What is drawn-on-film animation? It is a type of animation that is commonly known as direct animation or animation without camera, it’s a technique where footage is produced by creating the images directly on a film strip. Where as other animations are produced by photograph frame by frame.
The techniques to this type of animation is two basic methods to produce directly on film. It starts with blank film strips and the other one with black that’s already been developed. The black film can then be scratched and etched in to to get the drawing the artists wants. All of the techniques can be combined together, an existing image may be distorted by chemical or mechanical ways. A third method is by going into a dark room and the artist places the objects on the new film strip and then using a small light beam to shine through the film and and it then starts to create the image.
The best artists that work on drawn on film animation are, Len Lye, Norman McLaren, Stan Brakhage and then Steven Woloshen. Their work covers over the abstract animation. Other animators in the 1960’s expanded the idea of this work and the film stock methood started to increase up until the point that the film was destroyed in the process of projection. Direct animation could be an inexpensive way to produce a film, and it can be done on outtakes or discarded film strips from previous or old projects, rather than using actual photographed animation and animating it that way, it’s a more expensive process than this one.
What is a Thaumatrope? A Thaumatrope is a toy that was popular in the victorian times, it is a disk of card with a picture on each side that is then attached to a piece of string, when the strings are twirled at a rapid speed the two pictures appear to be combined together into one singular image.
The most common images to be used on Thaumatropes are usually one side would have a bird and the other would have a cage, or a tree one side and the leaves on the other side. They were one of the most simple mechanisms used to create an animation, they are recognized as important antecedents of cinematography.
The invention of this is either credited to John Ayrton Paris or Peter Mark Roget and they based the idea of this invention on the ideas of an astronomer called John Herschel and the geologist William Henry Fitton.
Thaumatropes are simple two framed animations that are easy to make. Here is an example of a working one.
Kinetoscope. What is Kinetoscope? Kinetoscope is an early motion-picture device in which the images were viewed through a peephole. The kinetoscope was designed merely for films to be viewed one by one, by one individual people at a time through a peephole viewer at a window that is located on the top of the device. It was not a projector but they later introduced the basic approach that it would become the standard for all cinematic projections before the invention of video. It is caused by creating an illusion of movement by having a strip of perforated film that have a sequence of images on over a light source moving at a high speed shutter.
It was largely developed in 1888 by Thomas Edison and then developed by his worker William Kennedy Laurie Dickson between 1889 and 1892. Later, Dickson and his team at the Edison lab also devised the Kinetograph, a innovative motion picture camera with the rapid intermittent or stop-and-go film movement, to photograph movies for house experiments and later produce commercial Kinetoscope presentations. On May 20th 1891, it was the first public demonstration of a prototype version of a Kinetoscope, and it was given at the laboratory for approximately 150 members of a club. In the top of the box was a hole, roughly an inch in diameter and the hole they looked through they saw a picture of the man, It bowed and smiled and waved it’s hands and took of the hat, it was described to have been perfect and graceful. The man in the film was Dickson and it is approximately 3 seconds long and it’s now referred to as the Dickson Greeting.
The premiere of the completed version of the Kinetoscope was meant to be held at the Chicago World’s Fair, but it was rescheduled to be shown at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences on May 9th 1893. The first film that was ever publicly shown on the device was Blacksmith Scene, which was directed by Dickson and shot by Heise. It was produced at the new Edison moviemaking studio that was known as the Black Maria.
During the time of 1895, It was noticeable that the Kinetoscope was going to lose out on one end to projected motion pictures and, on the other to thew new Peep Show devices. The cheap, flip book-based Mutoscopes. They created a Projecting Kinetoscope that was published in 1914 and was vastly used worldwide. He introduced the home Projecting Kinetoscope which employed a unique format of three parallel columns of frames that went in sequences on one strip of film, The middle column ran through the machine in the reverse direction.
Later on as this idea didn’t work, they brought out the Super Kinetoscope.
What is Cel Animation? Cel animation, which is more commonly known as Traditional Animation is a type of animation technique where each frame is drawn by hand, The technique was the dominant form of animation in the cinema until the advent of computer animation.
The processes of Cel animation include:
Storyboards
Voice recording
Animatic
Design and timing
layout
animation
Digital ink and paint.
pencil tests
Traditional Ink-and-paint and camera.
