which line
(21:14):
to use, which which delivery to use. Right, So the
line might be, Chris, I need you to say this line,
don't go in there. Don't go in there now. I
need you to say it like you're scared. Don't go
in there now. I need you to say it like
there's a big surprise and you just you can't let
(21:34):
this person see the surprise yet, don't go in there. See.
So that's exactly what the voice actors would be doing.
And it sounds ridiculous, but that's truly the way a
lot of these studios work, unless they're casting Robin Williams,
in which case they give them a microphone like like,
here's here's your stuff, here's your queue line, here's the
(21:55):
line you need to give so that the next actor's
line makes sense. Go at it. Yeah, the stuff that
ended up on the cutting room floor for Aladdin is phenomenal.
I mean, the stuff that made it in was great.
The stuff that made it on that was cut was
pretty amazing too. Anyway, that's that's one way of doing it.
(22:16):
Another way, sometimes studios will bring in groups of actors
and they will all have headphones on. They'll be uh
in the studio and they will they will read outlines
together and you will actually have actors acting off of
one another's delivery like a group read, which which is great.
And usually there's also a group read before they even
go into the recording process so that they can kind
(22:38):
of get that feel. This is particularly true for television animation,
where they'll get a table read so that the actors
kind of know where they need to go with their
performance before they go into the studio. But if they're together,
it makes it easier at least, and I have done
this for me, it makes it easier for me to
act when I have someone to act opposite of. That way,
(22:59):
we can we can judge how to deliver the next
line based upon what the other person has said. It's
a lot more challenging when you're doing it in a
void and you just hope that the way you deliver
a line matches up with the way they delivered their line.
But both approaches are used, and there are some phenomenal
animated works out there where every single actor never ever
(23:23):
encountered any of the other actors, which to me blows
my mind. Um, so they record this thing and then
you have what is called a scratch track. This is
the audio track of the film that includes all the
vocal acting, including songs if there are any vocal songs
that the characters are performing in there, and usually some
temp music tracks, because often the music for a film
(23:46):
is not finished until you've got at least something to
look at so that the composer can kind of match
the mood of the music to whatever's on screen. But
they'll be temp music tracks to kind of give the
the you know, music tracks that are selected that give
sort of a similar feel to what the filmmakers are
going for, so that the animators have something to work
(24:07):
off of. So you've got the scratch track done. By
the way, this was not how it was always done.
Prior to the nineteen thirties. Animators would create an animated
film and then record the sound matching, trying to match
the sound to what was already created in film format.
So they were going the opposite way. They would create
(24:28):
the film and then they would try and essentially do
foley for whatever the animated film was. But but eventually
it moved to the other way. Yeah, if I were
going to do this, it would probably be more like that, right,
That would be because I'm not an animator. Yeah, So,
because what the animators are doing is they take that
that that soundtrack, that scratch track, and they start to
(24:49):
create the animation. Now, sometimes there's another step. In fact,
very often there's another step called an animatic or a
pencil test. This is a very primitive version of the film,
so it goes beyond the storyboard model where you've got
some some movement usually involved in the antimatics. But it's
(25:12):
if you think, you know, the most primitive form of
the animatic could just be a storyboard set to the
scratch track, and this again is a reference for the
animators to look at when they start to really generate
the the visuals for the film. Now, at this point
you can start to divide up the labor, which is
(25:32):
very useful because it means that you can have different
departments working on various stuff all at the same time,
and people can specialize in very particular tasks and it
makes the whole project move much more quickly. It's like
an it's it's an assembly line approach. So and it's
it's kind of key to how they started making animated
(25:54):
motion pictures. I'm glad you said the word key, but
I'll get to that. So that you might have a
background department. This is the department's purposes just to create
the backgrounds that you're gonna see in this animated feature.
We'll be back here if you need us. So they
actually are. That's that's their job is to create the backgrounds.
And these backgrounds might, like I said, be larger than
(26:15):
the frame is when you're taking pictures with your film camera,
so that you can move the background around in relation
to what's going on in the foreground, so that you
can have that illusion of characters moving around a scene
and you aren't. You aren't restricted to just what you
can see in any given frame. Uh. So they that
(26:36):
department starts to work on the backgrounds. You've got the
drawing department, and what they usually do is start on
paper and they'll start drawing out the characters. They'll they'll
start creating character concepts. This is the time where, uh,
they really start to refine the way characters look and move,
and not just the characters themselves, but anything the character
(26:58):
happens to have on him or so for example, if
you've drawn a space marine character who's got a big gun,
a big clunky armor, you would want to draw a
lot of different poses for this character to kind of define, like,
this is how this character moves, Like the armor restricts movements,
so things need to be really angular and there can't
be a lot of flexibility here. And when the character
(27:19):
expressed a surprise, um, his eyebrows actually go down, not up,
and that sort of stuff. And these are things that
really define acting choices in the movie. You know, it's
a weird. Another weird thing is that a performance in
an animated film is defined by not just the person
who's recorded the voice, but the person who has drawn
(27:41):
that character, And so you've got an acting performance coming
from at least two different people, and usually more than
two different people. Yeah, there there are times in uh,
for example, I know this is not a hand drawn animation.
There are times in Monsters, inc. When I'm watching Mike
Wazask and I'm seeing Billy Crystal in my head because
(28:02):
they've captured some of the same facial And that's not
unusual either. Often often people will film or videotape the
cast recording sessions in order to get a look at
how the actors, uh, you know, some of the some
of the facial expressions they use, or the quirks they have,
(28:24):
and they'll even incorporate that into the character designs, which
is that's always fun when you see an animated character
make a movement that is something you associate with a
physical human being, that's always a fun moment. Yeah. Yeah,
And I think that's another benefit of doing it the
other way around. Not only do you have to not
match up the voice to the animation, but you actually
(28:46):
get to to breathe a little life into the animation
too and make it more appealing, right, We've got more
to say about how animation works, but before we get
to that, let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor.
So the next step is, once you've got the drawings
(29:08):
on paper, you start to trace it onto cells. Now
technically it's on the back of the cells that you're
tracing this stuff on. And after after you've drawn the
line drawing, you know, after you've inked it, it's the
inking phase. It's time to go to paint, where you
have to use the very specific colors you have designated
(29:30):
for that character. Um there are you know, there are
guides for every single animated feature or television show about
what color belongs to which character. And you know, it's
a very specific thing because when it's off, it's noticeably off,
particularly if it's off within a single uh episode of
(29:52):
a show or a single film, But if it's something
that's between episodes, even then it can be noticeable. Even
like Homer's Simpson's pants aren't the right color of blue.
It's true, you know, you can. In fact, there are
companies that have had problems where the paints they were
using no longer existed because the company that produced them
was gone and they had to try and figure out
(30:13):
how to recreate that exact color or or there are
times too when um, you know, especially for TV shows
where they're they're creating many episodes of a show where uh,
the producing studio farms the animation work out to other studios,
so you'll see differences sometimes in colors when one studio
(30:36):
does it versus another. Yeah, and that's that's that can
be distracting for long time fans. That's another issue I
was going to mention, is that, so you get to
this point where you're drawing the cells and you're painting
the cells. You're inking and painting the cells. Everything is
being done on the back of the cell. That also
hides the brush strokes. So that way, when you turn
the cell over, you've got this beautiful color image of
(30:56):
a character or an object or whatever, but you don't
see the individual strokes or anything, cause that's on the
back of the cell. Uh. Then once those cells are done,
if if you were to do all the animation yourself,
you would produce all the cells you needed two complete
the animation for the various scenes you're doing. And sometimes
that means that you're going to be using some of
(31:16):
the same cells again and again, like if there are
a lot of scenes of a character walking down the road,
then you may have a certain sequence of cells that
you use several times. Uh. You don't want to rely
on it too much, of course, because otherwise it just
looks like it's the same thing through the whole picture.
But you would put those cells individually on top of
(31:39):
the respective backgrounds. Take a photo, make the adjustments, take
the next photo, make adjustments, take the next photo until
you were done. And you know, you do that all
the way through and you're matching it up to that
scratch track. You actually have to make sure that the
animation matches up with the soundtrack for the film. And
then they the final soundtrack comes through with the music
(32:03):
and effects and everything, and uh, you master out the
film and then you've got your finished animated project. However,
like Chris was saying, a lot of television shows in
particular farm out animation to other countries, particularly Korea. Korea
is is like a known factor in animation UM and
(32:27):
shows like The Sibsons and Futurama, they use these studios
in Korea to complete the animation. What usually happens is that, uh,
the team back in the United States will create what
are called key frames. Key frames are showing very specific
points in the animation that need to happen, and you
(32:50):
have these segments between the key frames that are left unfinished.
