By: William Bibbiani
Source: http://www.craveonline.com
Thanks to the Gods of Saturday Morning, several generations of kids
have been raised on an exciting round of animated TV programs. No child
alive is not intimately familiar with cartoons. I was, myself, largely
drawn to the old Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies put out by Warner
Bros. in the 1940s, and rerun on TV in the 1980s. I think the old shorts
are still being run here and there on entire cable networks devoted to
animation. And when I wasn't giggling at Bugs Bunny or Daffy Duck, I was
grooving to crappy animated programs like Transformers and He-Man and the Masters of the Universe
which were both sponsored by toy companies, and features only the most
rudimentary of action thrills for my sugar-saturated mind.
One of the first feature films I remember seeing in a theater was Walt Disney's Pinocchio
(1940). I don't recall much of the story, but I remember Jiminy Cricket
(voiced by Cliff Edwards), and I remember being utterly terrified when
the island of naughty boys began to magically transform into donkeys.
Are we not men?
As I grew, I refused to give up on my cartoons, and continued to watch
Saturday Morning fare into high school (no, I was not a cool kid). But
my interest in the form did, thankfully, become more sophisticated as
the years passed. And I can now offer you, my dear and loyal readers, a
scholarly look at the form, and offer what knowledge I have on the
making of animated feature films. Welcome back, then, to CraveOnline's weekly Free Film School,
wherein I, Witney Seibold, your humble professor-like being, will
impart piece-by-piece all of my film knowledge to you, hoping to get you
to grow from a casually interested film fan into a legitimate film snot
who dominates conversations at parties.
Animation, as we have likely all come to realize, has actually become
something of a dominant art in recent years. Computer-generated imagery,
or CGI, has not only been used to create entire
feature films, but is leaned upon heavily to create all manner of
special effects. These days, it's likely that most of the explosions,
crumbling buildings, slimy monsters, and even certain stuntpeople have
been created using CGI. Indeed, the reliance on CGI to create images in
live-action films has reached the point where old school genre fans
begin to reminisce when practical special effects were ubiquitous and
more convincing. This is a subject I already covered in the Free Film School before.
But, for much of the filmmaking process, films animated using CGI and
films animated in the traditional frame-by-frame style actually cleave
kind of similar. Let me take you through the steps now.
STEP ONE: Writing. Like any film, an animated film
starts with a screenplay. Thanks to the animated form, just about any
visuals can be realized. There is no need to worry about what's possible
with a camera. If you can draw it, it can be in an animated film. The
“camera” in an animated film can dip and swerve and go anywhere the
director wants. In traditional cel animation, changing perspective on an
entire scene can be hard; it's easier to render something like that in
CGI. I'll get to “cels” in a minute.
STEP TWO: Character design. This can be done before or
after the voice-recording step (see below), but a team of artists will,
using traditional paints, pens inks, and paper, design the look of the
character. Some characters will go through several iterations before a
final look is selected by the film's director. Characters are never
designed using CGI. They are always sketches first. The character
designers will also come up with a character sheet for each and every
character, detailing the various extreme expressions each one has.
They'll have a “happy” drawing, an “angry” drawing, etc. Since hundreds
of animators will end up working on the film (sometimes even being
shipped to other animation studios overseas for some of the manual
labor), it's important that they each know exactly how each character
looks. If there are standardized character sheets, one can be assured
continuity in the look of your talking rabbit, even when that look is in
the hands of hundreds. Occasionally, you'll come across a cartoon that
wants to rattle this standardized system, and do more original,
free-hand animation (see: The Ren and Stimpy Show). When a character deviates from their model sheet, it's called “going off-model.”
Characters can only move so far in most animated films, provided the
director wants them to look like they have real weight; characters
should only be able to squash and stretch their faces so far, right? The
term for this form of squash-and-stretch design is actually
“squash-and-stretch.”
In a CGI film, often a 3-D clay model will be sculpted to give the
computer animators an idea of how it will look in the 3-D space within
the computer. CGI allows for the quick change of perspective on an
image, so how it looks from all angles is important.
STEP THREE: Voice recording. Actors are selected for
their voice talents. The entire script is then typically recorded in its
entirety. For most animated feature films, actors are recorded at
different times, and their lines are edited together. Some animation
directors prefer the naturalness that comes with organic acting
techniques, and may record all the actors in the room together, going
over entire scenes. Actors stand in front of individual microphones, and
usually read directly from their scripts. There is little in the way of
improvising, although Robin Williams was a big exception when he played
the genie in Aladdin.
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Source: http://www.craveonline.com/film/articles/178563-free-film-school-23-animation-the-twelve-step-program
