The evolution of Disney movies

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Rumpelstiltskin
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The evolution of Disney movies

Post by Rumpelstiltskin »

Not sure what the future of Disney feature animation will be these days, so why not look back and see the changes the movies have gone through? In Walt Disney's days he tried to break new ground with movies like Snow White, Fantasia and Bambi. During the war and the years after the war not so much was done because of financial restrictions and other limitations. A new way for live action characters to interact with an animated world was invented, and a lot of effect animation was used in Sleeping Beauty, and of course the Xerox process was used in 101 Dalmatioans. But not much beyond that.

After that the movies reached some status quo. I'm not referring to the skills and stories, which were still entertaining. I don't think any children will complain if you show them Robin Hood, The Aristocats or The Sword in the Stone. With The Rescuers, the previoulsy black Xerox lines was softened up a bit. I think color xerography was introduced a few years later, and by the time of The Little Mermaid, Floyd Norman mentioned something about how they were finally getting close to perfection the Xerox process, and then they abandoned it.

But in the 70's and 80s, not much happened before Don Bluth left Disney, hoping to make animation return to its glory days:


https://www.questia.com/magazine/1P3-12 ... of-n-i-m-h
Techniques used on THE Secret of NIMH which have not been used extensively in recent animated features include split exposures to create shadows and translucency, diffusion in conjunction with split exposures to create reflections, color Xerography for the creation of cels and painstaking color orchestration.

Newer techniques include the use of video animation for testing and backlight. The use of multiple exposure techniques is probably the best indication of the time and effort taken with the film. The average number of passes through the camera for a scene in the film was probably four (in comparison with a more common average of two on other contemporary animated features) and some scenes required as many as twelve passes. Similar efforts were made in every phase of production.

The main requirements which could not be met by existing cameras were the capability of multiplane photography and a rotating camera head. Some animation stands include a rotating bed which can accomplish the same effect as a rotating camera head (i.e. making an image spin around), but working with a rotating bed is a great deal more awkward since the operator must follow the bed around as it rotates. There were no cameras capable of doing multiplane work anywhere outside of Disney studios. While the camera designed for Bluth is not as large and complex as the multiplane at Disney, it is capable of shooting on two planes and is operated electronically instead of manually.
https://uncannymagazine.com/article/the-secret-of-nimh/
Developing and building the cameras took a full a year and a half. And, he wanted his film to offer something new. For that, he and his team turned to special effects and lighting, something Disney had stopped experimenting with after Fantasia. Bluth was not quite ambitious enough to try underwater sequences, but he did want to make things glow and explode.

The big trick here was accomplished by Dorse A. Lampher, who had the multiplane camera shoot images through backlit color gels—giving the illusion that the film colors were actually glowing, with a radiance that had not been seen in animation since Fantasia. Lampher and the others at Don Bluth Productions were so excited by the results, they decided the film needed a glowing magical amulet. The original book has nothing about magical amulets, let alone magical amulets capable of lifting concrete blocks when triggered by mice with pure hearts, and trying to squeeze one in proved rather awkward, but not only was this a relatively logical follow-up to the influential Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back, the glowing amulet allowed animators to show off different multiplane camera effects and backlit animation. At the very least, it got investors for the film interested enough to cough up extra money—rather useful, given the added costs for these special effects.

Apart from forcing a change in the plot, the astonishing light effects had one other disadvantage, though: the focus on light made animating shadows a particular nightmare. Eventually, the artists carefully animated individual shadows for each character, working with light effects in their studio to ensure that each shadow was at the correct length and angle. To this, Bluth added split exposures to create more shadowy and translucent effects. The result: arguably the greatest advancements in animation since the development of the xerography process for One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961). Bluth had accomplished his goal of restoring innovation to animation.