They need to be filled in, and that's called in
between meaning, which makes sense. You're you're creating this the
action that exists in between the key frames. So if
you think about it back when I was talking about
the storyboard with the whole football, uh example, you would
(33:14):
probably have more key frames than just the three or
four panels I had talked about, But that would essentially
be the same sort of thing saying this is your
starting point, this is your ending point. We need to
have the pathway connecting these two. It needs to be
this many frames long. So that's that kind of dictates
how fast the action takes UM and then once that
(33:35):
is all done, the the foreign for us anyway, the
foreign studio sends the footage back and you can incorporate
into your show. Now, often you have to do a
lot of work to match up things like vocal work,
in particular with UM with the animation that's sent back,
because you're talking about a language barrier. Often you're talking
(33:58):
about people who may not get the gist of a
joke because of either linguistic or cultural differences. So something
that makes sense and is funny to us may not
be funny to another culture because they don't have the
same cultural background or same linguistic background, so they're there
are adjustments that need to be made at that point.
(34:20):
But the idea is that the bulk of the work
is done, which ends up being less expensive for the
studio here in the United States because, frankly it the people,
the animators who are working in Korea are doing it
at a much lower cost than it would be to
produce it all here. So that's the general approach. Now,
(34:43):
we have a couple of special things we wanted to
talk about. One of those being something that was invented
uh many decades ago by Disney animators Disney engineers. Yeah,
this may uh, I'm not certain that that we're talking
about this same thing. Yes, the multiplane came. That's exactly
(35:03):
I'm doing the multiplane camera gesture so that Chris would know. Yes,
that's the the international symbol for the multiplane camera, which
is putting putting your horizontal hand in five different levels.
This um, this is a little different in technique. Um
and and it's it's similar in other ways now, Um,
(35:24):
this is something that the Disney studios there were there
were several people who worked on this. Disney himself did
some work on it, and the the semi famous UBI
Works also worked on it as well. Um and Uh,
Basically they had noticed there's a there's an awesome film
of Disney himself introducing this and talking about it. I
(35:46):
assume that it looks like it came from the Disneyland,
uh TV show that was out in the fifties and
six or so, and I'm sure it was using in
something like The Wonderful World of Disney. You know, it's
it's He did a whole series of films where he
talked very you know, just just a matter of fatter
(36:07):
of fact approach about how they do what they do
and how they make Disney magic, which in my mind
made it all the more magical because you saw the
amount of thought that went into producing the stuff they made. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely,
But it's been in about five minutes. I had actually
read about this in a biography of Walt Disney, but
seeing it actually explained step by step and how they
(36:29):
make it work. Um. Now, when you show a traditional
two D animation, uh cell being shot, a photo being
taken of the cell against the background. Basically there's a
frame that holds the cell in place over the background.
They clamp it down so it's not gonna wiggle while
they take the shot. And the cameras mounted above the table,
(36:50):
so it is taking a picture of what is inside
the frame, the physical frame on top of the table.
So you basically have a shutter shutter release control. You
mount that, you put the cell in place, lock it
down in place, uh, you know, back out so you
don't take a picture of the back of your head
and gets some weird reflection in there or something. Yeah,
(37:11):
and and and do the shutter release you know, with
your with your thumb, you know, finger and uh you know,
take your two shots if you're doing uh you know. Okay,
so you got it. But what what Disney was explaining
in this video was, uh, basically the problem of perspective.
How certain things appear larger when they're closer to you
(37:33):
or smaller farther away. Now you have, um, something like
a barn and that's specifically from this with a moon
hanging in the sky in the background. Yeah, Now, you
as you get closer, as you walk toward the barn,
it's going to start to appear larger. But in in
traditional animation, you know, two D animation, you start to basically,
(37:56):
if you everything gets larger because you're basically zooming in
on Yeah, you're if you if you're thinking of it
in purely physical terms, you are either moving the camera
closer or focusing the lens so that the focal length
is different. But you're you're essentially moving the camera closer
to the frame, or you're moving the frame closer to
the camera. In either case, you're decreasing the distance between
(38:19):
camera and frame in order to create the illusion that
you are zooming into a physical landscape. So in a
real world situation, it'd be like a cameraman holding a
camera and walking toward this barn that's on a hill
on the moon is hanging behind it, And in that situation,
the barn would gradually start to appear larger in the
(38:41):
frame because you're getting closer, but the moon would not
start to get larger because the moon is so much
further away. You would have to go a really long
way before that moon started looking like it was getting bigger.
But in animation because it's a static background and it's
drawn on a two dimensional piece of paper or whatever.
(39:03):
When the camera gets closer, everything gets bigger because you
cannot selectively say, hey, static image that it was drawn
once that we're going to use over and over again.
Make sure the moon doesn't get bigger when I get
closer to it. It doesn't work that way. We got
a little bit more animating to do, folks, But before
we can do that, we're gonna take another quick break.
(39:31):
So the way that that the Disney Studios decided to
work around this was to essentially, and it's not exactly
like this, but if you will essentially use a stack
of layered cells um mounted, you know, one over the other,
over the other over the other, so that the table
(39:51):
underneath them still has the bottom and the camera is
still above them. But what this enables the animators to
do is to adjust. Uh. So the moon in this
case will be on the very bottom because it's not
going to move, but there might be a tree between
you and the barn. So as the camera gets closer
(40:14):
to the layer with the tree on it, it eventually
goes out of sight. Because at this point, you uh,
there the illusion is that you have passed the tree.
The barn is still ahead of you, and it still
appears to be getting larger, but more slowly than the
bush on another layer in between, and then you eventually
(40:34):
don't see the bush anymore because you have theoretically passed it.
And uh, as you get closer to the barn is
still appearing larger, but the moon still appears to be
the roughly the same distance away. So as the camera gets,
you know, layer by a layer closer and closer down
the stack of layers. UM, you know, you do have
(40:56):
that illusion that you are that the perspective is working
the way would in real life. UM. Now it is
not exactly the same as as sell animation. In this case,
they're actually using oil paint on glass. Don't drop that
layer I worked on all day, Bill, Don't don't get
your filthy, smudgy hands off the layer I just felt.
So they for every shot. Now this this again, this
(41:18):
is an expensive process because now they are drawing not
just one frame at a time, they are drawing several
layers that you may or may not get to reuse later. Um.
But they have to mount these in the holders for
each frame. So let's say you've got seven layers. Um,
(41:39):
the bottom one with the moon on it, that's gonna
stay the same, Yeah, it's just it'll be on a
stationary table. Yeah, but you might have to animate. You
might have to replace the ones on the first three
more frequently, and then the four and then the five.
So you're you're for every shot, you're going to have
to adjust the different layers as needed. And so you
(42:00):
got you've got this device that has all these platforms
that can hold each layer. So, and the platforms themselves
are adjustable where you can move them closer to or
further away from the camera. The camera remains stationary. You
can also move them left to right, or up or down.
Frankly genius. So yeah, again, again, you can create a
much wider scene than can be seen on a single
(42:23):
shot of the camera. And remember we're still doing this
this approach where we take one picture, than you adjust,
take one picture, then you adjust. You couldn't theoretically do
this live if you really wanted to, but it would
look it would probably be a chaotic mess. So um, instead,
let's say that you are doing a panning shot through
a forest. Well, the stuff that's closer to you is
(42:45):
going to appear to move more dramatically than the stuff
that is much further away. Well, that was the shot
that used in the video you were talking about was
from Bambi, where it was a panning shot through the forest,
and and this effect was very impressive because you had
different layers of the background moving at different speeds relative
(43:07):
to our perspective, and so it creates a much more
realistic feeling than just camera panning across a static painting
which doesn't have any other layers to it. Um And
it really did add this level of immersion to those
early animated films. Now, it was a very kind of
(43:30):
primitive form of three D sense because you're not you're
not having any it's it's giving the illusion of depth.
