So as I looked
into Frank and Ollie and how they made their movies, I kept running across this
common theme of realism. Not realism in that every animation reflects real life
perfectly, but realism in that each character is a believable being that thinks
and feels, so that the audience can connect with them. This does have something
to do with the physics of how things look when they move, but it mostly has to
do with personality.
One of the ways that
Disney artists put real emotion behind their characters was with live action
references. Take for example Snow White. She has to dance with that dress on
and behave a certain way. Unless you’re unnaturally familiar with how dresses
behave while twirling about, or how people behave when they’re twirling their
dresses, you’d need to see it a few time to be able to draw it correctly. So
starting as early as Snow White (http://bit.ly/zBmBRm), live people would be
recorded acting out scenes from the movie, which animators would watch and then
animate. The realism it brought to the movies, both through the replication of
movement and emotion, was extraordinary.
One way to make
this technique really work for the animator was to use rotoscoping (which
Brooke talked about in her powerpoint). The film would be projected onto a
drawing surface, and the action would be “traced”. The Disney definition of
tracing is a little bit different than the standard definition, because
rotoscoping was used to animate one of the initial scenes with Jiminy Cricket (http://bit.ly/zshHWE).
Tracing for Disney means copying the emotion conveyed by the live reference.
This ties back to
Frank and Ollie’s striving toward “realism”. Making drawings come to life is
not an easy thing to do, and with their twelve principles, they make animated
characters real in every sense. With the aid of rotoscoping and live references
it becomes easier, but the artists still have to be talented to make it all
come together.
More Youtube Videos!
Sleeping Beauty Live Reference - http://bit.ly/Ad9Yvc
Little Mermaid Live Reference - http://bit.ly/9QMfJL
Alice in Wonderland Live Reference - http://bit.ly/xCzC6
Sleeping Beauty Live Reference - http://bit.ly/xLXYyj
Reused Footage - http://bit.ly/ihvj (I
actually think this is due to the reuse of live reference footage)
I had actually never paused to even consider that animators would need that in order to create a realistic animation. When you say it, it sounds so obvious that in order to depict the swaying motion of the dress one would need to see it in real life first but that just goes to show the in-depth process involved with making these films up to a standard that the public desires and craves.
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