But after NIMH, how many animated features were made in the tradition of the old Disney classics from the golden age, which used old school and new tools and techniques? What Disney is concerned, only two; The Black Cauldron and The Little Mermaid (imagine if they had made The Little Broomstick, like Woolie Reitherman intended, instead of The Black Cauldron). They used both new and old techniques that hadn't been used in decades. Meanwhile, Disney was also experimenting with digital effects. And after the Little Mermaid, analog effects were replaced by digital tools. According to Alvy Ray Smith, the new leaders at Disney animation once Miller had to step down, Eisner, Wells and Katzenberg, they visited Pixar shortly after asking for the digital ink and paint program that a few years later would become CAPS. And it seems like it was The Great Mouse Detective which to a large degree started the digital revolution:

http://michaelperaza.blogspot.no/2010/0 ... art-2.html
Dave English and I met while I was creating some multiplane shots using his Academy Award winning computerized rig called ACES for Epcot and Walt Disney World. Unlike the old multiplane, we could repeat camera moves using the computer system which gave us more flexibility with layering. It was also set up like our old horizontal multiplane as opposed to the vertical one which gave us more room for trucking into the scenes. With his rig I created visuals that were later combined with audio-animatronic figures for the parks. I told him about Basil and my hopes for a computer sequence and he introduced me to a fellow at WED, Lem Davis. I would go over after hours (without permission) and we put together plot drawings of computer graphic settings for the gears turning and the chess board sequence. I chose those two setups because they were made up of simple (or so I thought) geometric shapes that we could easily reproduce in the new digital format. In those days, the computer systems didn't use a mouse and everything was input using a keyboard. Yeah, not easy. For the gears I had to get mechanical drawing made over in the machine shop on the backlot that would then be input point by point into the system. Did I mention that the system liked to crash? It did, frequently especially with the heat those machines built up. I took the colored line plots and sent them to our camera department to be shot with my animation poses exposed on top. After seeing the clips, John and Ron were enthusiastic over the possibilities. However the producer felt it might not fit into the look and it was dropped. Now I didn't agree with the decision but you have to understand that at the time it was a radical new concept and if not handled properly could indeed have stopped the visual flow so I understood his point of view.

I pinned the pastels and charcoals I had done next to the plotted line drawings and they were forgotten, for a while. At least until a visitor came in one afternoon, Roy Disney. He was showing Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg around the studio and came in to see what was up in our wing. During the tour, Roy was looking over my corner intensely and smiled, "Glad to see we're putting some computer images into the mix." After they left, I was given the go ahead to put the computer graphics into production. I remember John Musker's grin as he left the room was almost as big as mine.

The Black Cauldron was as we know supposed to be a modern Snow White, and was so ambitious that 70mm film was used and the APT-technique was invented (and then never used again). A new sound library was created (the old one had a short return in The Great Mouse Detective I think), and it was also the last animated Disney feature that used original Disney animation paint. After that they switched to commercial paint.

One of the reasons Disney animation was if not dying, than at least slumbering, was the the modern blockbuster was still not invented. Apparently that happened with Jaws (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018 ... expendable). But an animated feature that was a blockbuster? That hadn't happened for a long time. Once a new Disney animated feature was pulled from the theatres, it would not make much more profit to speak of. And except from Winnie the Pooh, you wouldn't find any of the characters in Disneyland either (even if I'm not sure when and to what degree he and his friends appeared in Disneyland). And there were no spinoffs, sequels, reboots, or remakes, again except for a couple of Winnie the Pooh shorts.

In the 80s, Disney animation changed not just because of the new generation of artists, but partly because of Ron Miller who wanted to try something different, and because of focus on industries like merchandise such as toys, T-shirts and other collectables (triggered by Star Wars), and new phenomena like VHS rentals and eventually VHS sales.

http://michaelperaza.blogspot.no/2010/0 ... art-3.html
Speaking of Ron Miller, Joe and I were both disappointed that so called "film historians" tend to sweep much of his innovative accomplishments under the rug or just give credit to Eisner's regime albeit they also produced some great results. I wonder how many readers realize that Miller's rein was responsible for the creation of The Disney Channel, Buena Vista Home Entertainment, actual construction of Walt's dream of EPCOT, funded Disney's FIRST Broadway show, gave Tim Burton his break as well as many of the future wonderkids of animation, acquired "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" and put it into development, Tokyo Disneyland, initiated Disney's first attempts at computer animation with projects like "Tron", started the Touchstone label for films HE produced like "Splash" and many more achievements.

