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