It's not coming out at you. And also ultimately it's
the illusion of depth of a series of two dimensional paintings. Right,
So it's almost like uh, And I've seen this with
televisions that do three D conversion two D to three
(43:50):
D conversion. The problem I have with two D two
three D conversion is that it always gives the appearance
of a bunch of cardboard cutouts that are at different
depth levels. So if you had if you took a
photo with a two D camera of a bunch of
people lined up so that they are like, like, there's
one guy who's really close to fairly close to you,
(44:13):
another person who's a little further back, another one a
little further back, and another one at the very back
of the picture. And you've adjusted the focus so that
everyone's more or less in focus, and you take the
photo and then you converted to three D. Well, now
it looks like a cardboard cutout of your friend is
really close and a cardboard cutout of your other friend
is in the middle. It doesn't, don't They don't appear
to be three dimensional objects. The same thing is true
(44:34):
with this multiplane camera approach is that the backgrounds all
look like two dimensional paintings because that's what they were,
but that there were some that were closer to the
camera than others. So it created a very interesting effect
and it was immersive, but it was not so immersive
as a true three dimensional background. Yeah. Um, Nonetheless, I
think it was a very clever way to to work
(44:57):
around the limitations of two D. And uh, you know,
in thinking about it just now, I think in a
way it inadvertently forced the ken Burns effect because when
you're when you're shooting documentaries as as he has, and
he's showing still images and they're you know, they they're
interviewing somebody, they're talking, and basically you're watching a photo
(45:20):
that was taken a hundred years ago. There's it's it's
a static photo of a real person, and it's what
are you gonna do. You're gonna sit there and stare
at the photo of Abraham Lincoln for two minutes while
this guy is talking about it. No, you've got to
do something to make it more. I think it's sort
of set an expectation that when you're watching a video,
(45:42):
it should be moving and it should appear realistic. So, um,
I started thinking about it. You know, I bet that's
why we have the ken Burns effect, because you know,
we we came in with that perspective of moving in
to the photo or panning across a still photo. Um.
And that's exactly actually what I was thinking when now
he was when Disney was narrating this, this thing is like, well,
(46:03):
you know, you can zoom in if you want to,
and it's sort of seems like you're getting closer but
it does it's not as realistic as if you had
this sense of perspective as we will create with the
multiplane camera. So I just kind of thought about that now.
The other thing I wanted to talk about is another
development that has dramatically changed the way hand drawn animation
works today, and that is using a digital platform to
(46:27):
create hand drawn animation. So it's not computer animation. You
are not building computer models. You're still drawing stuff by hand,
You're just doing it with a computer right to assist
to you and tip. Typically this is through the use
of things like Waycom tablets, specifically centreat tablets tend to
be favored by a lot of the artist's sign note
mainly because you can with the right tablet you can
(46:49):
actually still look down and see as you're drawing. That's
a that's a something that I've I've got a friend
who does animation, actually got a couple of friends to
do animation. My buddy Lucas Ryan was talking to me
about this because I said, we're going to do an
episode about hand drawn animation. What would you suggest we
talked about? And he says, well, you know, you're going
to cover the whole history and that's great, But I
want you to talk about what it's like for an
(47:11):
animator today to use one of these digital tablets, and
you talked about, you know, there's a disconnect. There are
some tablets where it's like a giant touch pad, right,
and you've got a stylistic use a pen that you
use and you draw on the touch pad, and the
touch pad itself doesn't display anything. You have to look
at a screen. He says, there's some people who they
(47:33):
just can't get past that. They can't get past the
fact that they are looking at a screen but they're drawing,
you know, on a on a surface that they are
not looking at, and that that's kind of understandable. I mean,
someone who's just learning to touch type, it's pretty intimidating
because you have to you have to really teach yourself
the layout and everything. So there are a lot of
(47:54):
tablets out there now where there's also a display built
into the tablet itself, So drawing on the tablet, it's
also being reflected on a display on a computer, but
you can look down and see what you're doing, so
that way you can make these adjustments. Also, he talked
about the the benefit of moving from a raster based
(48:15):
system to a vector based system. We've talked about this before.
Where raster is all pixel based, right, well, vector is
math based. Yeah, it's a line art, line art, which
is yeah. And and the nice thing about vector graphics
is that it's it's relatively easy to adjust lines after
you draw them, So you can reshape a line much
(48:36):
more simply with a vector based drawing than you could
with raster, where you would essentially have to erase what
you did and draw it again. So there's some illustrators
and animators out there who they're just used to it.
They'll be they'll draw a line and say, no, that's
that curves not right, and a racing they'll drawing some
well it's closer, but that's not what I want, and
they'll erase it and they'll draw another line. But then
(48:56):
with the vector based ones, you can draw a line
and say, oh, you know what, I just need to
tweak this a little bit and it's going to be
exactly why I need um. So that helps cut down
on on a lot of stop and start work, and
also the inking and painting part is much more much simpler.
Now you have a huge variety of colors, you can
(49:19):
choose from depending upon what sort of programs you're using.
You don't have to worry about it not being consistent
from one shot to the next because it's all digital,
so that that code of color is going to remain
the same no matter what um And you might even
be able to use some effects in some software to
create lighting effects that you don't have to necessarily do yourself,
(49:44):
so it would know that, all right, if you're going
to put a shadow of this intensity over this particular picture,
it needs to adjust the color to look like that
so that you know, so that it's natural to the viewer.
So that's really the change the way illustrators and animators
have created artwork. I know there are a lot of
(50:05):
people who create web comics who exclusively use tablets now.
For the longest time, they would do all their art
on paper and then they would scan the paper and
they would upload the art that way. So Kurts used
to do it that way, the guys at Penny Arcade
used to do it that way, and then they all
began to switch over using digital tablets. And almost every
(50:26):
single one I hear the animator or or the artists
talking either on a blog or on a podcast or
whatever about how the initial transition period is incredibly painful
and frustrating, and then after they get past the learning curve,
they're like, I don't know why I didn't do this
earlier because it makes things so much easier. And so
(50:49):
that's that's become sort of the new standard is using
these this digital format to do hand drawn animation. And
we also have seen some combinations of hand drawn animation
haired with computer generated backgrounds. So, I know, Beauty and
the Beast did that the big ballroom sequence with the
dance and Angela Lansbury singing and um and stuff that
(51:13):
had a computer generated background. Uh so, you know, we
were seeing some marriage of computer generated animation and hand
drawn animation, uh happening, and it's been going on for
a while. It's not like Beauty and the Beast was
the first and only example. It's just one example. Uh So,
you know, I'm sure we'll see more of that. I'm
(51:33):
glad to say that there are plenty of artists at
studios out there that still support hand drawn animation because
I think that there is something special to that. There's
a feel hand drawn animation has that's its own thing
and I like that. Yeah, it seems like, well, at
least in my opinion, it seems like there's a warmth
(51:54):
to it. Yeah. Um, but you don't necessarily get Yeah,
there's an asterisk cleaner you can't. Yeah. And there are companies.
There are companies out there like Pixar that can make
you sob like a little baby with some computer generated graphics. Yeah. Yeah,
and I you can you can ask my wife. There
(52:14):
is not a Pixar movie that I see without me
going look at the fill in the blank here, like
the Water and Finding Nemo or the fur Unsully in
Monsters and absolutely blows my mind. The the the story
of the the balloons and up where they did their
computer modeling to determine how balloons would actually behave. Yeah,
(52:34):
it kind of made me think of the engine that
what I've built for um, the Armies for Lord of
the Rings. It's like, let's why don't we take that
technology and convert it for helium balloons. It's essentially what
they did. Uh, that's fascinating stuff. But there is there's
a Um, I agree with Jonathan, there's a feeling that
(52:55):
you get when watching hand drawn animation that is different
than the feeling that you get when you're watching a
computer It doesn't doesn't mean better or it's just different.
