Acquired
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
01:28:59 · Ben Gilbert, David Rosenthal
[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 [01:30:08] S1: Like little statues.
01:30:08 · David Rosenthal, Ben Gilbert
[01:30:08] S1: Like little statues. [01:30:09] S0: Right. They're perfect so that you can kinda say, how how would they look from that angle? How would they look if I stood eight feet away? Yep. Then you have animation itself. So it starts with sketching on paper with a pencil or with charcoal, and they're literally sketching one frame at a time. And they are flipping pages on their pad of paper back and forth, back and forth over and over again to get a feel for how the emotion of the drawing is coming through frame to frame. Does this character move like I think they should move? Are they consistent in their motion? Is their clothing sort of twirling the right way when they turn left? It's an insane art. [01:30:49] S1: Are their mouths speaking correctly? Yeah. [01:30:51] S0: Right. As the character drifts closer to the synthetic camera, are they getting big in a way that feels consistent with the laws of physics? My mind is so blown by the skill and talent of these people. So 24 frames per second means 12 to 14 drawings per second. So think a thousand ish per minute. That's around 80,000 in a feature length film of this era. And, of course, that's if there's only one character Right. Doing one thing on one layer. [01:31:18] S1: Yes. There's usually about, what, double that? Triple, quadruple.
01:31:18 · David Rosenthal, Ben Gilbert
[01:31:18] S1: Yes. There's usually about, what, double that? Triple, quadruple. [01:31:22] S0: Yeah. So there's two ways that this can happen. One is the most clean and obvious one, straight ahead, which is where an animator draws every frame in order. Or there's something called in betweeners, where lead animators draw the key frames with the essential poses or major character movements, and then the assistants or the in betweeners go to the drawings, and they sort of bridge between those frames. And the goal of doing this is to make the most efficient use of the skilled artist's time on the film. Now over a time, a division of labor started to emerge where which kinda makes sense. A super skilled animator would do work kinda fast and loose with sketches that had little extra lines hanging off everywhere. There'd be, like, revisions on top of their original drawing without actually cleaning up the the the mistakes underneath. And then it was handed over to a cleanup artist Yes. To trace their drawings with a single line versus the hairy mess to kinda get it ready for the next stage. But, again, preserving the same correct emotion, flow, bounciness, shape, form of the lines. Both the in betweeners and the cleanup artists were kind of a result of the industrialization of the animation process versus the early days in the early Mickey ones of a kind of a single artist animating the entire thing.
01:32:43 · David Rosenthal, Ben Gilbert
[01:32:43] S1: Yep. By this point, as they're heading into Snow White, this had become a real scale production process. I mean, it wasn't quite like an assembly line. This is still art here, but it's a lot closer to Henry Ford than it is to Picasso and his studio. [01:33:00] S0: Right. At least you do need to sort of synchronize and coordinate teams and make the highest use of the most valuable scarce resources, stuff like that. Yep. So then there's ink and paint. So let's talk about inkers. Back in 1914, Earl Heard had invented a concept known as cel animation, c e [01:33:18] S1: l Yep. [01:33:19] S0: Where you would draw with ink on the front of a piece of transparent plastic or cell in the business, short for celluloid. And that way, you could keep redrawing just the character in each frame, and the background could stay static. That essentially made animation possible at all in 1914. You could imagine if you had to just redraw every line on every frame every time. One, it would look crappy because things would sort of wiggle all over the place when the film was actually playing. But, two, it just was economically infeasible to draw every line every time. [01:33:52] S1: Yeah. It was not scalable. [01:33:54] S0: So it had evolved since then where there were now armies of people who were almost exclusively women at this point in history who would literally duplicate every line that the animators drew on paper with pencil, and they would trace over their entire drawing with ink on cell. Every single frame. [01:34:12] S1: Yes.