When Disney became the target of corporate raiders like Saul Steinberg, certain shareholders criticized Miller's leadership even though he had done wonders since becoming president of Walt Disney Productions just recently in 1980 and then CEO in 1983. Unfortunately just as Miller was truly waking the Sleeping Beauty, he was ousted. Keep in mind that I'm not saying he was perfect or that he was Walt but then again has anyone truly filled that void? I am saying that he was trying to do a good job with the company and I believe that for the most part he did exactly that. Not to take anything away from Eisner and what his troupe accomplished but they certainly reaped many rewards from the foundation set by Miller's team.

Thank goodness Michael Eisner rewarded Roy Disney's support with control of Disney animation when other new management staff originally wanted nothing to do with that division and some would just as soon see it shut down and weren't shy about letting that be known. Ironically in 2004, and by now fed up with Michael Eisner's leadership, Roy would spearhead the "Save Disney" rally which led to the ouster of Eisner a year later. I can only guess at the wonders we might have have witnessed if Ron and Roy could have remained united and taken Disney into the future together.

Black Cauldron was our 25th Full-Length Animated Feature and I guess I just wanted to be a part of another icon that would draw lines of folks wanting to experience the magic of a new Disney classic.

The grand Disney experiment called "The Black Cauldron" that we all faced together was definitely worth the effort in the long run. The intense sometimes painful labors and likewise sparkling discoveries we made while working on this feature made us all a bit more ready when we soon tried our hands on new animated undertakings like "Basil of Baker Street." That delightful Victoria era film in turn eventually made it possible to go on and make what would someday be hailed as the beginning of the Disney renaissance, a fantasy fish tale or perhaps fish tail called "The Little Mermaid."
http://www.denofgeek.com/uk/movies/disn ... 0s-and-80s
Miller repeatedly clashed with other executives over the company's future - not least Esmond Cardon Walker, Disney's CEO. Miller had long wanted to make more adult movies at Disney; Walker hated the idea, arguing that it would tarnish the company's public image. Nevertheless, the release of Star Wars appeared to serve as a tipping point behind the scenes, because, by 1979, Miller was talking openly about a creative shake-up at the House of Mouse.

With The Black Hole, Disney - or at any rate, Ron Miller - was actively courting a more edgy kind of movie. Long before the film was even finished, let alone submitted to the MPAA, cast and crew alike were talking about how different The Black Hole would be from previous Disney films.

As producer, Ron Miller pressed on with his interest in pursuing darker projects at Disney as the 80s dawned. Based on a novel by Florence Engell Randall, The Watcher In The Woods took the plunge into pure gothic horror, with an American family moving to a British manor house which plays host to a malign presence.

The horror tones of The Black Hole and The Watcher In The Woods continued into Dragonslayer, a moody fantasy featuring some stunning animated sequences from Phil Tippett. Dragonslayer was the second joint venture between Disney and Paramount, who'd previously joined forces on Robert Altman's expensive Popeye, and the result was a surprisingly gritty tale of man versus giant serpent. If Disney had received letters objecting to the swear words in The Black Hole, we can only imagine what they'd have thought about Dragonslayer's scenes of death and sacrifice.

The other live-action movies from Disney's early-80s period were a similarly mixed bag in terms of reception, but they were certainly different in style and approach from the fare it was producing a decade earlier.

Even Tron, which on paper was another family-friendly action adventure, was bold in its approach.

