ANIMATION
[Film Technology]
[Film Technology]
The most popular form of animation associated with films
is the type of cartoon in which animals are
given human attributes. GERTIE THE DINOSAUR is
created with starting the trend in 1909, but FELIX THE
CAT, MICKEY MOUSE and DONALD DUCK followed. The popularity led WALT DISNEY eventually to progress from animals to
life like characters in the first length colour and sound cartoon film. SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS.
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Conveying controversial and difficult information.
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Instructions.
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Selling TV commercials.
If therefore film is exposed one frame
at a time (stop frame) to any static subject
that is slightly moved between each exposure,
the projected sequence also creates an illusion of movement. In brief an animating artist makes a series of outline pencil
drawings on paper which are traced onto celluloid sheets
known as `cel’. The cels are colour painted with
in the drawn outlines (usually on the reversal to avoid masking the detail) and are photographed against their appropriate
backgrounds. This is done one frame at a time
using a rostrum camera fixed vertically above
sheets of glass, beneath which the cels are positioned. Each cel has punch
holes which fits over pins on the rostrum bench
to ensure that the cels are held in register. With 24 separate picture per
second to expose, it is a very slow process requiring many cels to create a
sequence. To keep the number of drawing to a minimum the artists draws enough
cels for one complete cycle only of repeated actions, e.g. walking or rotating
wind mill sails. The cels are then numbered and shooting instructions given to
repeat the cycle of cels for the length of action required. See cel and rostrum camera.
See animation camera and animation stand, and animation table.
Animation, Animated Films, and Animated Cartoons, variety of motion pictures that produces the illusion of movement in
hand-drawn pictures or stationary objects by photographing them on a single frame of film, then
substituting the next drawing or object in the
series, which shows the subject in a slightly different position, then
photographing that on the next frame, and so
on. Silent Animation -The basis of film animation pre-dates the
first live-action
motion pictures, for it
was used in optical toys such as the Zoetrope and Reynaud's Praxinoscope. Several years after standard live action motion pictures were
possible, the first frame-by-frame animation of objects on film was done by Edwin S. Porter for the Edison company. In 1905 he made How Jones Lost His Roll and The Whole Dam Family and the Dam Dog, in which the inter-titles are formed by cut-out letters that move randomly about the screen until they get into line in the right order
to spell out the required message. This technique required an adaptation of the
ordinary motion-picture
camera so that it only
exposed one frame of film, and then stopped with the shutter closed, rather than the usual continuous
running at 16 frames per second. The idea was first applied to make a series of
filmed drawings move by James Stuart Blackton of the Vitagraph company, in Humorous Phases of Funny Faces (1906). In the same year,
Blackton produced another film, A Midwinter Night's Dream, in which toy
dolls were made to appear to move by shifting their limbs slightly between the
filming of each frame of film. This was the first example of “puppet animation”. Blackton extended this type of
animation in The
Haunted Hotel (1907),
making objects sculpted in modeling clay appear to gradually transform into
other things by slightly deforming their shape between the exposure of each frame of the film.
