DISNEY DIDN'T TRACE the live-action frames into the animation.
You need to know
THE TRUTH ABOUT DISNEY ROTOSCOPING.
I know there's another thread for it, but I am answering the people's comments in here directly. Especially
sotiris,
Divinity, and
Flanger-Hanger. It's necessary. It's important.
sotiris2006 wrote:Disney from the beginning of animated features films has used extensive rotoscoping and i
don't just mean live-action reference footage.
Rotoscoping
From Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotoscoping
1) "Walt Disney and his animators employed it carefully and very effectively in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937.
Rotoscoping was also used in many of Disney's subsequent animated feature films with human characters, such as Cinderella in 1950. Later, when Disney animation became more stylized (e.g. One Hundred and One Dalmatians, 1961), the rotoscope was used mainly for studying human and animal motion, rather than actual tracing"
2) "Peter Pan: Bobby Driscoll as Peter Pan, where his performance was filmed, and then rotoscoped for the animated character"
From the book "Hippo in a Tutu"
http://jimhillmedia.com/blogs/jim_hilll ... eview.aspx
1) "Of course, when it came to "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," Disney did have a secret weapon: 14 year-old Majorie Belcher. Starting in 1934, this professionally trained dancer appeared in dozens of 16 mm films that the Studios artists then blew up into photostats. Which were then traced so that the movement of this film's title character would be that much more life-like, would come across as that much more believably human".
2) "Marge may been the first dancer to toil in secret for Disney (Says Belcher: 'I was sworn to secrecy about all that I did ... The words rotoscoping and tracing ... were forbidden')".
First off, you cited freakin' Wikipedia. It's untrue. Or rather, they are not using the correct word, and don't know what rotoscoping is.
Second, and more importantly, as it's from a book source, I saw that Jim Hill article a way back. I read all that. And here's what you did not think of:
They say they made photostats. That were traced. Guess what? That's it. They did not trace the pictures onto the animation paper they used for the characters. They may have traced the images onto
some animation paper, to see how it moved, but they did not trace them onto the animation paper used for the final character animation. They instead
looked at their tracings
for reference.
From another book, not some quotes from a book on the internet, but from the book I own, "The Art of Walt Disney", it says: "Years earlier, Max Fleischer had devised a method of filming live actors and using the results as a guide for his animators. This system, known as rotoscoping, yielded gestures and mannerisms that could never be invented."
I beg to posit that you can imagine or invent anything, but Marc Davis did say live-action reference helped with things "you can't pull out of your head", like exactly how a real person would walk or move.
My book continues, "Now actors were brought to Hyperion Avenue (the performer cast as Snow White went on to achieve fame as the dancer Marge Champion), and they would act out a piece of "business" in front of the cameras - often under the direction of the animators themselves. This action would then be transferred to a series of photostats which the animator could use
for reference. The artist could, in fact, have simply traced the figures from the photostats, but this was seldom done because the characters had to be adapted in order to be consistent with the remainder of the animation. Instead, a kind of gentle caricature was employed, so that gestures and poses became slightly exaggerated. This system served the animators well, and they continued to use it in later movies."
In an interview with Grim Natwick:
DJ: I know you've talked a lot in the past about how you didn't like to use the rotoscope, but didn't the rotoscope help with the timing, for instance?'
Grim Natwick: Well, we changed it often. We never went in and told Walt we were doing it.(Here he talks about the one hundred and one rotoscoped images of one particular scene from Snow White and how he used the first and last ones but everything in between was done free-hand, without the rotoscope [the scene, Snow White running down the stairs after hearing the pot boiling over, was partly cut in the final version.]. He never told this to Walt, who upon seeing it, is said to have stated: "That's just what I want!") And we took liberties. Walt never said, "Don't do this", but if it didn't work, you got the scene back and re-animated it.
That's from:
http://www.animationartist.com/InsideAn ... twick3.htm
I swear I remember reading about one scene where Snow White walked up the stairs and the animator felt bad because he had to rotoscope it, but here's two things: rotoscoping could have just been what he called heavy live-action referencing, and the other thing is the interview at least proves that at least some of Snow White, even the very human title character, was free-handed, and not rotoscoped in any way at all.
You should probably read what
merlinjones was told by animators about rotoscoping, how it was just live-action reference, tracing onto photstats, but not actually putting any of the tracings in the animation.
At:
http://www.ultimatedisney.com/forum/vie ... 33810ae5eb
And I'll tell you why it is impossible for Disney to have literally directly traced the live-action into the animation paper and also drew them in the cartoony designs and movements you see in the film.
You can't trace two things at once. In other words, pay careful attention to this, but you can't trace a new cartoony design over the next live-action film frame, because then the previous cartoony-designed tracing would not match up. Snow White's eyes or anything else would not be in the same exact place, it would look terrible, shaky, wrong, just bad, and you would also know something was up.
So you would need to either have the characters be extremely close to the live-action frames and look bad (probably how Gulliver and Anastasia were), or you merely make some tracings of key poses and look at them for reference.
Didn't Marc Davis say, on the Sleeping Beauty release, I forget which one, that he was always angry that people thought they traced the live-action right into the animation paper, and he tried whenever he could to let them know they never did?
FINALLY, I leave you with this from Marc Davis: "Cinderella's movements were never tracings of the live model because if you trace a photographic image with a flat line, the image becomes wide and gross. Live action is useful as a pattern to help you in the difficult things that you can't pull out of your head."
Yea. Your welcome, Disney animators, for me trying to prevent lies from being spread about your animation.
sotiris2006 wrote:UmbrellaFish wrote:However, Anastasia is obviously HEAVILY rotoscopped. As far as I know, Snow White was rotoscopped in only one scene.
Actually they've used it in every scene that features a human character besides the dwarfs.
Uh, NO, as I just proved. Especially with what Grim Natwick said.
sotiris2006 wrote:[You could buy the book, I'm sure it will give you an insight on the subject. The reason that there is not so much info about Disney rotoscoping out there is because of Disney's efforts to disclose the matter.
OMG, you're wrong again? Wow! I actually
own books that dispel the lies you're spreading? Wow! And as I said, people did believe Disney rotoscoped. Marc Davis, and other animators I'm sure, tried all they could to explain they never rotoscoped in the "tracing live-action into the animation" sense, and to explain what they really did. The reason there's not much info about is because they really never did rotoscope, and when they tried to say they didn't and explain what they really did, no one listened, or got it. You shouldn't be one of them, either.
If you think I'm being rude or using strong language, guess what, it's because I'm pissed at you spreading wrong, negative information!
It's a nice poster although Tiana looks off model here.
AMAZING!!!!