Arguably the most successful live-action film from the era - at least in creative terms - came in 1983: Something Wicked This Way Comes, based on the novel by Ray Bradbury.

The last vestiges of darkness clung to Disney until the middle of the 80s, as two long-in-gestation projects finally made it to the screen. The Black Cauldron, a fantasy adventure based on a series of stories by Lloyd Alexander, had been in production since the late 1970s, and subjected to a series of delays; directors and animators came and went, and when the film was finally completed in 1984, its budget had soared to an extraordinary $44m.

Likewise Return To Oz, Walter Murch's unexpectedly stark follow-up to The Wizard Of Oz.

Disney's long journey back to a major powerhouse began in the late 80s, as the live-action adventure Honey, I Shrunk The Kids and animated classic The Little Mermaid went on to astonishing success.

As Ron Miller explained back in the late 70s, "The last thing I want to do is go back to the formula Disney Picture. I want them to say, 'Hey, look, Disney isn't that predictable...'"
When Eisner replaced Miller, he might have played it safe at first, but even Eisner would eventually start give movies that didn't follow a standard formula a chance. Emperor's New Groove is one of Disney's most surreal features, and sometimes feel like a Looney Tunes cartoon. The Hunchback of Notre-Dame is different from most of Disney's animated features in that the villain is showing a clear sexual insterest in a girl. Fantasia 2000 use the same concept as the original Fantasia, but is still a luxury most studios couldn't allow themselves to test. Atlantis used a very different animation style, and Treasure Planet probably used a lot more CGI than any other animated Disney films to date (Dinosaur was as mentioned elsewhere not originally part of the canon, and either way used live action backgrounds). Chicken Little and Meet the Robinsons may not be Disney's greatest hits, but they tried something new. One is about combining science fiction with an old well-known story, the other is about time travels and the future. Also Lilo & Stitch stands out in animation style:

http://www.indiewire.com/2013/03/interv ... re-100330/
Sanders is one of the more interesting figures in modern animation. After working his way up as a story artist and designer at Walt Disney Feature Animation on things like “Mulan,” he co-wrote and directed “Lilo & Stitch” for the studio, a kind of under-the-radar project that few higher-ups at the company even knew was being produced. (It was animated entirely at the now defunct Florida animation studio, using such offbeat stylistic flourishes as hand-painted watercolor backgrounds.)
As mentioned in other threads, American Dog would have been a weird road movie with a dog superstar, one-eyed cat and a giant radioactive rabbit. And Rapunzel/Tangled, which was first a more humorous story about a pizza delivery guy becoming a knight and lots of other transformations, eventually turned into a much more traditional story that Lasseter found too dark:


http://www.indiewire.com/2017/11/john-l ... 201900142/
The turning point at Disney, though, was “Tangled” (2010), a troubled project that began as “Rapunzel” from animator-turned director Glen Keane. It was a dark and unwieldy fairy tale update, blending photoreal and painterly animation styles. But Lasseter never gave up and found a way of tweaking “Tangled” as a fresh and funny fairy tale/rom com under the direction of Nathan Greno and Byron Howard.
After Iger took over, they played it more safe again:

https://www.flickeringmyth.com/2018/03/ ... e-fiction/
When Bob Iger replaced Eisner, he immediately stopped the experimentation that occurred during early-2000s and played it safe with a series of calculated buyouts: Pixar; Marvel; Lucasfilm; and now 20th Century Fox. Iger understood that people judge Disney on its cinematic output even if it accounts for a tiny amount of the company’s turnover. After the Pixar purchase John Lasseter was placed in charge of all of Disney Animated assets and, before he went on a six-months leave for “unwarranted hugs”, he guided the Walt Disney Animation Studios into the Disney Revival by reverting back to the formula. Like the Disney Renaissance, Frozen, Moana and Zootropolis stick to the successful formula and take modernisation one step further. The results have been spectacular: Frozen and Zootropolis have both grossed more than $1 billion. Lucasfilm has fired directors who strayed too far from the Star Wars mould. At Marvel, many directors, most famously Edgar Wright, left because they struggled to match their vision with Marvel’s house style.
Wreck-It Ralph and Big Hero 6 are also unusual concept for Disney, especially the latter, even if they follow standard formulas. Lasseter is aiming for the emotions:

https://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/04/movies/04hols.html
Mr. Lasseter talks a lot about making audiences cry. “John will go straight to as much emotion as possible,” said Lee Unkrich, the director of the recently announced “Toy Story 3” from Pixar. “It can become sappy.”