It's just different. And and you know Lasseter of Pixar,
he would argue the same thing. He says, you know,
it's we use at Pixar, we use computer animation because
that's the tool we use. But to us, the most
(53:17):
important part of any film is the story, and that
ultimately the tool you use is nowhere near as important
as the story is. So if your story is solid,
then as long as you are good at using whatever
tools you have, you should be able to tell that
story effectively. Now that if those tools are hand drawn animation,
(53:40):
that's great, and if it's computer animation, that's great. There's
no there's nothing wrong with either choice. You're going to
get a different experience depending on which one to use,
but it doesn't mean that one experience is superior or
inferior to the other. And that wraps up this classic
episode of tech stuff. Hope you guys enjoyed it. I
always enjoy going back and listening to these old shows
(54:03):
and hearing Chris and his uh wonderful delivery. I miss
him and his puns. He's still doing quite well, by
the way, she's just not with our company anymore. Anyway,
I hope you guys enjoyed this. If you have any
suggestions for brand new episodes of tech Stuff, you can
reach out the email addresses tech stuff at how stuff
works dot com, or you can pop on over to
(54:24):
our website that's tech stuff podcast dot com, where you're
going to find an archive of all of our past episodes,
including these classics. You also find links to our social
media presence, and you'll find a link to our online
store where every purchase he make goes to help the
show and we greatly appreciate it, and I'll talk to
you again really soon. Tex Stuff is a production of
(54:49):
I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from
my heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Eight
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production of I Heart Radios
How Stuff Works. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with
How Stuff Works in my Heart Radio and I love
all things tech and his time for another classic episode
of tech Stuff. This episode is called How hand Drawn
(00:26):
Animation Works, and it originally published on October two thousand twelve.
And I'm a huge fan of animation. I love animation.
I think when it's done well, it can be an
incredible art form. One of my favorite films of the
recent past is Into the Spider Verse, a truly gorgeous
(00:50):
animated movie. Although not necessarily talking just about hand drawn
animation in that respect, but I thought it would be
good to look back on this and kind of get
an appreciation on how this stuff works. So let's listen
in as Chris and I go down the path to
understanding hand drawn animation. Today, we wanted to talk about
(01:11):
the traditional hand drawn animation process, what goes into it,
why does it work, and how has it changed over
the years. Uh. And we were specifically focusing on hand
drawn animation because I think we may have I know
we've talked about computer animation in previous podcasts. I don't
think we've done a full episode on it, but but
the two disciplines are different enough where I think it
(01:35):
warrants two different podcasts. Yeah, the I have done some
research on it, just by accident, just because I was
interested in a topic from time to time, and I
started thinking about it the other day when I saw
something and suggested it. Um. It's uh, it's very different
in quite a few ways from from computer animation, and
(01:56):
Jonathan and I like to talk about how old styles
of tech have affected us and uh, the kinds of
things that people used to do. Um. You know, there
are some very famous studios that have have gone computer
only these days, but um, some of the very same
studios were pioneers and some of the amazing tech that
went into making a piece of hand drawn animation look
(02:19):
very realistic. UM. And I thought, you know, it would
be really fun to kind of touch on that. Um,
which is which is why I think we decided to
go ahead and make an episode of it. We should
probably already attach this into our movie making tech series
of stuff, just because we haven't done one in a while.
And then now we can say we have. Yeah, I
(02:39):
think it's been I think it's been like a year.
Um yeah, okay, that that that's fun with me. This
belongs in our movie Magic Technology series. It really does.
It's just that I wasn't thinking of it that way.
So before U, before we get into the actual process
of making a hand drawn animated project, whether it's television
(03:03):
for television or for film or whatever, um, we should
kind of explain the whole concept behind animation. It's the
idea is that it's an illusion, obviously, an illusion of movement.
And this is because the way our our brains and
our eyes work, we have this uh, this sort of
it's it's almost like a visual memory in a way,
(03:24):
and we're able to fill in enough information where if
you have a sequence of images of an object that
appears to move because it has a different um orientation,
or you've slightly changed the location of the object from
one page of of a like a pad of paper
(03:46):
to another, and then you move those at a fast
enough clip, it gives the illusion that that that's actually
an object that's physically moving through a space. Yeah, persistence
of vision, Yes, you might call it. Yes, in fact,
that's its name. That's and that is reason to call
it that. And so I mean, anyone who has played
with a little notepad or post it notes or whatever
(04:07):
and have created their own little versions of this knows that.
You know, you you get a uh, you know, you
create this illusion of movement, You move the figures, you
you draw the next figure a little bit further away
from the first one, or you give it some other
form of motion. Uh, And when you flip the book,
then it looks like something's happening. I used to do
(04:29):
this all the time with post it notes. I went
through so many packs of post it notes, drawing my
own little cartoons, which almost always ended in violent mayhem.
They usually began innocently enough. Yeah, I'd be like, okay,
and now he's jumping over hurdle, and now he's opening
up a door, and now he's hit in the head
with an ax, and now he's running away from a monster,
(04:50):
and yeah, things fell apart pretty quickly for me. If
you're if you've ever read the comic strip Calvin and Hobbs,
where Calvin is uh, you know, coming up with these scenarios.
And now look, the giant tanker truck full of acid
is coming toward it and meteor from space? How can
(05:10):
they avoid this? And this is the image I'm seeing
of Jonathan doing this. Yeah, it wasn't pretty. So how
do you take that and you transfer it over into
making an animated show or film? Well it's been done
for centuries now really in a way. In a way,
but the the process that kind of defines the way
(05:31):
modern animation worked throughout the twentieth century was really defined
by Earl Heard, and Earl Heard actually patented the cell
animation process, and we call it cell animation. The original
material that people drew, the drawings of figures or whatever
(05:52):
was being animated within a scene, they would draw draw
that on celluloid. Eventually the end stream made a transition
from celluloid to cellulos acetate. Part of that was because
celluloid is um yeah, extremely flammable, very flat. It's both
flammable and inflammable and also it uh, it could be
(06:17):
prone to spontaneous decomposition, so you couldn't store it indefinitely.
Are you see those stack of drawings? They were right?
They see that public goo over there? Yeah, that's snow white.
Um yeah, they would they would. It seems problematic. Yeah,
so you couldn't you know, you couldn't archive this stuff,
which in the early days the industry wasn't a big concern.
(06:40):
You know. The concern was to create this this product
and then have it shown, usually in a movie theater
in the early days. You know, this is this is
before television. So this was something where you would go
to a a like a theater and see it projected
on a screen. But there wasn't weren't too concerned about
(07:01):
storing stuff for for posterity, not prosperity. They wanted prosperity, posterity.
They weren't so concerned about um. But yeah, so, so
it wasn't a big deal. But then the move to
cellulous estate, which is essentially kind of plastic, helped take
that that problem out of the picture, so to speak. Yeah,
the reason that now this this material um, the celluloid
(07:25):
was was clear, yes, basically a clear sheet of plastic
if you will, just just for the sake of the
image in your head. Actually, most of you have probably
seen somebody working on cells for animation. It's you know,
we sort of know what this looks like. We haven't
gotten so far out from that realm that it's foreign
(07:46):
to us. Yeah, but this is this was a big
improvement because before this, uh, there were some very early
animation uh you know, moving pictures that were made with
drawings on paper, and that is so much more time
consuming because just as you know, um, there are several
(08:08):
frames of film that pass. Each second is the standard. Yes,
I couldn't remember per second of standard for film thirty
for television. I was thinking television. If you're in the
United States, I have to you have to make these
qualifiers because other other countries have different standards. So imagine
(08:32):
if you will, then you are one of the animators
and you have to draw twenty four complete drawings for
each second of film. This is very time consuming, where
using the the cell method allows you allows the animator
to make a subtle change to the original drawing and
and just change make those subtle changes and you can
see it because um again, if you watch a video
(08:54):
of somebody making an animation with cells, they are able
to overlay them on top of one another and they
can make those subtle adjustments seeing where the differences are
between the two drawings, which you you won't be able
to do as well with paper because it's especially if
you're using hand especially if you're using paper, Like if
(09:15):
there's a background image that's involved with paper, you have
to draw the whole thing each time, right, So you're
drawing that whole background because you know, again your paper
is not transparent, so you're joining the whole background. Plus
they're drawing whatever is in the foreground that's that's animated,
and then the next frame you have to draw it
all over again. Whereas with cells, what you could do
(09:35):
is you could have a pre generated background image that
is laid down in a frame, and then you could
overlay these cells on top of it, one at a time,
and because the cell itself is clear, anywhere that you
have not drawn, you could see the background. And then
you take that cell out, you put another cell in,
(09:57):
you take another picture, which represents a frame of the film.
You know, when you think about film, really is animation,
Even live action film is technically animation because you're talking
about looking at a series of photographs that are played
at such a speed as to create the illusion of movement. Yes. Uh, Now,
the granted this is we're talking about physical film here,
(10:19):
because once we get into digital there's different things to
you know, consider. But in the old film days, that's
that's really what we're talking about. So with animation, each
of those frames is essentially a photograph. You're using a
camera to photograph this drawing, and with the cells, like
I said, you take one cell out, you put another
cell in the background remains static. Uh. Then you have
(10:43):
a character that is appearing or object or whatever that
it's appearing to move on top of this background. If
it's a movement that is you know, easily repeatable, you
don't even have to draw more than the number of
cells it takes to complete one cycle of that action.
