Animation is impressive

Coming into this Motion Graphics and Animation class, I can confidently say I know nothing about animating. I've never used After Effects or Maya before, but I plan on being able to improve my skills throughout the next few months of the year. Animated movies have always been a very important part of my life, especially Pixar and Disney movies, and I have always found animators to be some of the most talented people. When I was in London, I had an internship at Objective Productions, where one part of it was finding facts about different animated movies, including Shrek, Frozen and Bambi. It was interesting to view the commentary on how they created Frozen, a very recent Disney film to how they animated Bambi, the first Disney film ever created. The content that I viewed showed me the evolution of cartoon animation and how everything used to be drawn by hand while now everything is digitally animated and it can take days just to animate a characters hair! Overall, animation is something that I really admire, and I am excited to become more knowledgeable on how to create certain things for all of the projects that we are going to do in class.

Here is the link to the Frozen documentary I watched: 

https://vimeo.com/105934014

And here is the documentary on Bambi I watched: 

This commercial by PARABELLA for "Twinings Tea" reminded me of "The Adventures of Tom Thumb". Not the little claymation of Tom but the actors whose movements almost seemed like they were claymated. After doing some research I found that PARABELLA was heavily inspired by the Golden Era of musicals and multi-plane animation techniques which was pioneered by Walt Disney back in the 30's. The animation blends CG with pointilism, and includes 100,000 tea bags and 50 different paper folding styles to bring vivid and intricate movement throughout the piece. The heroine was also shot frame by frame, and several 3D models were shot on layered planes to captivate an amazing sense of depth and perspective.

Walt Disney Pictures Animation

The start to every adventure began with a blue sparkling tower with a shimmering shooting star. I'm not talking about bedtime dreaming. Some times the adventures would begin at the crack of dawn (5:30AM), but that would never stop me. Whether it were Toy Story, Tarzan, Atlantis, or The Lion King, the Walt Disney Logo led the way. It's amazing to think that while the logo has changed so much in the last 20 years (with advancements in motion graphics and animation), the stories have continued to excite individuals of all age groups. It's also interesting to note that while recreating the current logo is almost impossible for a college student to complete, the iconic original Walt Disney logo is definitely an achievable task. However, today we have millions of tools in After Effects, Maya, etc. Back in the 1940's, when the original logo was produced, none of these programs existed. While it may be a pretty long video, the evolution of the Walt Disney logo, shortening of the on-screen textual elements, and the specifically tailored movie opens are not only inventive but accurate set the mood of the story before the film's very first scene. I hope you enjoy the magic of Walt Disney.

Walt Disney's Multi-Plane Camera

This is not "computer animation", this is animation before computers. Walt Disney Productions used to put an incredible amount of effort into making their animations without using computers. This video, which is one of my favorite videos of all time, shows how they used multiple planes to simulate 3D animation before computers.

Disneyland...the Series?

I had been planning on writing a blog post on Disneyland even before class today, and now this episode in particular is even more applicable to what we've been talking about.

Disneyland, which would eventually become The Wonderful World of Disney on ABC, aired for an impressive 54 years. In 1954 the series was created in order to help fund the creation of Disneyland park, but it wound up being so popular, that it continued to air until its finale in 2008. When it first began, the series showed the inner-workings of Disney and the animation industry/process. The episode that I linked to in this post happens to be a brief history of animation up until when Disney as an animation giant really emerged.

The best part of the episode is that you'll be able to see some of the devices we were talking about in action, as well as see a couple other people who were really instrumental in the initial development of animation. If you like this, I highly recommend you check out the rest of the series. While a lot of it is obviously very Disney-focused, it gives a really great insight into hand drawn animation. I know for me, it gave me a whole new sense of appreciation for how much work goes into these films, as well as how far the craft has come.

Getting into the Halloween Spirit

Since it is in fact Halloween, I decided that now was the perfect time to talk about Disney's "The Skeleton Dance". This animation was produced and directed by Walt Disney himself and animated by Ub Iwers. This film shows a group of four skeletons who dance around and make music with very peculiar musical instruments. It was created in 1929 as a part of the "Silly Symphonies" animated shorts. The group of skeletons dance to music that was inspired by the Saint-Saëns composition, "Danse Macabre" aka the "dance of death" which seems all too fitting. This short animation was also the first animation where the sound was not post-synced. It has been highly regarded as one of the greatest cartoons of all time as well and I think we all could learn a thing or two from their dancing!

All My Favorites!

Because all of my post have been amazing I really just wanted to go out with a bang. So I figured I would share my top five favorite animation stuff. These can range from movies to clips. Lets get ready to rumble!!

5

Paperman (styled as paperman) is a 2012 black-and-white 3D hand-drawn/computer animatedromantic comedy short film produced by Walt Disney Animation Studios and directed by John Kahrs. The short blends traditional animation and computer animation. 

4

Wreck-It Ralph is a 2012 American computer-animated family-comedy film[4] produced byWalt Disney Animation Studios and released by Walt Disney Pictures.[5] It is the 52nd animated feature in the Walt Disney Animated Classics series.

3

Up is a 2009 American 3D computer-animated comedy-adventure film produced by Pixar Animation Studios and released by Walt Disney Pictures. By tying thousands of balloons to his home, 78-year-old Carl sets out to fulfill his lifelong dream to see the wilds of South America and to complete a promise made to his lifelong love. 