“I am, by nature, an honest person,” Mr. Lasseter said. “I wear my emotions on my sleeve. There is no ‘behind closed doors’ with me. It’s the nature of Hollywood that there are the people in power and the people who tell them what they want them to hear. We choose to be honest and open.”
When will the studio start take bigger risks again? It doesn't have to be big budget projects like Treasure Planet. Lilo & Stitch wasn't that expensive to make, and did pretty good at the box office.

We never saw the painterly style Glen Keane wanted to use for Rapunzel. So why not making a movie with that approach? He has also said that traditional animation looks the way it looks because of its limitations (even with a multiplane camera, you didn't have that many options; zoom in or out, move up or down, to the left or to the right). Instead of finding out what traditional animation can do for computer animation, he also wants to find out what computers can do for traditional animation, and has claimed that computers will set hand-drawn animation free. It would have been interesting to see such a project. Paperman experimented with it, and probably Keane's Duet as well (And if Disney won't do it, what about Netflix, or Jeff Bezos, who just used his money to save The Expanse? Maybe he is an animation fan too. Or someone else, like Richard Branson).

CGI can do much, but using Lilo & Stitch as an example again, this animation style would not work properly as CGI. You could obvioulsy use the plot to make a computer animated movie, but it would have to be a different animation design.

At what point can you just as well make the characters CGI as well as everything else around them? Walt Disney tried hard to create depth and dimensions in his movies. In computer animation, this is now so common that everybody takes it for granted. So how far should a hand-drawn movie go in trying to achieve what is so easily done in computer animation? And how much should they focus on effects like light directions and shadowing?

Andreas Deja's comment about making The Princess and the Frog, and the older Disney movies:
I always thought that maybe we should distinguish ourselves to go back to what 2D is good at, which is focusing on what the line can do rather than volume, which is a CG kind of thing. So we are doing less extravagant Treasure Planet kind of treatments. You have to create a world but [we're doing it more simply]. What we're trying to do with Princess and the Frog is hook up with things that the old guys did earlier. It's not going to be graphic…. All those things that were non-graphic, which means go easy on the straight lines and have one volume flow into the other—an organic feel to the drawing.
Making a movie that way could work good as well, and would have been cheaper too. It is true that hand-drawn at one point was more expensive than computer animation. But that was when so much effort and resources went into traditionally animated movies like The Lion King, and Toy Story was just an experimental movie that required a much smaller crew. These days it is usually the other way around, and the budget for CGI movies are much higher. Must confess that I don't always see the point with all the realism. In Finding Dory we have cartoony characters swimming amongst photorealistic seaweed.
After having used some CGI in a couple of his movies, Hayao Miyazaki then made Ponyo as a fully hand-drawn feature. And it do have a special feel to it.

While there is no animation police that will knock on your door and give you a fine for breaking a law about having too much CGI in hand-drawn animation, one has to wonder about where one should draw the line. At what point does an animated movie contain so much CGI that one could just as will do the whole thing as CGI, including the characters? There are movies with CGI backgrounds, and CGI objects (cars, buildings, trains, furniture and so on), and a mix of the two styles (like John Silver's robotic arm in Treasure Planet), and by having some character be drawn by hand and others CGI (like the robot in The Iron Giant). There is probably no clear answer to that, instead it is about how integrated the whole thing feel. But if Treasure Planet was remade as a completely computer animated movie today, and otherwise using the same designs and style, how different would it be from the original?