So let's say that you wanna picture You've drawn a
(11:03):
cartoon kangaroo and the kangaroos just jumping straight up and
down five times. Well, you don't have to draw enough
cells to do that five times. You draw it so
it does one full cycle, one jump from start to finish,
and then you you could photograph that sequence five times
using those that same cells. So, in other words, you've
(11:24):
just cut down on the amount of work you would
have to do if this were all done on paper. Yes,
and that's one of the important points to that that
so many animators have used in the past. Um Uh.
The the illusion of movement you've got your kangaroo hopping
up and down. Now, if the background stays static, um,
(11:44):
then it looks like the kangaroos hopping up and down
in place. UM. This technique that Jonathan was just saying,
um or just talking about uh is often used to
create the illusion of movement across a linear surface from
point A to point B. Let's say the characters are
walking down a street in the city. Man, I remember
(12:08):
those old Marvel Comics heroes animations from the sixties and
all the buildings. If if you watch a lot of
these shows, um, Hanna Barbary did this kind of thing
to all the time, where you're moving down the urban
landscape and they've you've got your drawings of the city.
And after a while to build, the buildings begin to
(12:28):
look the same, which is because underneath what the characters
are doing, the same images of the city. You know,
once they've gotten uh you know, let's say twenty four
for each frame, they probably had uh, you know, a
certain number of those, and once they got to the
end of that, then they started over at the beginning,
and loops and loops and loops. So if you think
(12:50):
of if you think of like a cell a cell
is generally the size of whatever the the whole frame
of that images, right, So so one cell has the
character or object or whatever, or characters or objects or
mix of whatever. Um it has those in the center
or what has those on the on the center, it
(13:11):
doesn't really matter it has on the cell. The rest
of the cell is clear. That's what's showing you. The background. Generally,
the backgrounds are much wider than the frame on sometimes
taller as well than the frame that you are looking at.
So when you take that picture and you remove the
cell so you can put the next cell indicating the
next movement of that character, you would also adjust the
(13:35):
position of the background so that you would have that
illusion of a character walking forward. So let's say the
characters staying in the center of the frame, and the
animation is the character is making a walking motion. Then
what you would do is between the different shots you
would move the background horizontally so that it would look
(13:55):
like the characters making progress. Well, eventually you're gonna run
out of back ground. You'll have to switch to a
different background, or you have to reuse one, which is
what Chris was talking about. You also notice in a
lot of those old animations, characters have very limited movement.
Sometimes it looks like a static character who's just kind
of bouncing up and down a little bit as the
background is moving. And again, that was a way of
(14:17):
saving money by drawing fewer cells. You draw a character
on a cell, and you're using that same static image
of the character. You're just repositioning the cell slightly and
adjusting the camera's frame so that there the character appears
to be moving up and down as if they are walking,
but in fact you're just using the same picture over
(14:39):
and over and over again. Pretty get to the clutch
cargo days, where you replace the cartoon character's mouth with
a human mouth and generate a whole generation of nightmares.
I'm pretty sure though, that this this method is exactly
why he Man always appeared to be moon walking everywhere
he went, Right. Yeah, The match matching the h the
(15:00):
background movement with the animated character movement is an art
form of it's in and of itself, and if you
don't do it carefully, then you get this weird glide
e motion where the character either seems to be uh
walking too quickly but not making enough progress, or walking
slowly but moving really fast. And um, yeah, it's it's
(15:24):
a it's a form of art really. To get that
just right, we're kind of getting a little too far
into this though. I want to talk kind of about
the whole process of building an animated feature. But before
I jump into it, one other thing I need to
say is that this traditional form of animation we're talking about,
where you're drawing pictures on cells, Uh, it takes up
a lot of space. Yes, it does. The equipment takes
(15:46):
up a lot of space because you usually have to
have a table on which you are photographing all this
stuff and you're not using like a hand camera, No,
this is professional, huge camera. And generally speaking, uh, this
kind of helps cut down on the amount of materials
you need. But generally speaking, for film, most animation is
(16:08):
done where they call it animating on two's, which means
they take two pictures per h position, which means that well,
the playback is twenty four frames per second, the positions
are more like twelve frames per second. So uh, that way,
you've just cut the number of cells you need to
(16:30):
create in half. Also, the number of times you need
to adjust the background, You've cut that in half. Uh,
which makes a big difference. Now for things that are
like action that's moving really really quickly where you want
to really smooth, you might be animating on ones, which
means every single time you take a picture you have
to change it whatever you know, either the background or
(16:52):
the foreground or both between each picture. So you've just
added twice as much work. You know, sometimes even more
than twice as much because you think about all the
departments that are involved in this. But uh, it creates
a lot more work that way. It also means you
have to have storage space for all this stuff because
(17:13):
cells take up room, backgrounds take up room, the equipment
takes up room, and film itself takes up room. So
you know, you talk about film footage, well that really does.
That really does refer back to how many feet of
film you've shot? Right footage. I mean when you think about, oh, yeah,
I've got some great footage, but you don't think of
(17:35):
what that really means. Well, in the film days, that
actually meant how many feet of film you had exposed,
how many you had you had shot of whatever seen.
If you want to know how much film animated, an
animated picture takes about sixteen frames is a foot okay,
(17:56):
one second of film is twenty four frames. So one
second of film is a foot and a half. Okay,
most about half. Most cartoons are longer than a second.
So you have lots and lots of film that you're
dealing with. All right, So that's that's the space issue,
(18:18):
and we'll talk more about how we've kind of worked
around that, uh and move beyond the cell based animation
these days while still staying hand drawn. Um So, if
you wanted to make an animated film, Uh, the way
you would generally approach this is you come up with
an idea for a story. That's the best thing. That
(18:41):
the best way to start, in my opinion, I just
drew some stuff bouncing around. Is that all right? You
could do that. It's not terribly you know interesting, Um
beyond maybe a certain group of friends who are amused
by anything you My friends know who they are. Um, hey,
they like my stuff anyway. So you create a story,
(19:04):
and then you think of how you want to visualize
this story. This is where you create a storyboard. Now,
storyboard is kind of like a comic strip or a
graphic novel. It tells the story in a series of frames,
and uh, it all depends on how detailed you want
to get. Sometimes you just show a uh, you know,
(19:24):
a frame, and then you might make a note about
what is happening as far as the action goes, because
of course a frame is a still image. We don't
see movement in a frame. We can see the implication
like that it's implying movement perhaps, but it doesn't actually move.
So you might say, you know, like I have a
have a picture of a character who is holding an
(19:46):
American football, and is, uh, that's for my friends in
in places other than the United States. But holding an
American football is if they're going to throw a pass,
so their arm is cocked back they're holding the football,
and then you might draw some arrows showing that this
is the forward motion that the character is going to
throw the ball. And then the next shot might be
the football in the air, and then the next shot
(20:07):
might be a character with arms wide open trying to
catch this ball, and the next shot might be the
ball passing right between the character's arms. That would be
several frames within a storyboard. You fill out the entire
story this way, so you end up with a huge,
depending upon the length of your project, a huge comic
strip that is your story and it's told in this
(20:31):
visual format. UM. Once you've got an idea of what
it looks like and the mood you're trying to get
across in various parts of the story, the next step
UH and and not every project takes these steps in
this exact order, but in general, the next step would
be you get your cast together and you record all
(20:51):
the voice work. So it all depends on the project
of how you do that. Some some UH and Asian companies,
what they would do is they would bring in the
voice actors UH individually and they would just deliver their lines.
And they might deliver a line five six different ways
so that the director has the choice of which line
(21:14):
to use, which which delivery to use. Right, So the
line might be, Chris, I need you to say this line,
don't go in there. Don't go in there now. I
need you to say it like you're scared. Don't go
in there now. I need you to say it like
there's a big surprise and you just you can't let
(21:34):
this person see the surprise yet, don't go in there. See.
So that's exactly what the voice actors would be doing.
And it sounds ridiculous, but that's truly the way a
lot of these studios work, unless they're casting Robin Williams,
in which case they give them a microphone like like,
here's here's your stuff, here's your queue line, here's the
(21:55):
line you need to give so that the next actor's
line makes sense. Go at it. Yeah, the stuff that
ended up on the cutting room floor for Aladdin is phenomenal.
