Apparently, Pixar is also having 2D animators help out on their films with draw-overs now. I've got a question though: if CG animation is supposedly the "superior" medium, why do studios always need 2D animators to improve their CG animation?
Tony Fucile, whose credits include Disney’s “The Lion King” and “Aladdin,” served as an animation sketch artist for the film. He was tasked with bringing the best of hand-drawn animation to the CG film. Fucile attended animation dailies and often provided his notes as actual draw-overs that could be captured and provided to the animator. “I worked with the animation team to juice up the poses a little bit,” says Fucile. “I like to push the poses or expressions a little further—rarely will I ever suggest to pull it back.”
“All of the Emotions are the most cartoony, most stylized characters that we’ve ever attempted in a feature film here at Pixar,” says supervising animator Victor Navone. “They are the kind of characters that might actually be easier to draw on paper—but they’re really hard to do in three dimensions. These characters are so special, so unique—we just wanted to hit a home run.”
Source:
http://www.thebeardedtrio.com/2015/06/p ... notes.html
When an animator shares a particular scene they are working on, story artist Tony Fucile with sometimes do “draw overs”. These help the animators address notes from the film’s director, Pete Docter. It is kinda of like using a piece of transparency film over the top of a piece of art. The notes and drawings are all there, but the original is still in tact — it is just all done digitally. It is really fun to see how minor changes like increasing the arch of eyebrows, or softening an expression can have such a big impact on a scene.
Source:
http://mommybunch.com/get-animated-with ... nside-out/
One way that changes are made (beyond verbal notes) is by Story Artist Tony Fucile who will do what’s called “draw overs” by using an overhead projector type unit, he is able draw over the image on the screen making visual notes for the animators, from tweaks in movements or adjustments in facial expressions. Fucile also had a special tool to assist him in his notes – a mirror. During the sessions he would place the mirror in a place where he would be able to see Pete Docter’s face and gestures, which would be quite animated, and use his mannerisms as reference.
Source:
http://www.wonderandcompany.com/inside- ... r-studios/
But for the interior scenes, with Joy, Sadness, Anger and the rest, the approach was completely different. For those, the great animator Tony Fucile – a key figure in the Disney Renaissance of the Nineties, and a lead artist on The Little Mermaid, Aladdin and The Lion King – sketched the characters entirely freehand, using the “rushes”, or basic, first-draft versions of scenes, as backdrops. Fucile’s drawings were then used to refine the characters’ expressions and movements – and for extra guidance, he also ran weekly seminars in which he picked apart classic Looney Tunes and MGM cartoons frame by frame, so that Pixar’s younger animators might better understand the form’s capacity for energy and play.
Officially, this makes Inside Out the first Pixar feature to use the art-form the studio almost accidentally extinguished, and the difference is as unmistakable as it is indefinable. Jonas Rivera, Inside Out’s producer and a seasoned Pixar-ite since the Toy Story days (he joined as the studio’s first intern), describes it as “that feel… that magic trick that loosens things up a little bit”.
Source:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/film/inside- ... interview/
Much inspiration came from classic mid-20th century animation: the work of Tex Avery and Chuck Jones, and classic Disney. "Seeing the early character designs," says animator Victor Navone, "I thought, 'Wow, that's much more cartoony and stylised than anything we've done before - we have to up our game." To do that, they went back to the drawing board, bringing in artist and animator Tony Fucile, who worked on Bugs Bunny and Tom and Jerry cartoons in the 80s and 90s, as well as The Little Mermaid, The Lion King and Ratatouille. "As our sketch artist, Tony gave us that level of hand-drawn design so we knew where to push it to," says Navone.
Fucile drew over the top of the computer-generated works in progress. "Pete was after a sense of draughtsmanship," says Rivera. "And Tony's an amazing hand-drawn animator. We knew we could make it feel physically correct but we wanted to go further than that, push the curves and stretch out the limbs, really have impact. So as Pete was directing the animators, Tony would draw right over the shot, and we hopefully retained some of that. In 101 Dalmatians and Robin Hood, where you feel the drawing... that's impossible to do in our medium, because it's a [computer] model, but drawing over it helped loosen it."
Source:
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/201 ... inside-out
Q: Tony Fucile was much involved in this movie. What did he bring to your department, as he was a noted 2D animator?
Victor Navone: We call Tony a “triple threat,” because he can do storyboarding, character design, and animation, and do them all really well. He was a savior on this film, and really helped us push the quality of our animation further than ever. He brought a hand-drawn aesthetic to our animation that we had been craving, and we all felt like we were in school again when we would see his drawings on our shots. Once or twice a month we would have “Tony Time,” where the animators would join him in a screening room and he would go over someone’s shot live, or analyze a piece of classic 2D animation. It was very inspiring! I rarely asked Tony to help me plan a shot, but once I had some blocking I was always asking him how to improve it. Tony is very timid about offering his own ideas, but is great at pushing others’ ideas to be clearer and more entertaining. You had to really twist his arm to get him to suggest a new idea. I would often ask him, “how would you animate this, Tony?!”
Source:
http://animatedviews.com/2015/inside-an ... ones-mind/
Q: Can you tell me about Tony [Fucile]’s position? You mentioned that that’s a new one during the presentation. Did he just come on for Inside Out or is that a permanent position you guys would like to incorporate when making future films?