No matter where animation is going in the future, the computer animation will continue to evolve. If they also takes risks regarding plot and story, and try to avoid the standard formulas now and then, and maybe even try to push traditional animation forward, there could be much to look forward to.
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Re: The evolution of Disney movies

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Great post!! I think if one of the smaller studios has a blockbuster hit with a hand-drawn film, maybe Disney will maybe take another look at doing a hand-drawn film...maybe. I mean, or they can continue having other studios animate the portions in live-action films (Disenchanted, Mary Poppins Returns), and people will still praise Disney for keeping to their roots.

We have to keep in mind that there will be new people in charge, with maybe Lasseter leaving, Iger retiring...D23's YouTube channel posted a Glen Keane drawing Tarzan video yesterday...I like to think that, given the chance, some future higher-ups will embrace the artistic merit of having movies with different visual styles/mediums.
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Re: The evolution of Disney movies

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Yes, that could perhaps inspire them to take another chance. There is so much in hand-drawn animation that doesn't exist in computer animation, and it is important that the world of animation doesn't forget how to make these movies. At least it seems to be doing well in Japan. Even if The Thief and the Cobbler was never fully completed, it shows what is possible with this form of animation.

Iger wanted to leave earlier, but has promised to remain at Disney a few more years, or at least till the Disney-Fox deal is signed, assuming Comcast doesn't mess it up. But when his contract goes out next time, he will not sign another one.

Should Lasseter not return because of his harassment, new blood at the studio would just be an extra bonus.
Home on the Range is perhaps not one of Disney's biggest hits, but at least its main intention is to entertain, and doesn't pretend to be anything else. A project like that would be unthinkable in the Lasseter era. If the movie had been made today, the usual standard ingredients would have been added. It would have been a story about friendship, bonding and a place to belong, the cows would stare wide-eyed at the wild and untamed praire landscape for the first time, saying "woooow". They would meet an eccentric prairie dog or something (or a whole colony of them, demonstrating a funny collective behavior where everybody repeats everybody else), and a wise old bison who share some of his life wisdom with them (something obvious that we have already heard different versions of a dozen times before), and in the end, they have new insight in life and everything returns to normal, only a little better than before because of everything they have learned.

Just too bad not more experimentation was done before the introduction of computers. Like the physical car models used in 101 Dalmatians. They should have explored those possibilities further. Whole buildings and other large and complex objects could have been made as 3D models and then integrated into the animation.

But new technology offers new possibilities, and far from all of them are explored.
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Re: The evolution of Disney movies

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Home on the Range is perhaps not one of Disney's biggest hits, but at least its main intention is to entertain, and doesn't pretend to be anything else.  A project like that would be unthinkable in the Lasseter era. If the movie had been made today, the usual standard ingredients would have been added. It would have been a story about friendship, bonding and a place to belong, the cows would stare wide-eyed at the wild and untamed praire landscape for the first time, saying "woooow". They would meet an eccentric prairie dog or something (or a whole colony of them, demonstrating a funny collective behavior where everybody repeats everybody else), and a wise old bison who share some of his life wisdom with them (something obvious that we have already heard different versions of a dozen times before), and in the end, they have new insight in life and everything returns to normal, only a little better than before because of everything they have learned.
HOTR gets crapped on by most people, but I like it. Is it in my top 10? Nope, but I actually really enjoy it.  The music is amazing, it has some really funny moments (I've always really liked Alemeda Slim), and some really touching moments (the cows and Buck do go through an emotional growth/transformation). And pretty much it does this:
they have new insight in life and everything returns to normal, only a little better than before
, based on the results of the journey they were on.  Maggie was an outcast, but the girls banded together to save the day and save the farm!

