Acquired
01:24:41 · David Rosenthal, Ben Gilbert
[01:24:41] S1: Yes. One tiny part of inking and painting. [01:24:43] S0: Listeners will include some behind the scenes ink and paint photos of David and I in the email. So let's start with the goal. The goal is to create the illusion of motion with a series of still frames, like a ton of still frames, 24 still frames per second. So that requires a lot of clever tricks to make it economically possible, to make it consistent, and to make it enjoyable. And if you really do your job to make it emotional for the viewer. [01:25:21] S1: And to be clear, live action film is the same thing. It's an illusion. But as we talked about earlier, it doesn't cost anything to animate the humans. [01:25:31] S0: And you get physics for free. So believability comes for free. You don't have to do clever things like figure out how do things stretch and squish when someone bounces on the ground. It all just sort of happens because you're shooting it in the real world. Yep. So where does it all start? It starts with a good story. So there's something called the story department that kicks off the process with little sketches that are sort of pinned to cork boards. And so these story meetings are great. You have people acting out alongside the drawings to illustrate their idea, how the characters move and interact and talk. And Walt was famously amazing to watch when he did this acting. So this then gets put into a story reel of static sketches, just kind of illustrating the main flow of the story. At this point, it is super easy to edit, reorder, change dialogue, anything. I
01:25:31 · Ben Gilbert, David Rosenthal
[01:25:31] S0: And you get physics for free. So believability comes for free. You don't have to do clever things like figure out how do things stretch and squish when someone bounces on the ground. It all just sort of happens because you're shooting it in the real world. Yep. So where does it all start? It starts with a good story. So there's something called the story department that kicks off the process with little sketches that are sort of pinned to cork boards. And so these story meetings are great. You have people acting out alongside the drawings to illustrate their idea, how the characters move and interact and talk. And Walt was famously amazing to watch when he did this acting. So this then gets put into a story reel of static sketches, just kind of illustrating the main flow of the story. At this point, it is super easy to edit, reorder, change dialogue, anything. I [01:26:25] S1: see where you're going with this at this point.
01:26:25 · David Rosenthal, Ben Gilbert
[01:26:25] S1: see where you're going with this at this point. [01:26:27] S0: At this point. So then the sound department gets involved, and that's both music and voice. So first, you'll have oftentimes a temp voice over. So the animators have something to animate to if you don't have the real actors laying down the vocal track yet. You also have the music scored and recorded at this phase. And the way that animation and sound are synced at this point is through something called bar sheets or exposure sheets, where the entire film, this is gonna sound insane, is broken down by frame, by syllable of dialogue, and by beat of the music, and these are mapped together. So this way, the animator can do their drawings exactly to the music and dialogue. Now you can kind of understand the insanity of what Steamboat Willie was trying to do and why that was so difficult. The the Disney studio kinda had to invent this process. [01:27:21] S1: Yeah. And that was, what, seven, eight minutes long?
01:27:21 · David Rosenthal, Ben Gilbert
[01:27:21] S1: Yeah. And that was, what, seven, eight minutes long? [01:27:25] S0: Yes. Meanwhile, you have the layout department who is doing the staging, the camera framing, the composition of these shots, the lighting for every scene. Now when I say things like staging, there's there's no stage. Camera framing, there is a camera, but that's not even the camera this is referring to. This is where the synthetic camera is aiming in the synthetic action. Composition, lighting, this isn't like lighting the way you think of lighting. This is this very abstract art of imagining what it would look like if these characters were real and there were real lights and figuring out how to draw that scene. Then this gets forked into two parallel processes where background painters are doing their work on these gorgeous watercolors on paper and oil paintings on these super wide panes of glass to allow for the panning across the scene. Whenever you go into the Disney archives, you can see these, I don't know, four foot wide by something like eight inch tall backgrounds because the camera has to pan around as the characters move around against the background. And then the other side of the fork is the animators who are doing their work on the characters themselves.
01:27:25 · Ben Gilbert, David Rosenthal
[01:27:25] S0: Yes. Meanwhile, you have the layout department who is doing the staging, the camera framing, the composition of these shots, the lighting for every scene. Now when I say things like staging, there's there's no stage. Camera framing, there is a camera, but that's not even the camera this is referring to. This is where the synthetic camera is aiming in the synthetic action. Composition, lighting, this isn't like lighting the way you think of lighting. This is this very abstract art of imagining what it would look like if these characters were real and there were real lights and figuring out how to draw that scene. Then this gets forked into two parallel processes where background painters are doing their work on these gorgeous watercolors on paper and oil paintings on these super wide panes of glass to allow for the panning across the scene. Whenever you go into the Disney archives, you can see these, I don't know, four foot wide by something like eight inch tall backgrounds because the camera has to pan around as the characters move around against the background. And then the other side of the fork is the animators who are doing their work on the characters themselves. [01:28:38] S1: Yep. Yeah. The backgrounds are just beautiful when you see them in person. That was my favorite part about the archive, to get to see the backgrounds of Snow White or Cinderella or the other great Disney classics. You just look at them and think, oh my god. These are right up there with Rembrandts or Picasso's or they they should be in a museum.
01:28:38 · David Rosenthal, Ben Gilbert
[01:28:38] S1: Yep. Yeah. The backgrounds are just beautiful when you see them in person. That was my favorite part about the archive, to get to see the backgrounds of Snow White or Cinderella or the other great Disney classics. You just look at them and think, oh my god. These are right up there with Rembrandts or Picasso's or they they should be in a museum. [01:28:59] S0: And they are basically in a museum. Disney has 11 rooms in the animation research library, which are temperature controlled and humidity controlled. And they've got all these UV filters all over everything, and there's these drawers and drawers and drawers inside. Almost looks like data centers, where they have all of these old background paintings and all the drawings we're about to talk about. Yep. So the animation department then develops what's called a character model sheet that shows the character from several different angles and positions that are likely to be in throughout the film. This is distributed to each animator who works on that character because often and by necessity, there are multiple since that character is going to exist on film for, you know, eighty, ninety, a hundred minutes. It's a lot of drawing to do. Then there's the model department who makes something called a maquette. The animators who are drawing a character hundreds and hundreds or thousands of times or tens of thousands of times need a consistent physical reference that they can hold and rotate and examined under a lamp. So these are, you know, eight inch tall versions of the characters that are