I mean, the stuff that made it in was great.
The stuff that made it on that was cut was
pretty amazing too. Anyway, that's that's one way of doing it.
(22:16):
Another way, sometimes studios will bring in groups of actors
and they will all have headphones on. They'll be uh
in the studio and they will they will read outlines
together and you will actually have actors acting off of
one another's delivery like a group read, which which is great.
And usually there's also a group read before they even
go into the recording process so that they can kind
(22:38):
of get that feel. This is particularly true for television animation,
where they'll get a table read so that the actors
kind of know where they need to go with their
performance before they go into the studio. But if they're together,
it makes it easier at least, and I have done
this for me, it makes it easier for me to
act when I have someone to act opposite of. That way,
(22:59):
we can we can judge how to deliver the next
line based upon what the other person has said. It's
a lot more challenging when you're doing it in a
void and you just hope that the way you deliver
a line matches up with the way they delivered their line.
But both approaches are used, and there are some phenomenal
animated works out there where every single actor never ever
(23:23):
encountered any of the other actors, which to me blows
my mind. Um, so they record this thing and then
you have what is called a scratch track. This is
the audio track of the film that includes all the
vocal acting, including songs if there are any vocal songs
that the characters are performing in there, and usually some
temp music tracks, because often the music for a film
(23:46):
is not finished until you've got at least something to
look at so that the composer can kind of match
the mood of the music to whatever's on screen. But
they'll be temp music tracks to kind of give the
the you know, music tracks that are selected that give
sort of a similar feel to what the filmmakers are
going for, so that the animators have something to work
(24:07):
off of. So you've got the scratch track done. By
the way, this was not how it was always done.
Prior to the nineteen thirties. Animators would create an animated
film and then record the sound matching, trying to match
the sound to what was already created in film format.
So they were going the opposite way. They would create
(24:28):
the film and then they would try and essentially do
foley for whatever the animated film was. But but eventually
it moved to the other way. Yeah, if I were
going to do this, it would probably be more like that, right,
That would be because I'm not an animator. Yeah, So,
because what the animators are doing is they take that
that that soundtrack, that scratch track, and they start to
(24:49):
create the animation. Now, sometimes there's another step. In fact,
very often there's another step called an animatic or a
pencil test. This is a very primitive version of the film,
so it goes beyond the storyboard model where you've got
some some movement usually involved in the antimatics. But it's
(25:12):
if you think, you know, the most primitive form of
the animatic could just be a storyboard set to the
scratch track, and this again is a reference for the
animators to look at when they start to really generate
the the visuals for the film. Now, at this point
you can start to divide up the labor, which is
(25:32):
very useful because it means that you can have different
departments working on various stuff all at the same time,
and people can specialize in very particular tasks and it
makes the whole project move much more quickly. It's like
an it's it's an assembly line approach. So and it's
it's kind of key to how they started making animated
(25:54):
motion pictures. I'm glad you said the word key, but
I'll get to that. So that you might have a
background department. This is the department's purposes just to create
the backgrounds that you're gonna see in this animated feature.
We'll be back here if you need us. So they
actually are. That's that's their job is to create the backgrounds.
And these backgrounds might, like I said, be larger than
(26:15):
the frame is when you're taking pictures with your film camera,
so that you can move the background around in relation
to what's going on in the foreground, so that you
can have that illusion of characters moving around a scene
and you aren't. You aren't restricted to just what you
can see in any given frame. Uh. So they that
(26:36):
department starts to work on the backgrounds. You've got the
drawing department, and what they usually do is start on
paper and they'll start drawing out the characters. They'll they'll
start creating character concepts. This is the time where, uh,
they really start to refine the way characters look and move,
and not just the characters themselves, but anything the character
(26:58):
happens to have on him or so for example, if
you've drawn a space marine character who's got a big gun,
a big clunky armor, you would want to draw a
lot of different poses for this character to kind of define, like,
this is how this character moves, Like the armor restricts movements,
so things need to be really angular and there can't
be a lot of flexibility here. And when the character
(27:19):
expressed a surprise, um, his eyebrows actually go down, not up,
and that sort of stuff. And these are things that
really define acting choices in the movie. You know, it's
a weird. Another weird thing is that a performance in
an animated film is defined by not just the person
who's recorded the voice, but the person who has drawn
(27:41):
that character, And so you've got an acting performance coming
from at least two different people, and usually more than
two different people. Yeah, there there are times in uh,
for example, I know this is not a hand drawn animation.
There are times in Monsters, inc. When I'm watching Mike
Wazask and I'm seeing Billy Crystal in my head because
(28:02):
they've captured some of the same facial And that's not
unusual either. Often often people will film or videotape the
cast recording sessions in order to get a look at
how the actors, uh, you know, some of the some
of the facial expressions they use, or the quirks they have,
(28:24):
and they'll even incorporate that into the character designs, which
is that's always fun when you see an animated character
make a movement that is something you associate with a
physical human being, that's always a fun moment. Yeah. Yeah,
And I think that's another benefit of doing it the
other way around. Not only do you have to not
match up the voice to the animation, but you actually
(28:46):
get to to breathe a little life into the animation
too and make it more appealing, right, We've got more
to say about how animation works, but before we get
to that, let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor.
So the next step is, once you've got the drawings
(29:08):
on paper, you start to trace it onto cells. Now
technically it's on the back of the cells that you're
tracing this stuff on. And after after you've drawn the
line drawing, you know, after you've inked it, it's the
inking phase. It's time to go to paint, where you
have to use the very specific colors you have designated
(29:30):
for that character. Um there are you know, there are
guides for every single animated feature or television show about
what color belongs to which character. And you know, it's
a very specific thing because when it's off, it's noticeably off,
particularly if it's off within a single uh episode of
(29:52):
a show or a single film, But if it's something
that's between episodes, even then it can be noticeable. Even
like Homer's Simpson's pants aren't the right color of blue.
It's true, you know, you can. In fact, there are
companies that have had problems where the paints they were
using no longer existed because the company that produced them
was gone and they had to try and figure out
(30:13):
how to recreate that exact color or or there are
times too when um, you know, especially for TV shows
where they're they're creating many episodes of a show where uh,
the producing studio farms the animation work out to other studios,
so you'll see differences sometimes in colors when one studio
(30:36):
does it versus another. Yeah, and that's that's that can
be distracting for long time fans. That's another issue I
was going to mention, is that, so you get to
this point where you're drawing the cells and you're painting
the cells. You're inking and painting the cells. Everything is
being done on the back of the cell. That also
hides the brush strokes. So that way, when you turn
the cell over, you've got this beautiful color image of
(30:56):
a character or an object or whatever, but you don't
see the individual strokes or anything, cause that's on the
back of the cell. Uh. Then once those cells are done,
if if you were to do all the animation yourself,
you would produce all the cells you needed two complete
the animation for the various scenes you're doing. And sometimes
that means that you're going to be using some of
(31:16):
the same cells again and again, like if there are
a lot of scenes of a character walking down the road,
then you may have a certain sequence of cells that
you use several times. Uh. You don't want to rely
on it too much, of course, because otherwise it just
looks like it's the same thing through the whole picture.
But you would put those cells individually on top of
(31:39):
the respective backgrounds. Take a photo, make the adjustments, take
the next photo, make adjustments, take the next photo until
you were done. And you know, you do that all
the way through and you're matching it up to that
scratch track. You actually have to make sure that the
animation matches up with the soundtrack for the film. And
then they the final soundtrack comes through with the music
(32:03):
and effects and everything, and uh, you master out the
film and then you've got your finished animated project. However,
like Chris was saying, a lot of television shows in
particular farm out animation to other countries, particularly Korea. Korea
is is like a known factor in animation UM and
(32:27):
shows like The Sibsons and Futurama, they use these studios
in Korea to complete the animation. What usually happens is that, uh,
the team back in the United States will create what
are called key frames. Key frames are showing very specific
points in the animation that need to happen, and you
(32:50):
have these segments between the key frames that are left unfinished.