Just too bad not more experimentation was done before the introduction of computers
Since Where The Wild Things Are never panned out, the only movies w/  'non-traditional' backgrounds in the pre-CGI-explosion era  are Tron and Dinosaur, that I can think of at 5am! :p  I wonder why the WtWTA test didn't go further. And I know Lasseter wanted to make The Brave Little Toaster back in the day- did he want that to b3 a hybrid, or straight CGI?  I wonder what other projects with experimental mediums they had cooking up at various times that never came out (and why?!- did story fall by the wayside for medium/experimentation?).
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Re: The evolution of Disney movies

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Obviously the relationship changes a bit, but not by using the standard formula mentioned.

When Lasseter started working on The Adventures of André & Wally B., he had originally plannet to do just the backgrounds as CGI and make the characters as hand-drawn animation, but Catmull convinced him to give it a try to make it a 100% computer animated short. So whatever plans Lasseter had that included CGI before he left Disney, it was just the backgrounds and objects that he had in mind. Just like The Where the Wild Things Are-test.

Too bad they never made a whole movie using the same concept as the Fleischer Studios' setback camera. But just like the multiplane camera, it was time consuming and expensive, and only used for a few selected scenes. The main reason why not more experimentation was done was probably because of the budget, and the fact that the whole animation industry seemed to be in a crisis after Walt died.
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Re: The evolution of Disney movies

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I just looked up the setback camera- I had never heard of it. Wow, it looks amazing, the moving backgrounds!!!!! Very, very cool.
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Re: The evolution of Disney movies

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I don't know if it was this clip that you saw, but if not, one can see how much dept some of the Popeye cartoons had:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fnvnyb1e-p8

Just wish Who Framed Roger Rabbit hadn't been the highlight of the optical printing process, but instead had been the first of several features using these tools. The movie is mostly remembered for how it combines live action and animation, but it would have been just as interesting to see a fully animated movie push all the analogue animation technology to its limits. And with no live action synchronizing to worry about, it would probably have been cheaper and faster too.

https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA ... 7E981b5c39
Although Who Framed Roger Rabbit represented the cutting edge of compositing technology and a dazzling display of the optical printer's creative power, ironically it appeared at a turning point in compositing history when compositing began the transition from the optical printer to the digital technology of the computer. Thus, the film now stands as a monument to a dying technology, the pinnacle of its achievement.

Appearing in 1944, the optical printer, a device in which film frames and sections of frames are rephotographed and combined, greatly increased the precision needed for optical line-ups. It also introduced new processes and further systematized optical effects production. Since then, the optical printer has been continually refined and improved, culminating in the state-of-the-art techniques in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. More recently, digital compositing technology, with its even greater potential for image manipulation, has overtaken most optical techniques.
https://www.cartoonbrew.com/feature-fil ... 58471.html
Cartoon Brew: What did your role as optical photography supervisor at ILM on Roger Rabbit involve?

Ed Jones: The responsibility of optical photography is very much like building a sandwich at a deli. It’s taking all the various elements that have been shot and compiling them into something that’s seamless for every frame, for 24 frames a second. You’re re-photographing elements. You’re using a lot of optical printers that have two projectors and a camera, and you’re having to make what we used to call holdout mattes to create a void, where you would then put an image. In doing that, you have to figure out all the frame counts – the counts, the beats, the exposures, the fade-ins, the fade-outs, et cetera, to make this illusion come to life on the big screen. Take Jessica Rabbit: for example just to create her dress, her look, and all, had 30 different pieces of film. It all had to come together synchronously to make her look like she’s in the scene with Bob Hoskins (Eddie Valiant). We’d look down and say, ‘How, if we were to photograph this…’ – it’s almost like taking a cg model these days and doing a turn table – ‘if we were to photograph it, where would the shadows be, or where would there be rim lights, or with Jessica, say, how many layers of sparkles would she have?’

One of ILM’s optical printers.