Typically, Traditionally-animated productions just like any other forms of animation start of with a story board which is a script written in not a lot of detail and an image above, similar to a comic strip. The pictures remind the animation team how to plan things and what is next in the sequence to try and stick to a certain plan so that everyone knows what the story or animation is going to be about. It’s a rough starting point for all animations.
Next in the planning for an animation you have voice recording, before any final plans for animation begin the soundtrack or ‘scratch track’ is recorded, this makes it much easier so that the animators can sync up the soundtrack to the animation precisely. It is easier for the animators to have a pre-existing soundtrack. The completed cartoon or animation will be complete with music, sound effects and a dialogue performed by voice actors.
Pre-1930 sound animated cartoons were post-synced, this means that the sound track was recorded after the film was entirely animated and ready, and playing the sound effects and dialogue when needed, most commonly by a studio called Fleischer continued to post-sync their cartoons through most of 1930.
Usually the animatic story reel is made after the soundtrack is created, but before the full animation begins, an animatic is usually created and consists of pictures from the storyboard synchronized with the soundtrack. This lets the directors and animators work out any script issues and timing problems that may appear with the storyboard at it’s current state, this allows them to be able to apply changes before anything final has been done. If necessary they can create a whole new animatic and await review until the story board is up to their standard. The animation process is a long and expensive process so they need to make sure that the storyboard is perfected until they spend money and time on creating it.
Advertising companys usually employ the use of animatics to test run their adverts before they are made into full spots. Animatics are drawn art work with moving pieces, they usually are 2D and 3D with some sketches in, depending on whether they are live action or not depends on the amount of detailing that goes into it.
The cel is an important innovation to traditional animation as it lets some bits of each frame to be repeated from frame to frame which saves a lot of time.
In early cartoons before the usage of cel, such as Gertie the Dinosaur (1914), the entire frame including the background, characters and items were drawn on one sheet of paper, then photographed and Everything else had to be re-drawn for each frame after that had movements in them, It made the animation appear sharp and jittery but in some cases this was a particular art style. A frame was made by removing all of the blank parts and the objects were drawn before being placed on top of the backgrounds and finally photographed. The Cel animation process was invented by Earl Hurd and John Bray in 1915.
Cel overlay is a cel with inanimate objects that are used in animation to give the impression that there is a foreground on top of an already placed frame, this effectively creates the illusion of depth, but doesn’t create as much depth that a camera would produce. A special version of cel overlay is called line overlay and this is made to complete the background instead of the foreground and it was created to fix the sketchy appearance of xeroxed drawings. The background would be painted at first and shapes and flat colours would appear, it would have very little design detailing in it and then this is where you would add a cel with very detailed black lines and it was placed directly over the background layer. It gave shape to the background and gave it the complexity it needed, This visual style background will match the xeroxed character cels as the process overlay was left behind.
What is sand animation? Sand animation is also known as ‘Sand Art’ and it is a term that has two meanings, it is the name given to a style of live performance art and a type of animation. In which the artist creates a series of images using sand and a process which is achieved by applying sand to a surface and then rendering images by drawing lines and figures in the sand with their hand. A sand animator will generally use the help of an over head projector or a lightbox, similar to what a photographer will use to view translucent films. The animator will move sand on a backlighted or front lighted piece of glass to create each frame individually for the animated film.#
Animators may use different coloured sands to show depth and density to create their images and once the single frame is complete, the animator will capture it on a camera and then adjust the sand to be ready for the next frame in the sequence. The changes may sometimes be extremely subtle, such as the slight movement in the waves, or as drastic as completely changing the entire scene all together. The process is sort of similar to stop motion in the fact that the whole process is done frame by frame and manipulation of three dimensional and physical media in order to create the animation. The end result generally has the same sharp and uncoordinated movement that stop-motion animation has.
One contemporary artist that does sand art is a person called Kseniya Simonova, and she creates videos of her sand art such as her film called “Beautiful Morocco”.
Sand art is often used in the modern day in adverts, mostly coffee adverts as it fits in well with the product, sand animation is becoming a thing that people are now very interested in and is becoming popular within the industry.
Paint-on-glass Animation.
What is paint-on-glass animation? This type of animation style is a technique that is for making films by manipulating the slow-drying oil paints on sheets of glass. Gouache mixed with glycerine is sometimes used instead as an alternative but the most well known artist that uses this technique is a Russian animator called Aleksandr Petrov, he has used it in seven films all of which have won numerous awards.