They need to be filled in, and that's called in
between meaning, which makes sense. You're you're creating this the
action that exists in between the key frames. So if
you think about it back when I was talking about
the storyboard with the whole football, uh example, you would
(33:14):
probably have more key frames than just the three or
four panels I had talked about, But that would essentially
be the same sort of thing saying this is your
starting point, this is your ending point. We need to
have the pathway connecting these two. It needs to be
this many frames long. So that's that kind of dictates
how fast the action takes UM and then once that
(33:35):
is all done, the the foreign for us anyway, the
foreign studio sends the footage back and you can incorporate
into your show. Now, often you have to do a
lot of work to match up things like vocal work,
in particular with UM with the animation that's sent back,
because you're talking about a language barrier. Often you're talking
(33:58):
about people who may not get the gist of a
joke because of either linguistic or cultural differences. So something
that makes sense and is funny to us may not
be funny to another culture because they don't have the
same cultural background or same linguistic background, so they're there
are adjustments that need to be made at that point.
(34:20):
But the idea is that the bulk of the work
is done, which ends up being less expensive for the
studio here in the United States because, frankly it the people,
the animators who are working in Korea are doing it
at a much lower cost than it would be to
produce it all here. So that's the general approach. Now,
(34:43):
we have a couple of special things we wanted to
talk about. One of those being something that was invented
uh many decades ago by Disney animators Disney engineers. Yeah,
this may uh, I'm not certain that that we're talking
about this same thing. Yes, the multiplane came. That's exactly
(35:03):
I'm doing the multiplane camera gesture so that Chris would know. Yes,
that's the the international symbol for the multiplane camera, which
is putting putting your horizontal hand in five different levels.
This um, this is a little different in technique. Um
and and it's it's similar in other ways now, Um,
(35:24):
this is something that the Disney studios there were there
were several people who worked on this. Disney himself did
some work on it, and the the semi famous UBI
Works also worked on it as well. Um and Uh,
Basically they had noticed there's a there's an awesome film
of Disney himself introducing this and talking about it. I
(35:46):
assume that it looks like it came from the Disneyland,
uh TV show that was out in the fifties and
six or so, and I'm sure it was using in
something like The Wonderful World of Disney. You know, it's
it's He did a whole series of films where he
talked very you know, just just a matter of fatter
(36:07):
of fact approach about how they do what they do
and how they make Disney magic, which in my mind
made it all the more magical because you saw the
amount of thought that went into producing the stuff they made. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely,
But it's been in about five minutes. I had actually
read about this in a biography of Walt Disney, but
seeing it actually explained step by step and how they
(36:29):
make it work. Um. Now, when you show a traditional
two D animation, uh cell being shot, a photo being
taken of the cell against the background. Basically there's a
frame that holds the cell in place over the background.
They clamp it down so it's not gonna wiggle while
they take the shot. And the cameras mounted above the table,
(36:50):
so it is taking a picture of what is inside
the frame, the physical frame on top of the table.
So you basically have a shutter shutter release control. You
mount that, you put the cell in place, lock it
down in place, uh, you know, back out so you
don't take a picture of the back of your head
and gets some weird reflection in there or something. Yeah,
(37:11):
and and and do the shutter release you know, with
your with your thumb, you know, finger and uh you know,
take your two shots if you're doing uh you know. Okay,
so you got it. But what what Disney was explaining
in this video was, uh, basically the problem of perspective.
How certain things appear larger when they're closer to you
(37:33):
or smaller farther away. Now you have, um, something like
a barn and that's specifically from this with a moon
hanging in the sky in the background. Yeah, Now, you
as you get closer, as you walk toward the barn,
it's going to start to appear larger. But in in
traditional animation, you know, two D animation, you start to basically,
(37:56):
if you everything gets larger because you're basically zooming in
on Yeah, you're if you if you're thinking of it
in purely physical terms, you are either moving the camera
closer or focusing the lens so that the focal length
is different. But you're you're essentially moving the camera closer
to the frame, or you're moving the frame closer to
the camera. In either case, you're decreasing the distance between
(38:19):
camera and frame in order to create the illusion that
you are zooming into a physical landscape. So in a
real world situation, it'd be like a cameraman holding a
camera and walking toward this barn that's on a hill
on the moon is hanging behind it, And in that situation,
the barn would gradually start to appear larger in the
(38:41):
frame because you're getting closer, but the moon would not
start to get larger because the moon is so much
further away. You would have to go a really long
way before that moon started looking like it was getting bigger.
But in animation because it's a static background and it's
drawn on a two dimensional piece of paper or whatever.
(39:03):
When the camera gets closer, everything gets bigger because you
cannot selectively say, hey, static image that it was drawn
once that we're going to use over and over again.
Make sure the moon doesn't get bigger when I get
closer to it. It doesn't work that way. We got
a little bit more animating to do, folks, But before
we can do that, we're gonna take another quick break.
(39:31):
So the way that that the Disney Studios decided to
work around this was to essentially, and it's not exactly
like this, but if you will essentially use a stack
of layered cells um mounted, you know, one over the other,
over the other over the other, so that the table
(39:51):
underneath them still has the bottom and the camera is
still above them. But what this enables the animators to
do is to adjust. Uh. So the moon in this
case will be on the very bottom because it's not
going to move, but there might be a tree between
you and the barn. So as the camera gets closer
(40:14):
to the layer with the tree on it, it eventually
goes out of sight. Because at this point, you uh,
there the illusion is that you have passed the tree.
The barn is still ahead of you, and it still
appears to be getting larger, but more slowly than the
bush on another layer in between, and then you eventually
(40:34):
don't see the bush anymore because you have theoretically passed it.
And uh, as you get closer to the barn is
still appearing larger, but the moon still appears to be
the roughly the same distance away. So as the camera gets,
you know, layer by a layer closer and closer down
the stack of layers. UM, you know, you do have
(40:56):
that illusion that you are that the perspective is working
the way would in real life. UM. Now it is
not exactly the same as as sell animation. In this case,
they're actually using oil paint on glass. Don't drop that
layer I worked on all day, Bill, Don't don't get
your filthy, smudgy hands off the layer I just felt.
So they for every shot. Now this this again, this
(41:18):
is an expensive process because now they are drawing not
just one frame at a time, they are drawing several
layers that you may or may not get to reuse later. Um.
But they have to mount these in the holders for
each frame. So let's say you've got seven layers. Um,
(41:39):
the bottom one with the moon on it, that's gonna
stay the same, Yeah, it's just it'll be on a
stationary table. Yeah, but you might have to animate. You
might have to replace the ones on the first three
more frequently, and then the four and then the five.
So you're you're for every shot, you're going to have
to adjust the different layers as needed. And so you
(42:00):
got you've got this device that has all these platforms
that can hold each layer. So, and the platforms themselves
are adjustable where you can move them closer to or
further away from the camera. The camera remains stationary. You
can also move them left to right, or up or down.
Frankly genius. So yeah, again, again, you can create a
much wider scene than can be seen on a single
(42:23):
shot of the camera. And remember we're still doing this
this approach where we take one picture, than you adjust,
take one picture, then you adjust. You couldn't theoretically do
this live if you really wanted to, but it would
look it would probably be a chaotic mess. So um, instead,
let's say that you are doing a panning shot through
a forest. Well, the stuff that's closer to you is
(42:45):
going to appear to move more dramatically than the stuff
that is much further away. Well, that was the shot
that used in the video you were talking about was
from Bambi, where it was a panning shot through the forest,
and and this effect was very impressive because you had
different layers of the background moving at different speeds relative
(43:07):
to our perspective, and so it creates a much more
realistic feeling than just camera panning across a static painting
which doesn't have any other layers to it. Um And
it really did add this level of immersion to those
early animated films. Now, it was a very kind of
(43:30):
primitive form of three D sense because you're not you're
not having any it's it's giving the illusion of depth.
