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“In A Hurry”: Animating a Dancer Dwight Swift: 12.03.2006 Intro to Film Studies: Alan Singerman ___________________ Over the last week and a half the main focus of my time has been to create an animated short film of a dance sequence. It has been an exercise in patience, of attention to details, and mainly of the right brain. I used a combination of techniques; however the style is mainly reminiscent of the early developments of the genre, or the 1920’s. Here I will share a brief history of animation, the process I used, design of the film, and thoughts about its creation. Animated films began in the early 20th century with newspaper cartoonists adapting characters from their daily cartoons into short animated sequences. Winsor McCay was one of these cartoonists in 1911, animating characters from his cartoon Little Nemo in Slumberland. One of his contemporaries Bud Fisher also started with his comic Mutt and Jeff (Barrier 10). By doing this, these artists were able to use their newspaper audiences to try out something new. And since viewers would recognize familiar characters from the newspaper, there was stronger public appeal. In the beginning animations were completely done by hand without any technical aids. As one can imagine this was a very labor intensive process. So in order to produce animations for the demand created by audiences, animators in this time were constantly coming up with ways to animate faster. Some of the more important innovations were the use of celluloid film to see the previous frame’s lines. This coined the term cel to refer to a frame of animation on a celluloid sheet. In conjunction with celluloid, animators developed a way to center each cel on the drawing board, as well as a way to backlight their work to enhance viewing of superimposed cels (Barrier 14). Over the years animators have experimented with an array of mediums. These include everything from clay models to the entirely computer generated scenes used in today’s action films such as Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. Will Vinton pioneered claymation with the first clay feature. “‘The Adventures of Mark Twain by Huck Finn’ (1985) was the first feature done in clay animation” (Solomon 209). And in the usual fashion, with the addition of technological computer advances we now see films such as Peter Lord and Nick Park’s claymation Chicken Run. While all media are still used to some extent, the public has mainly embraced the style pioneered by The Walt Disney Company. Disney started with Steamboat Willie 1928, and his company continues today with a multitude of animated features about fairy tales, fables, and other topics generally suitable for all ages (Tannenbaum 299). In production of my animated short, I used the process of rotoscoping. Patented in 1915 by Max Fleischer - the creator of Betty Boop – rotoscoping is the process of “drawing images on cells by tracing over previously recorded live action” (Parent 7). This allowed me as an amateur animator to capture lifelike motion, while keeping with the style I wished to use. To begin, the dance sequence was choreographed, filmed, and edited into a rough form. Then it was broken into frames and processed so each file contained three layers: a background image with the film frame, a semi-transparent white layer used to preview sketches, and a clear layer onto which I sketched. Instead of drawing on paper as is traditionally done, I used a graphics tablet to draw directly on a digital canvas. While this reduced production time in that I was not required to scan every frame at the finish, using the tablet took some adjustment and at times created more difficulty than it should have. Once each cel was drawn, I combined them into one movie file and added audio. Each cell averaged about 3.5 minutes to draw. At a total of over 350 cells this totals 20 hours of drawing time. The choreography, filming, and editing took 10 hours, giving the project in its entirety a rough estimate of 30 hours total production time, or 50 minutes per second. At the onset I had several ideas I wanted to incorporate into this short. First of all, I wanted to use the tablet rotoscoping technique outlined above. Given this, at 10 frames per second, somewhere around 30 seconds running time seemed reasonable. I wanted to make something that would capture the audience’s attention and entertain them within this small time span. A good way to do this was to keep the tone lighthearted. The soundtrack by Christian McBride’s In a Hurry seemed a fitting choice – and included a nice ending point at 34 seconds. I used the close up of the pointe shoes at the beginning and end to give a sense of completion; in the same way some poems use their starting phrase at the end to punctuate an emotion or idea. The medium and long shots with one high angle section make it more interesting to watch and gave me the opportunity to draw different types of cells that a static camera would not have permitted. The ribbons falling at the end act in much the same way as the horns do in the soundtrack. I wanted to give the impression that the dancer danced and arrived back where she started - only a little out of breath and with her shoes coming undone. There were a few things that I had to modify from the film. The most prevalent problem was due to a consistency error during filming. Liza, the dancer was wearing pants that were rolled up during the pointe shoe scenes. However during the long shots she was wearing different shoes due to grip problems on the floor, and her pants were rolled down. As a result, for over half of the animation I drew her calves and pointe shoes that were not there. While not a problem per se, I had to be very careful with her legs throughout. Also, whenever there was a frame with a motion blur I had to interpret the blur and draw an appendage accordingly. The ribbons falling at the end were filmed during a separate shot for balance reasons, so the drawn ribbons and feet are a composite of several images as well as some position changes necessary to join the two shots. Some inspirations for this project included the works of Don Hertzfeldt’s Bitter Films. While Hertzfeldt uses real paper, and his subject matter is dark and sometimes bordering on grotesque, his style stuck out to me as uncommon and fun to watch. Also, the iPod commercials with a dancing silhouette are comparable in that they have a dancer and music. However, the dancing sequence idea came up before thinking about these commercials, and the techniques are completely different. The iPod commercials use no animation whatsoever; it is entirely done with live footage and filters after the fact. It would be difficult to locate this project in the history of animation. It has parts from distant periods in development of the medium. Each frame is hand drawn, or rotoscoped, which would place it around 1915. However a computer was used extensively for production, and no paper was drawn on other than to make choreography notes. If we set aside the computer’s use and place it within the development of popular animation features, one might find a short such as this somewhere in the 1920’s. Animators long struggled to make their methods more efficient, and many advances were made in the 1920’s (Barrier 11). Because of the labor intensive process and the use of celluloid techniques (I used a digital form) developed in these years, I would locate my short in this time frame. Overall this project has taught me many things about the process of animated films. And although I rotoscoped the majority of the short, I picked up somewhat of a better sense of proportions in figure drawing. Editing took much longer than I expected as the minutia required in making a seamless final product surfaced. Synchronizing audio and making the final credits took time as well. And while I can see clearly why the genre has moved ahead to bigger and better techniques, I am pleased with the result I obtained and appreciate the style of drawings that the old fashioned manual way creates.
___________________ Works Cited Barrier, Michael J. Hollywood Cartoons. New York: Oxford UP, 1999. Parent, Rick. Computer Animation. San Diego: Academic P, 2002. Solomon, Charles. The History of Animation: Enchanted Drawings. New York: Random House, 1989. Tannenbaum, Barbara. "Before Mickey." JSTOR: Art Journal 3rd ser. 43 (1983): 299+. 3 Dec. 2006.
Posted By: Paul Miller
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