An animation artist called Witold Giersz has created many films by using this technique, some of the films he has made are; Little Western (1960), Red and Black (1963) , Horse (1967) and The Stuntman (1972).
Aleksandr Petrov is an animator who mostly works with Oil-on-glass animation and has produced seven films using this technique. His artistic style is from the late 1980’s and onwards, it can be characterized as a type of Romantic Realism. The people, animals and landscapes are painted in a way that is animated in a realistic fashion but there are many times where in his films Petrov attempts to depict a characters inner thoughts and imaginations, In ‘The Old Man and the Sea’ the example is the fisherman dreams that he and the brothers are swimming through the sea and the sky, and in another film called My Love, the main characters illness was represented in him being shown buried beneath freshly fallen snow on a dark night to represent this.
What is Rotoscoping? Rotoscoping is where you transfer an image into another film sequence using a rotoscope, typically frame-by-frame.
Rotoscoping was invented by the animator Max Fleischer, who used this technique to animate life-like motions for Koko the Clown from the Out of the Inkwell and Betty Boop cartoons, as well as other characters from the Fleischer cartoons like Betty Boop hula dancing in “Bamboo Isle”, the dancing ghost Walrus from “Minnie the Moocher”, and the titular Old Man of the Mountain, he made some of these animations with his brother Dave Fleischer in the early 1930’s.
The Fleischer’s studio is one of the most effective use of Rotoscoping in their series of action themed superman cartoons.
The productions that helped produce Looney tunes and Merrie Melodies for Warner Bro’s were Leon Schlesinger Productions and they used Rotoscoping on numerous occasions to make these animations, some other productions who use Rotoscoping to make some of their animations are Walt Disney, who are one of the top animation productions that use some of these old techniques in their newer releases, some of their old productions like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs from 1937 use Rotoscoping, and it was mainly used to learn all about the human and animal movements, not for actual tracing around the animations. Rotoscoping was also extensively used in China, where they first featured a film called “Princess Iron Fan” (1941) and it was released under very difficult conditions during the Second Sino-Japanese War and World War II.
While Rotoscoping is generally known to bring an illusion of realism to a large budget film, the American animation company called Filmation, who are mostly remembered by low-cut limited TV Animation, started to heavily use the technique of Rotoscoping with good effects in series such as Flash Gordon, Blackstar and He-man and the Masters of the Universe.
Not only was Rotoscoping heavily used in animation for film productions and TV Series but it was also used quite a lot in video games like The Last Express, who was designed by Jordan Mechner, who has previously used a lot of this technique in other games such as Prince of Persia and Karateka, and in the modern day, it is used in games like The Walking Dead, it’s a unique video game style that isn’t used as much compared to what it is used in Film and TV productions.
The output of this can have a minor deviation from the lines that differ from frame-to-frame which is caused when the line shakes unnaturally in the animation sequence. Though, sometimes in certain animations the ‘boil’ technique is something that animators aim to do, and this takes a certain skill to internally achieve this as it is a stylistic technique, sometimes used to emphasise the surreal quality of rotoscoping. This was used in the music video “Take on Me”. The very first animated music video was created for a song called “Routine Day” for the band Klaatu and it was rotoscoped by Al Guest and Jean Mathieson. It involved overlapping and dissolving to give a surreal feel to it and feeding It to the ‘boiling’ pencil line. It was also used for a number of other music videos.
Although, Blue and Green screen techniques are still a big thing that is used very often for laying subjects in scenes and creating backgrounds, rotoscoping is still a large factor in the animation industry and is still used very widely in the visual effects of imagery and it has been allowed to be used for special visual effects, for example in the Star Wars films the lightsaber effect was created by a matte base on sticks held by the actors and the editors traced around each frame with the prop and enlarged and added a glow to achieve the effect of the lightsabers glowing. Digital Rotoscop artist is responsible for creating extremely detailed digital mattes, using 2D imagery and processing it using drawing tools. These Mattes are used with wire removals and background fixes, and blue screen extractions.
In the animation industry, there are still a lot of modern day animators who are constantly looking for artists to provide them with rotoscoping techniques, such as Prime Focus, Reliance Media works, Eveqube, Prana Studios, Tata Elxsi Studios and Rhythm n hues.
Here is my own example of what I made for Rotoscoping.
Louise Marie 