It's not coming out at you. And also ultimately it's
the illusion of depth of a series of two dimensional paintings. Right,
So it's almost like uh, And I've seen this with
televisions that do three D conversion two D to three
(43:50):
D conversion. The problem I have with two D two
three D conversion is that it always gives the appearance
of a bunch of cardboard cutouts that are at different
depth levels. So if you had if you took a
photo with a two D camera of a bunch of
people lined up so that they are like, like, there's
one guy who's really close to fairly close to you,
(44:13):
another person who's a little further back, another one a
little further back, and another one at the very back
of the picture. And you've adjusted the focus so that
everyone's more or less in focus, and you take the
photo and then you converted to three D. Well, now
it looks like a cardboard cutout of your friend is
really close and a cardboard cutout of your other friend
is in the middle. It doesn't, don't They don't appear
to be three dimensional objects. The same thing is true
(44:34):
with this multiplane camera approach is that the backgrounds all
look like two dimensional paintings because that's what they were,
but that there were some that were closer to the
camera than others. So it created a very interesting effect
and it was immersive, but it was not so immersive
as a true three dimensional background. Yeah. Um, Nonetheless, I
think it was a very clever way to to work
(44:57):
around the limitations of two D. And uh, you know,
in thinking about it just now, I think in a
way it inadvertently forced the ken Burns effect because when
you're when you're shooting documentaries as as he has, and
he's showing still images and they're you know, they they're
interviewing somebody, they're talking, and basically you're watching a photo
(45:20):
that was taken a hundred years ago. There's it's it's
a static photo of a real person, and it's what
are you gonna do. You're gonna sit there and stare
at the photo of Abraham Lincoln for two minutes while
this guy is talking about it. No, you've got to
do something to make it more. I think it's sort
of set an expectation that when you're watching a video,
(45:42):
it should be moving and it should appear realistic. So, um,
I started thinking about it. You know, I bet that's
why we have the ken Burns effect, because you know,
we we came in with that perspective of moving in
to the photo or panning across a still photo. Um.
And that's exactly actually what I was thinking when now
he was when Disney was narrating this, this thing is like, well,
(46:03):
you know, you can zoom in if you want to,
and it's sort of seems like you're getting closer but
it does it's not as realistic as if you had
this sense of perspective as we will create with the
multiplane camera. So I just kind of thought about that now.
The other thing I wanted to talk about is another
development that has dramatically changed the way hand drawn animation
works today, and that is using a digital platform to
(46:27):
create hand drawn animation. So it's not computer animation. You
are not building computer models. You're still drawing stuff by hand,
You're just doing it with a computer right to assist
to you and tip. Typically this is through the use
of things like Waycom tablets, specifically centreat tablets tend to
be favored by a lot of the artist's sign note
mainly because you can with the right tablet you can
(46:49):
actually still look down and see as you're drawing. That's
a that's a something that I've I've got a friend
who does animation, actually got a couple of friends to
do animation. My buddy Lucas Ryan was talking to me
about this because I said, we're going to do an
episode about hand drawn animation. What would you suggest we
talked about? And he says, well, you know, you're going
to cover the whole history and that's great, But I
want you to talk about what it's like for an
(47:11):
animator today to use one of these digital tablets, and
you talked about, you know, there's a disconnect. There are
some tablets where it's like a giant touch pad, right,
and you've got a stylistic use a pen that you
use and you draw on the touch pad, and the
touch pad itself doesn't display anything. You have to look
at a screen. He says, there's some people who they
(47:33):
just can't get past that. They can't get past the
fact that they are looking at a screen but they're drawing,
you know, on a on a surface that they are
not looking at, and that that's kind of understandable. I mean,
someone who's just learning to touch type, it's pretty intimidating
because you have to you have to really teach yourself
the layout and everything. So there are a lot of
(47:54):
tablets out there now where there's also a display built
into the tablet itself, So drawing on the tablet, it's
also being reflected on a display on a computer, but
you can look down and see what you're doing, so
that way you can make these adjustments. Also, he talked
about the the benefit of moving from a raster based
(48:15):
system to a vector based system. We've talked about this before.
Where raster is all pixel based, right, well, vector is
math based. Yeah, it's a line art, line art, which
is yeah. And and the nice thing about vector graphics
is that it's it's relatively easy to adjust lines after
you draw them, So you can reshape a line much
(48:36):
more simply with a vector based drawing than you could
with raster, where you would essentially have to erase what
you did and draw it again. So there's some illustrators
and animators out there who they're just used to it.
They'll be they'll draw a line and say, no, that's
that curves not right, and a racing they'll drawing some
well it's closer, but that's not what I want, and
they'll erase it and they'll draw another line. But then
(48:56):
with the vector based ones, you can draw a line
and say, oh, you know what, I just need to
tweak this a little bit and it's going to be
exactly why I need um. So that helps cut down
on on a lot of stop and start work, and
also the inking and painting part is much more much simpler.
Now you have a huge variety of colors, you can
(49:19):
choose from depending upon what sort of programs you're using.
You don't have to worry about it not being consistent
from one shot to the next because it's all digital,
so that that code of color is going to remain
the same no matter what um And you might even
be able to use some effects in some software to
create lighting effects that you don't have to necessarily do yourself,
(49:44):
so it would know that, all right, if you're going
to put a shadow of this intensity over this particular picture,
it needs to adjust the color to look like that
so that you know, so that it's natural to the viewer.
So that's really the change the way illustrators and animators
have created artwork. I know there are a lot of
(50:05):
people who create web comics who exclusively use tablets now.
For the longest time, they would do all their art
on paper and then they would scan the paper and
they would upload the art that way. So Kurts used
to do it that way, the guys at Penny Arcade
used to do it that way, and then they all
began to switch over using digital tablets. And almost every
(50:26):
single one I hear the animator or or the artists
talking either on a blog or on a podcast or
whatever about how the initial transition period is incredibly painful
and frustrating, and then after they get past the learning curve,
they're like, I don't know why I didn't do this
earlier because it makes things so much easier. And so
(50:49):
that's that's become sort of the new standard is using
these this digital format to do hand drawn animation. And
we also have seen some combinations of hand drawn animation
haired with computer generated backgrounds. So, I know, Beauty and
the Beast did that the big ballroom sequence with the
dance and Angela Lansbury singing and um and stuff that
(51:13):
had a computer generated background. Uh so, you know, we
were seeing some marriage of computer generated animation and hand
drawn animation, uh happening, and it's been going on for
a while. It's not like Beauty and the Beast was
the first and only example. It's just one example. Uh So,
you know, I'm sure we'll see more of that. I'm
(51:33):
glad to say that there are plenty of artists at
studios out there that still support hand drawn animation because
I think that there is something special to that. There's
a feel hand drawn animation has that's its own thing
and I like that. Yeah, it seems like, well, at
least in my opinion, it seems like there's a warmth
(51:54):
to it. Yeah. Um, but you don't necessarily get Yeah,
there's an asterisk cleaner you can't. Yeah. And there are companies.
There are companies out there like Pixar that can make
you sob like a little baby with some computer generated graphics. Yeah. Yeah,
and I you can you can ask my wife. There
(52:14):
is not a Pixar movie that I see without me
going look at the fill in the blank here, like
the Water and Finding Nemo or the fur Unsully in
Monsters and absolutely blows my mind. The the the story
of the the balloons and up where they did their
computer modeling to determine how balloons would actually behave. Yeah,
(52:34):
it kind of made me think of the engine that
what I've built for um, the Armies for Lord of
the Rings. It's like, let's why don't we take that
technology and convert it for helium balloons. It's essentially what
they did. Uh, that's fascinating stuff. But there is there's
a Um, I agree with Jonathan, there's a feeling that
(52:55):
you get when watching hand drawn animation that is different
than the feeling that you get when you're watching a
computer It doesn't doesn't mean better or it's just different.
It's just different. And and you know Lasseter of Pixar,
he would argue the same thing. He says, you know,
it's we use at Pixar, we use computer animation because
that's the tool we use. But to us, the most
(53:17):
important part of any film is the story, and that
ultimately the tool you use is nowhere near as important
as the story is. So if your story is solid,
then as long as you are good at using whatever
tools you have, you should be able to tell that
story effectively. Now that if those tools are hand drawn animation,
(53:40):
that's great, and if it's computer animation, that's great. There's
no there's nothing wrong with either choice. You're going to
get a different experience depending on which one to use,
but it doesn't mean that one experience is superior or
inferior to the other. And that wraps up this classic
episode of tech stuff. Hope you guys enjoyed it. I
always enjoy going back and listening to these old shows
(54:03):
and hearing Chris and his uh wonderful delivery. I miss
him and his puns. He's still doing quite well, by
the way, she's just not with our company anymore. Anyway,
I hope you guys enjoyed this. If you have any
suggestions for brand new episodes of tech Stuff, you can
reach out the email addresses tech stuff at how stuff
works dot com, or you can pop on over to
(54:24):
our website that's tech stuff podcast dot com, where you're
going to find an archive of all of our past episodes,
including these classics. You also find links to our social
media presence, and you'll find a link to our online
store where every purchase he make goes to help the
show and we greatly appreciate it, and I'll talk to
you again really soon. Tex Stuff is a production of
(54:49):
I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from
my heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Eight
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