How Hand-drawn Animation Works

is going to turn uglier in any second. Yeah, Today we wanted to talk about 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 two disciplines are different

enough where I think it warrants two different podcasts. Yeah, the UM 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 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 very realistic. Um, and I thought, you know, it would be really fun to kind of touch on that, um, which is uh, which is why I think we decided

to go ahead and make an episode of it. We should probably already uh attached 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 think it's been I think it's been like a year. Um. Yeah, okay that that that's fine 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 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, 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 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 it's and

that is a good reason to call it that. And so I mean anyone who has played with a little notepad or post it notes or whatever and have created their own little versions of this knows that you know, you you get a uh, you create this illusion of movement, You move the figures, 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 this all the time with post it notes. I went through so many packs of posted 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.

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 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 a 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 was being animated within a scene. They would draw draw that on celluloid. Eventually the industry made a transition from

celluloid to cellulus 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 prone to spontaneous decomposition, so you couldn't store it indefinitely. Are using those stack of drawings they were right, they see that puddle of goo over there, Yeah, that's snow white.

Um yeah, they they would, they would. It seems problematic, Yeah, so that you couldn't you know, you couldn't archive this stuff, which in the early days of the industry wasn't a big concern. 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 like a theater and see it projected on a screen, but there was people weren't too concerned about storing stuff for for pos 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 was was clear, yes, basically a clear sheet of plastic, if you will, just just for the sake of uh, 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 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 frames of film that passed. Each second is the standard, Yes, I couldn't remember per second of standard

for film, thirty for television, I think 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 it's so imagine if you will, that 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 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 o pack you, especially if you're using hand, especially if you're using paper. Like if there's a background image, yes, 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 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, 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. Uh. Now, the granted this is we're talking about physical film here, 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 potograph. 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 a character that is appearing or object or whatever that'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 cartoon kangaroo, and the kangaroo is 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 these that same set of cells. So, in other words, you've 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, 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 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, the build the buildings begin to 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 the beginning and loops and loops. And so if you think 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 has those on the on the center, it 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 into gating the next movement of that character, you would also adjust the 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 like the characters making progress. Well, eventually you're gonna run on a background, 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 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 cameras 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 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 the 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 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 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 done where they call it animating on two's, which means they take two pictures per uh 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 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 whatever you know, either the background or 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 um it creates a lot more work that way. It also means you have to have storage space for all this stuff because 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 got some great footage, but you don't think of 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 scene.

If you want to know how much film animated, an animated picture takes about sixteen frames is a foot okay. One second of film is twenty four frames, So one second of film is a foot and a half okay, most about half a 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, 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 the best thing, 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. So anyway, so you create a story and then you think of how you want to visualize this story. This is where you create a story board. Now, a 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, 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 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 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

visi dual 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 the voice work, So it all depends on the

project of how you do this. Some some animation 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 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 like there's a big surprise and you just you can't let 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 him a microphone like like, here's here's your stuff, here's your queue line, here's the 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. 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 out lines 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 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, 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 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

ratch 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 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 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 the film and then they would try and essentially do Foley or 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 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 animatics. But it's 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 them the visuals for the film. Now, at this point you can start to divide it up the labor which is 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 a it's it's an assembly line approach. So and it's it's kind of key to how they

started making animated 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 going to 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 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 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 happens to have

on him or her. So, for example, if you've drawn a space marine character who's got a big gun and 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 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 and of the weird things 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 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 Wazowski and I'm seeing Billy Crystal in my head because they've captured some of the same facial and that's 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, 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 get to to breathe a little life into the animation to and make it more appealing. Right. So, the next step is, once you've got the drawings 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 or 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 a show or a single film, but if it's something that's between episodes, even then it can be noticeable, like Homer 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 how to recreate that exact color or or there are times too when um, you know, especially for TV shows, whether 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

don't see differences sometimes in colors when one studio does it versus another. Yeah, and that's that's not 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 thinking 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 a character or an object or whatever, but you don't see the individual brush strokes or anything because 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 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