2

Tangled is a 2010 American computer animated musical fantasy-comedy film produced byWalt Disney Animation Studios and released by Walt Disney Pictures. Loosely based on theGerman fairy tale "Rapunzel" in the collection of folk tales published by the Brothers Grimm, it is the 50th animated feature in the Walt Disney Animated Classics series.

1

I honestly could not pick which of the Toy Story movies I liked best so I picked all of them! Toy Story is a CGI animated film series and Disney media franchise that began with the original 1995 film, Toy Story, produced by Pixar and distributed by Walt Disney Pictures. The franchise focuses on a group of toys that secretly come to life and end up unexpectedly embarking on life-changing adventures.

Walt Disney

This video was shown in another class of mine and I find it relevant to what we do in Motion Graphics.
The Story of the Animated Drawing is an episode of the Disneyland television program. Walt Disney is explaining throughout the vid the history of animation. In the 1950's, animation for a movie was much more difficult. Everything for a cartoon movie was done physically by hand. There is a person devoted to changing the scenes by using the kinetograph and other devices as well as a person devoted to music. The most interesting part is that the audience had no idea how much work was put into showing that movie.
   

I tried making a simple flip book with a stack of post-its, it wasn't impossible but it was definitely time consuming. Also you can't take the post-its apart because the adhesive wont stick the same and it wont be aligned perfectly. Fun task but imagine having to make a flip book for an entire episode of a show. Tough work! we're fortunate today to have all these programs with plugins that make our life so much easier.

Disney Animations

So I was researching the techniques of the old Christmas animation classics like Rudolf the Red nosed Reindeer, Frosty the Snowman, and the Year Without a Santa Claus when I discovered a behind-the-scenes look at Disney's old animated classics.

The video above starts around the 2:00 minute mark but what really impressed me is that it took the animators and designers 4 years to draw, animate, and paint the scenes for Beauty and the Beast. The artists put pictures up on the wall of lions, gorillas, buffalo, and bears in order to inspire different parts of the Beast's image. They then created 3-D clay models in order to truly visualize the Beast in every dimension before drawing him in the 2-D frames. In the next video Don Hahn, the Producer of Beauty and The Beast, goes into detail of the hand-drawn animation process.

In order to make the filming of the hand drawn frames more dimensional, Walt Disney's MultiPlane camera was often used for the classics. But if we think of all the work that went into animating and then filming these Disney movies, the idea of creating a new animation with the computer graphics and animation techniques available is astounding. I often complain about how long it takes for an animation to render or how quickly time seems to go by when animating. But when I take a step back and look at the process of creating my favorite Disney Animated Movie, I realize that I would have started the project my Freshman year in college only to finish it during graduation.

Disney's Beauty and the Beast may have been taken from a long line of French folktales, but the animation process and finished product are something that I can't help but admire.

Waking Sleeping Beauty

I saw a trailer for a documentary called Waking Sleeping Beauty that centers on the history of Disney animation. The trailer shows how Disney animators went through a rough time but decided to make a comeback which resulted in some of Disney's greatest hits. The movie features well-known animators such as Walt Disney, John Lasseter, Tim Burton, and Jeffery Katzenberg. The website for the film has a lot of great archival photos and videos. It also has detailed biographies about some of the key animators from Disney's golden era.

I have been trying to see the movie for a while now but it hasn't had a wide release. It looks like an interesting insight into animation and the business behind it so if you get a chance to check it out, I definitely recommend you do!

A Tribute to Burny Mattinson

Mattinson is one of the few remaining Disney artists that worked with Walt Disney on the animation of Disney creations we know and love. He began his career working in the mailroom at Disney at the age of 18 with no formal art training. Soon he was working as an in-betweener on Lady and the Tramp and shortly after became an assistant animator on Sleeping Beauty. He worked on other movies such as 101 Dalmatians, The Sword and the Stone, The Jungle Book, The Aristocats and Robin Hood.

He got his big break however, as key animator of Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too.

 
Mattinson states that his biggest challenge on this project was to make Winnie and his friends exactly as they had in the previous two movies. This not only meant modeling them correctly, but giving them the characteristics, features, movements, and life that the characters had previously. I find this very interesting because you never think much about everything that goes into maintaining certain characters throughout multiple movies, but the minute something is off or doesn't feel right about a character audiences know really well, it can easily ruin the movie and you often wonder why the creators didn't do something to fix that.

After Pooh, Mattinson went on to direct Mickey's Christmas Carol in 1983 that was nominated for an Academy Award as well as write, produce, and direct The Great Mouse Detective (one of my favorite Disney movies) in 1984.

Interestingly enough however, Mattinson is primarily remembered for his work on the original Winnie the Pooh featurettes because he is the only crew member left to have worked with Walt Disney and the "Nine Old Men." In a sense, he has almost become the Pooh guru and as long as he is alive, I doubt the cartoon will be reopened again without him. This is fortunate because Winnie the Pooh is one of few childrens' stories that truly has become timeless, kids still love it now just as much as children did when the first movie was release in 1964.

Below, Mattinson addresses his work on Winnie the Pooh, how he feels about the other characters he created, and what it was like to work with Walt Disney


For more information on Mattinson, visit this website with an exclusive interview of Mattinson by Animated Views.