And then those tone mattes would be created as ‘voids’ – just a shape that would fit on top of the character. They would then be sent to the optical department, and then what we created was what we called two-and-a-half-D, and then we used those tone mattes and used color print film, and created a pallet of almost 350 colors that were on top of the primary colors that we would then use with diffusion to shape each one of those characters. And that’s where there could be two tone mattes, or there could be 30, just depending on the character.

What was the optical printing department like? Was it more than one optical printer? How did things actually come through the department?

Ed Jones: Well, from the compositing point of view, you needed an optical printer that had two projectors, for the most part, in this particular instance, two projectors and a camera. But for us, we also had to create elements, whether they were black and white elements or not, whether it was through a bi-pack situation, or whether it was through projector. I think we had something like a total of seven printers.

And so all of those were used in a creative manufacturing type of way, where you’re building a car back in the day, or even today, you build the seats, the different elements that go into the actual car itself, and it rolls off the finish line. Well, think of this as that — we had to build all these individual elements, on workhorse printers. Some shots would just be one on one bi-packing the camera to a camera negative, to another element, and replicating it, and flipping a matte from positive to negative so that we could use that space in a different way within the way we build the composites.

And then we had to manipulate those pieces of original art into different, other pieces of film, then assemble the pieces of film, like a large jigsaw puzzle, so that they run synchronously, frame by frame, to give you the effect that you want, whether it was the tone matte and seven tones on Roger, or whether it was holding Roger out over a background. Or Jessica taking a handkerchief out of someone’s hand in the club, and passing it to herself, that type of thing with rotoscope and articulated mattes.

Was there any digital compositing or digital fixing, or anything like that considered for Roger Rabbit?

Ed Jones: Nope. There wasn’t. You know, I mean, around that same time, you might have had the introduction of digital compositing. I mean, Young Sherlock Holmes came out, and there’s some effects shots there that we did as Pixar, when it was kind of still part of ILM. I mean, the next step was, a couple years later on Hook, where we actually took Photoshop and mattes, and would composite with those digital tools, but we didn’t have enough render power! They would have to do one frame first on one matte, second frame on another matte, third frame, and then it’d all come together.

With digital, you can go in and fix almost anything, but how did you deal with re-dos on Roger Rabbit?

Ed Jones: Well, there were always re-dos. I mean, our goal was a ‘take one’ final, and basically that would be the equivalent to a dunk in basketball, or touchdown in a sports analogy. But there wasn’t a great amount of take one finals because there was always an exposure here or there that was off, and then you’d have to tweak it. So you built it from a baseline up, and the changes would be, ‘Well, he’s too red in this area,’ or whatever the color comments were.

Or, ‘There’s a matte line from these frames, from that frame,’ and you had to re-do your mattes and shrink your mattes through black and white processing, and different tricks that we created and used. So the repetition was fast and furious. I mean, you know you had to maintain inventory out the door as fast as you could, and had to maintain inventory in the door to get it done in a timely way. So with this we just had a process, we’d turn it over and over.
https://www.thewrap.com/why-who-framed- ... niversary/
Williams furthered this illusion by coming up with the idea to make the cartoon characters “2.5-dimensional.” Rather than fully 3D, they’re hand drawn to look like classic, two-dimensional cartoons of the ’30s and ’40s, then given shadows, layers and texture that makes them look as though they have depth. Williams described it as “Old stuff inserted into new stuff, using new techniques,” and it’s the reason why “Roger Rabbit” still stands apart from the CGI movies of today.

“By doing it 2.5 dimensional, it looks like the old stuff, and the old stuff is inventive. So drawn animation, by it’s own nature, you have to invent.”

“They developed a completely new technique in order to create this illusion of shape. So it was that kind of dedication,” Cundey said.

“If a sequel was done today, the production would likely utilize motion capture technology and computer generated animation, and the charm wouldn’t be the same.”
More about the movie, but it's mostly about the live action and animation hybrid:
https://www.artpublikamag.com/post/just ... ger-rabbit
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