Shawn Krause: It kind of came about because we were talking about movies we loved and one of them was Tangled, and there was a level of appeal they got to on that film. Glen Keane was the co-director on that, and he would draw over all these drawings. I think he said he even did more drawings on that film than he did on Tarzan, which is crazy. So as we were thinking, ‘how are were gonna get that level’ – not that we couldn’t already with our team – but how are we going to ensure this? We were thinking, well, there’s a level of 2D history that Glen had that we’d love to be able to reinforce at this studio. Tony was around and he was already helping out on the film …
Victor Navone: Although Tony came back to the studio. He was on break doing children’s books, but when he found out about this film, he really wanted to work on it. And he also worked in story and art, and we were lucky enough to be able to grab him for animation as soon as he was done in story and art, and it just worked out beautifully. But it’s the first time we’ve had the full time role for that, like you said, and although it won’t always be him, I think it’s gonna be something we have on all our films from here out.
Shawn Krause: And while we already incorporate as many of the principles of animation as we can, the way you think about animation in 2D – spacing of every frame – a lot of things are automated once we set key poses down. It sort of forces creative decisions beyond what’s given to us, and it’s challenging sometimes. So Tony brought that graphic style, brought that 2D sensibility and filled in the holes where maybe we can improve. And someone with his pedigree to come in, with his history and his respect, no one questioned it.
Victor Navone: Because Tony worked on Iron Giant, he worked on Lion King, Little Mermaid. He’s a wonderful 2D animator.
Shawn Krause: Family Dog.
Q: Is that one of the first people you’ve seen that’s come in with a 2D mindset?
Victor Navone: No, actually. We’ve hired plenty of animators with 2D backgrounds. In fact, we’ve even hired animators who never touched the computer before they got here.
Shawn Krause: Originally, most of us back 20 years ago, were trained 2D first and then you’d learn the computer.
Victor Navone: It’s a lot easier to teach someone how to use a computer than it is to teach someone how to be an artist, so we figured if they can animate with a pencil, we can teach them how to animate with a computer.
Source:
http://collider.com/inside-out-supervis ... interview/
Pete Docter talks about 2D animation and admits that Disney has given up on the medium.
Q: Then I was reading about the work Tony Fucile did on the project, serving as an animation sketch artist and bringing hand-drawn animation to the film. The industry has obviously gone away from hand-drawn, so how do you see the marriage of those two and what are the limitations of one versus the other that, in this case keeps hand-drawn animation alive even if the audience might not know it.
Pete Docter: As we came up with this idea I began thinking about how caricature, like if you look at Al Hirschfeld or any of these caricature artists, if they're really good they can sometimes make a person look more like them than a photograph because they're distilling out anything nonessential to that likeness., they're focusing in on the big nose or whatever it is. Movement, I think, can do that as well and animation can really embody that.
[We at Pixar], from our history, approached things almost scientifically. Of course we all came from hand-drawn, but I think on Toy Story, just for example, as we were building Buzz's face or some of the humans, we looked at musculature, human musculature, just to understand how the sub-orbital and the smile muscle connects here, and pulls that way, etc. So we were thinking pretty realistically. On this film, because it was about emotions, we thought, "Man, we can throw the ball the other way. We can go look at all the great stuff we grew up on -- Tex Avery and Chuck Jones." So, Tony is such a great artist, he has an instinctive sense, sometimes when you're drawing I don't think you can fully explain why you're doing something, it just kind of comes out of the pencil, and only later can you say, "Of course, I'm breaking the elbow in a way that it couldn't just to emphasize the stretch or the intention of the pose."
So he would draw over almost every scene, breaking down key poses and push things further, especially in the emotions.
Jonas Rivera: Yeah, we have a Cintiq that you can draw on as the shot is looping and people can pause it on a frame and start talking and Tony would start drawing over it. You can just see it --
Pete Docter: --getting stronger, yeah.
Q: So that obviously influences the CG animation.
Pete Docter: Yeah, so the animators then take those drawings back to their desk and even though it wouldn't instinctively occur to them to dislocate the shoulder, they can do that just to get the necessary stretch, to really exaggerate things.
Q: So would this movie work as a 2D, hand-drawn animated feature?
Pete Docter: Yeah, I think it could.
Q: So why have we lost that? Is it a matter of audiences are just used to the new thing now and they wouldn't show up to watch a hand-drawn feature?
Jonas Rivera: Character animation-wise, the movie would work beautifully in 2D, but one of the things I like is we've got these dimensional screens and memories in space that I really think benefit from CG. Having applied space, I love having that screen and that shot-within-a-shot. I think in 2D that might not be as lush.
Pete Docter: Yeah, that's true, but the idea would still be there and there would probably be other advantages to 2D that we didn't even get in 3D, but you're right there is a dimensionality, a lushness and textural things that you don't get in 2D.
Source:
http://www.ropeofsilicon.com/inside-pix ... -docter/2/
Q: I know you're a fan of Japan's animation powerhouse Studio Ghibli and its co-founder Hayao Miyazaki, who retired relatively recently. Do you think there will still be room – or a desire for – old-school, hand-drawn cel animation of that sort in the future? Or will a generation that has grown up with mainly digital animation at their local cineplex find that too old-school, or not "realistic" enough?
Pete Docter: Oh, man, I hope not. I love it. But I have no idea. For me, personally, it still speaks loud and clear. There's something about that fact that a person made these marks that express so much. In [the Studio Ghibli film] The Tale of Princess Kaguya there's this scene where she runs away and there's just this, wow, element of "I can just feel that." It's so good! And I don't know that we can ever get that with CG. I mean, we can do other things better than hand-drawing can do, but there are definitely things that hand-drawing can do better than CG. I gotta say that when I talk to young artists, there are a lot that say, and now more than ever, that they're really into anime and love what it brings to their lives for whatever reason. So I hope that [hand-drawn animation] is going to stay around in some way. But who knows? Fifteen years ago, I would have said that the 2-D animation that Disney was doing would have stayed around, too. It hasn't, but maybe it'll come back.
Source:
http://www.austinchronicle.com/screens/ ... e-message/
