Posted by cartoon-guy at 75-209.thevine.net on June 07, 2000 at 11:34:22:
In Reply to: *REPOST Q. FOR CARTOON GUY* -Process? posted by Darth Dobbin on June 07, 2000 at 10:32:20:
: can you provide for those interested parties out here in internet-ville, is what is the process like now? How much of it is hand drawn, and how much is computer-color-form-motion?
First off, feature production is slightly different from TV. In features, storyboards are drawn of the entire film and then cut in sequence to the length of the film. The backgounds are hand drawn and given to the animators to hand draw their characters over. Meanwhile, the background artist is painting their background traditionally, or on the computer.
The animators hand draw their animation (many characters are also animated using a computer these days) and are sent to an assistant to be inbetweened and cleaned up. The cleaned up drawings are taken to scanning where they are digitally combined with the scanned background. There, the characters are colored and output to film.
Tv is similar, except that because of economic reasons, only pre-production is done in this country. On CLERKS, we hand drew all of our character designs and backgrounds. Alan Bodner hand painted some spectacular color thumbnails which were translated by our background painter (the wonderful Nadia) into photoshop paintings. All our bgs were done in photoshop.
What we sent Korea wwere storyboards and exhaustive reference drawings of our characters and environments. From that reference, they drew new backgrounds (or used our keys if they fit) and painted them in photoshop. The animation was all hand drawn by them as well; even the inbetweens. The drawings were then scanned and digitally combined with the backgrounds and colored.
When the animation comes back from Korea, we add the sound to it and it done.
The advantage of not having cels is that the image is very clear. Cels warped and were very dusty, In old Disney films, you can sctually see the dust move around over the images.
The thing to remember about computers is that they don't animate any more than pencils do. People animate.