Subsequently, these techniques were taken up by European film-makers, such as
Segundo de Chomon and Émile Cohl. Cohl produced the first regular series of animated cartoons, featuring line drawings of
simplified human figures that jumped about and underwent astonishing
transformations. In the United States, the celebrated comic-strip artist Winsor
McCay took up film
animation, and
produced the first animated cartoons that were fully detailed and had smooth
natural movement in his 1911 Vitagraph film, Winsor McCay Draws Little Nemo. No one else rivalled the quality of McCay's
animation until the 1930s. The basic
devices used in hand-drawn animation to reduce the large amount of redrawing of
the stationary background for every frame were developed in 1914. Moving
figures were drawn on separate sheets of celluloid laid over a fixed background, drawn on paper. The technique was patented
by John Bray and Earl Hurd. It was essential to ensure positional
registration between successive drawings, and this was done by having holes
punched in the drawings that fitted on to pins fixed to the animation table under the camera, an idea
patented by Charles
Barré. All these men
were leading animators of the time: Bray began the
first American cartoon series in 1913 with Colonel Heeza Liar; Hurd
produced the Bobby Bumps series, which was considered to have the
best-constructed stories so far; and Barré directed an animated version of Bud
Fisher's popular comic strip Mutt and Jeff. Each of these animated
cartoons was drawn in rather crude black and white, with somewhat creaky movement, but in the 1920s animation
gradually improved. Figures such as the immensely popular Felix the Cat,
animated by Otto Messmer, still had rather rubbery movement, but Max and Dave Fleischer introduced new levels of weird
fantasy and complexity into their Out of the Inkwell series. The
Fleischers also invented the Rotoscope, a
device for projecting live-action film on to paper frame by frame, so that the outline of the moving
human figure could be traced to provide a guide for the animation drawings. Their films also developed the
technique of cartoon figures interacting with human actors in live action filmed in the real world. This idea of combining cartoon and live action was taken up by Walt Disney, after he moved to Hollywood in 1923, with
his Alice in Cartoonland series, which featured a small girl moving around in
an animated cartoon world. The work of the Disney team, led by Walt as story
editor, and Ub Iwerks as chief animator, rapidly improved, and in 1928 they had
a big success with the first Mickey Mouse films. After their innovation of adding sound to cartoons in 1928
with Steamboat Willie, the Disney studios moved into the leading
position both artistically and commercially. Some other countries, particularly
Britain and France, also had animation studios, but there was not a great deal worth noting outside the United
States, apart from the elaborate puppet animation of the Polish director
Wladyslaw Starewicz (for example, The Cameraman's Revenge, 1912) and the
animation of abstract shapes developed by Viking Eggeling, Walter Ruttman, Hans
Richter, and Oskar Fischinger in Germany throughout the 1920s. Also in Germany,
Lotte Reiniger produced the first feature-length animation, with The Adventures of
Prince Achmed (1926), using the technique of jointed silhouette figures
that she had been developing since 1916.
The Animation Process - In the 1930s, Disney introduced a fully systematized production
process for animated films, which quickly became standard. After the script of
the cartoon is worked out by a specialized
team of writers and artists, including the director, using rough sketches of
the shots, the soundtrack is recorded, and then “timed”[Timing]. This means that the specific frame when
all important movements start and finish is written down on a specialized chart
(“bar sheet”), which also has the precise
point at which each significant sound starts and finishes. This is used by the animators, who make exact drawings of the position of
the figures at points when they are briefly stationary (the “key poses” or “extremes”). The intermediate drawings that will provide the actual movement of
the figures on the screen between these poses are then drawn on paper by “in-betweeners”, and the whole action is filmed
frame by frame to give the “pencil test”. After this has been projected to check the smoothness of the
animation, and the drawings have been corrected, they are traced on to celluloid sheets (“cels”) by tracers. At this point, other artists
fill in the colour areas within the outlines on the cel by painting on the back
of the cel. Meanwhile, the backgrounds for the scenes will have been painted on to paper by yet other
artists. Finally, the layers of cels for each frame are assembled on the table
of a rostrum camera over the background in the right
position using the registration
pegs on the table,
and photographed. Animation
in the Sound Period -The trend in the 1930s was to fill the frame with more and
more independent movement of both the figures and the background, until the
whole picture was alive, as in Disney's The Old Mill (1937) and the
feature-length Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). Not only did
these films reach new levels in the depiction of the movement of nature through
animation, but they also introduced the breakdown of scenes into shots taken
from different angles, as had long been standard in ordinary films. The
technical achievement of the Disney studios in this period from 1935 to 1945 has never been surpassed.
Classics such as Fantasia (1940) and Pinocchio (1940) are
testament to this. Rapidly rising labour costs in the following years meant
that even Disney had to scale down the complexity of their work, although their
commercial success continued. The other animation studios in Hollywood followed behind
Disney, but there was little of distinction in their out-put, except for
further extremely bizarre ideas in the Fleischers' Betty Boop and Popeye
the Sailor series, and the even wilder jokes from Tex Avery at Warner Bros.