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 uh they the final soundtrack comes through with the music 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 shows like The Simsons 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 have these segments between the key frames that are left unfinished. They need to be filled in, and that's called in between, 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 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 is all done, the the foreign for us anyway, the Foreign Studios 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 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. 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's 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, we have a couple of special things we want 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 the same thing. Yes, the multiplane camera. That's exactly I'm doing the multiplane camera gestures 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, this is something that the Disney studios there were there were several people who worked on this. Um Disney himself did some work on it, and the the semi famous ou By 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 assume that it looks like it came from the Disneyland uh TV show that was out in the fifties and Stax or or so, and I'm sure it was used 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 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 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 clamped down so it's not gonna wiggle while they take the shot, and the camera is mounted above the table, 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, 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

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 and 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, to d animation, you start basically if you build, everything gets larger because you're basically zooming in on your 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 that either case, you're decreasing the distance between 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 frame because you're getting closer, but the moon would not start to it 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 an animation, because it's a static background and it's drawn on a two dimensional piece of paper or whatever, uh, 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. 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 underneath them still has the bottom and the camera is still above them. But what this enables

the 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 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 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 the camera gets you know, layer by a layer closer and closer down the stack of layers, um, you know, you do have that illusion that you are that the perspective is working the way it 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 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, 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 at needed. And so you've 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 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 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 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 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 D conversion. The problem I have with two D to 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, 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. That doesn't they don't appear to be three dimensional objects.

The same thing is true 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 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

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 him. No, you gotta do something to make it more. I think it's sort of set an expectation that when you're watching a video, it should be moving yea, and it should appear realistic. So UM,

I started thinking about it one. 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 I

he was when Disney was narrating this. This thing is like, well, you know, you can zoom in if you want to, and it 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

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 Wacom tablets, specifically centreat tablets tend to be favored by a lot of the artists sign note mainly because you can with the right tablet, you can

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

animator today to use one of these digital tablets. And he 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

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 tablets out there now where there's also a display built into the tablet itself, so you're 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, Uh, you talked about the the benefit of moving from a raster based 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 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 draw a line 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 with the vector based ones, you can draw a lot and and say, oh, you know what, I just need to tweet 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 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, 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 changed the

way illustrators and animators have created artwork. I know there are a lot of 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 that Kurts used to do it that way, the guy's at Penny Arcade used to do it that way, and then they all began to switch over using digital tablets.

And almost every 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 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 paired 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 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 glad to say that there are plenty of artists and 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, and it seems like, well, at least in my opinion, it seems like there's a warmth to it. Um. But you don't necessarily get Yeah, there's an asteriscreener 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 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 hair the fur un Sully in Monsters and absolutely blows my mind. The the the story of the the balloons and up where they did the computer

modeling to determine how balloons would actually behave. Yeah, 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 you get when watching hand drawn animation that is different than the 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 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, 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 needs to use, but it doesn't mean that one experience is superior or inferior to the other. Uh. And So I think I think it's a good discussion about the traditional hand drawn innivation and how it's evolved

over time. It's a really neat thing. If you guys have never watched any documentaries about it, I mean there are plenty there, even things like I remember there was one of their an episode of Tiny Tunes where Plucky learns about the process of animation, uh in a tortuous but effective way. UH say, there are a lot of different videos out there in movies that cover this, and

and I love watching all of them. I've always found them interesting and uh um, anyone who has that level of patience and attention to detail gets my admiration because when you look at that and you think, Okay, if you're talking about a film, even a seventy seventy minute film, and you think all right, Well, that means at bare minimum twelve drawings per second. That's a lot of drawing. Yes, it is. It's it's hard to imagine. So hats off

to any animator out there. You guys are doing some some great work and I really admire the discipline that takes to pursue a career in animation. Uh. If you guys have any suggestions for future topics of tech stuff, please let us know. Send us a message via email or at just this tech Stuff at Discovery dot com, or drop us a line on Facebook or Twitter. You can find us there with the handle of text stuff. H. S W and Chris and I will taught to you

again soon. The that's all, folks. For more on this and thousands of other topics, is that house staff Works dot com.