Hi everyone,
Well, I'm not entirely sure how to go about this, so I'm just going to fly by the seat of my pants a bit. If I don't offer up enough information, let me know and I'd be happy to flesh things out.
I found an interesting blip about a book that influenced Walt Disney's early work - Animated Cartoons:
How They are Made, their Origin and Development. Apparently Walt Disney read this book and it gave him the idea that animation cels would be superior to the cutout animation technique he was using at the time, and this is what led him to adopt the practice for everything produced by the Disney company (until 1990, when they adopted Computer Animation Production Systems). The book can be found here, it looks like an interesting read. maybe it could be future class material: http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.32106001458550;page=root;seq=11;view=plaintext;size=100;orient=0
For some background, the cutout animation technique is actually not unlike stop-motion animation: key moving parts of a scene are made into cutouts and laid over the scene, and a picture is taken at every moment that the cutout must move. Before computer animation, this was a popular animation technique because it avoided having to redraw every frame of an animation. Here's a page with some more information: http://www.aifweb.com/animation/cutout_anim/cutout_animation.html
In contrast, cels (celluloids) are clear sheets on which characters or images are painted and then overlayed on top of each other, and it's a staple of Disney animation.There's a page about cels and their use here: http://www.animationartgallery.com/aanimationdefinitions.html
This is something I'd definitely like to look into as it's something I never considered. Plus, I think it would be kind of cool to study that book a bit knowing Walt himself read that same text and was impacted by it.
~Brooke
The art work of animation when Disney was young would make a good item for the surcas presentation, especially in comparison with his innovations from those traditions
ReplyDeleteVery early in the Watts text this book is mentioned passively and not by name. I wouldn't have even thought twice about the sentence had you not made this post, but now I'm kicking myself for not remembering more specifically where it is.
ReplyDeleteYour post on backgrounds and cels reminded me of what Disney did with the multiplane camera. It can be explained best by Walt himself:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8d4-AUwkKAw
This technique is super neat. There's a shortened version of that video and a model of the set up within the One Man's Dream attraction at DHS. And even with the advancement in 2-D hand drawn animation, the effect achieved by the multiplane camera can still be seen in use
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwnh-sxaBwk (Beginning of Hunchback)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bI3QOce4saU (beginning of Beauty and the Beast)
Collin brings up a good particular to back up the generalization about Disney's innovations in cartooning. It would be great presentation material to have research to show on the history of the multi-plane camera. Also, the library owns The Art of Walt Disney which can be a good source for this and related inquiries....
ReplyDeleteGlad I sparked so much interest! For my second blog post I'll look through the Watts book and see what pertains to this, even if it just means looking at animation techniques as a whole or broadening the topic a bit.
ReplyDelete