In the late 1940s a new, more modern stylized graphic approach was developed at
a new cartoon studio, UPA, by John Hubley and others, and this style eventually
became common. With labour costs continuing to rise, full animation in the Disney
style became too expensive, and most studios gradually returned to the kind of
“limited animation” characteristic of the early period, in which only one character moved
at a time, and the movements were rather jerky. To balance this decline in
visual interest, more weight was placed on the soundtrack, which was ever more densely packed with dialogue and noises. The
introduction of xerographic copying machines simplified the production process by eliminating tracing,
thus helping to offset increasing costs to some extent. This gave rise to a new
look in films, seen in One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961). In the
1980s and 1990s the decline in the quality of animation has been halted, with a
number of people such as Don Bluth (An American Tail, 1986), and the
Disney studio itself, trying to revive the excellence of the great days of the
1930s and 1940s, though with only partial success. The best recent examples of
this, which have well-deserved commercial rewards, are the combination of live
action and animation in Who Framed Roger
Rabbit (1988) and the Disney studios' Beauty
and the Beast (1991) and Toy Story (1995). The latter is the first
feature-length film to be composed entirely of computer-generated
images. In the sound period there have been
more artistic innovations from independent animators, such as Len Lye, who painted
directly on to the film strip in Britain in the 1930s. This idea, and others,
were developed much further by Norman McLaren, who worked for the National Film Board of Canada during
and after World War II. The Canadian National Film Board has since sponsored a
number of younger artists working on new techniques and styles. East European
animation has produced a number of major animators, such as Jan Lenica and
Walerian Borowczyk in Poland, working in very individual styles since the
1950s. Lenica developed the animation of cut-outs taken from old engravings to tell bizarre stories, and
Borowczyk the use of deliberately crude simplification to present macabre and
grotesque relations between people. More recently, the works of the Russian
Juri Norstein and the Czech Jan vankmajer have created an international
impression. Model Animation and Puppet Animation - The technique of animating solid figures frame by frame has
never formed more than a minor part of film animation production, and has mostly
depended on the dedication of a single animator, perhaps because it is not as
adaptable to fully industrialized methods as is drawn
animation. Notable figures working in this
mode since Starewicz include the Hungarian George Pal, who began making puppet films for advertising
purposes in the 1930s in Holland and Britain, and then in the 1940s set up the
only studio to produce a regular series (called “Puppetoons”) of animated puppet cartoons in
Hollywood. After World War II the Czech animator Jíí Trnka attracted attention
for a while with his puppet animations, as did his fellow-countryman vankmajer
more recently, but most work in this area has continued to be sporadic, except
for short and simply made films for television programmes aimed at children.
Puppet or model animation has also been an important element within
feature-film production in supplying part of the action in some fantasy films. The first
notable example was the animation of prehistoric dinosaur figures in The Lost World (1925) by
Willis O'Brien, who continued his work in King Kong (1933), and this
tradition has been carried on by Ray Harryhausen, in many films from The
Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (1953) to Clash of the Titans (1981). More
recently, films such as Jurassic Park (1993) (which won an Academy Award for its visual effects)
have combined single frame animation of model creatures with sequences of
action filmed with a continuously running camera. These use models moved by
internal rods actuated by hand (“muppets”) or by hydraulic or electrical remote control (“animatronics”), and also
include sequences using animated computer
graphics. The first animator to gain
commercial success from the animation of figures made from modeling clay or
plastics has been Nick Park working in Britain. He has used the flexibility of the
material to give a flow to the motion that is usually lacking in this mode of
work, as well as adding colourful characters and well-timed scripts and gags.
His talent has won him three Academy Awards (Oscars): for Creature Comforts
(1989), The Wrong Trousers (1993), and A Close Shave (1995).
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