PODCAST EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Michael Hall: From ShoHawk Media, this is Filmmaking Footnote with your host Michael Hall. You’re listening to episode 12. This is the show where we give you the best filmmaking and production information so you can make the best project possible without having to spend a bunch of time or money at film school.
Let’s do it.
What’s going on everyone? I hope you are having a wonderful day. This is Michael Hall here hosting Filmmaking Footnote and we are, we’re rolling. We are on episode 12. I cannot believe that we have pumped these out. I really hope you’re enjoying these and learning as much as I am actually putting these shows together. We’re on this journey together. I’m learning just as much as you. I’m really having a good time. I hope that you are too.
Today, we are talking about the history of animation. Animation is personally an art form that I really love. Unfortunately I’ve only worked, I’ve only had the pleasure of working at an animation house for a few months. I worked on a project probably like five years ago. It was a commercial, animated commercial and it was super fun. I would love to work on a lot more animation in the future, but for now, I think this podcast episode is going to, it’s going to whet my appetite. It’s going to prompt me to do more things with animation.
I was recently watching a documentary by Werner Herzog. Sorry, that was really bad. I was recently watching a documentary called ‘The Cave of Forgotten Dreams‘ by Warner Herzog. In it, he talks about … A little context. The Cave of Forgotten Dreams is this, it’s this archeological cave that they found, I believe it was in France, where they found a bunch of neanderthals and the actual caves where these neanderthals lived. They found all of these Bison drawings on the walls. In the film, Werner Herzog has the hypothesis that these were, the bison drawn on the wall, the artwork drawn on the wall, it was drawn in such a way that there were various limbs coming out from the bison drawn on the wall. His hypothesis in the documentary was that the candlelight or the light from the cave, it actually made the bison appear like it was moving.
The thought of animation and of artwork moving and tricking your eye into making you believe that a piece of artwork is moving has been around for an incredibly long time. No one really knows when the first piece of art was created to make this sort of effect happen, but it can really, you can guess, you can assume that this has been around for all of human history. Humans have always, they’ve always looked at shadows, they’ve looked at pieces of art and always imagined what it would be like if a piece of art would move. This dates back to neanderthals. This has been around for all of human history, but what we know definitively is that it definitively began in the 17th century with a machine called a ‘Magic lantern‘.
What a magic lantern would do is it would take an image and project it onto the wall and there were slight movements that would happen, kind of like the bison in the caves, just very, very slight movements. This was a really groundbreaking piece of entertainment back in the 17th century. People would come from everywhere. There would be huge crowds where these pictures would be projected onto the walls and it would give this effect that no one had ever seen, at least on a big scale before. I’m sure they had seen flickering lanterns giving off some sort of shadows, but this is really the first time in recorded history that audiences gathered to see a piece of art move.
Looking back today on a magic lantern, you would not call this animation because the pictures themselves were moved by human hand. They were not moved by a machine. That’s really what differentiates something like a magic lantern or a moving shadow and a piece of animation. True animation is when still images are moving so fast that it tricks the human eye into thinking that the images are actually moving.
Throughout the 1600s, the 1700s, this sort of phenomenon continued. Different techniques emerged during this time period to trick the human brain into thinking that an image was moving. The first real example of this is with the Zoetrope. What the Zoetrope is, is it’s just … If you grew up in the 90s and you played with pogs for example, a pog is just a, it’s a little disc that’s cut out of cardboard and you had an image on the front and an image on the back. If you would spin that little disc really quickly with two pieces of string on the end, it would give the illusion of an image moving.
In the early 1800s is when the zoetrope was first introduced. A zoetrope is a round cylinder with slits cut in the side. When you would strip of paper on the inside with images surrounding the cylinder, so when you would spin the zoetrope, it would create the illusion of an animated figure. It wasn’t until the early 1900s when cameras were introduced that animation could really take off and become its own art form.
The first animated film was called ‘Humorous Phases of Funny Faces‘. This film came out in 1906 directed by James Stuart Blackton. Most historians regard this as the very first animated film recorded on standard picture film. This is the first time that stop motion as well as cutout animation were ever used in the film industry. You can actually find this film on YouTube. When you watch it, you realize that it’s a fairly simple cartoon. It’s a hand drawn animated scene that look like they’re just on a chalkboard and they have a clown playing with a hat and a dog jumping through a hoop. It’s very remedial basic animation, but at the time, it was mind blowing. People were just blown away that someone could actually create this on the screen.
From 1906 until about 1914, animation slowly progressed from choppy hand drawn animation until the film Gertie the Dinosaur came out in 1914. That was the first true smooth animation with full-blown animals and storylines. We’re still in the silent era of filmmaking, so Gertie the Dinosaur is a completely silent animated film.
What’s also interesting about Gertie the Dinosaur is that the cartoonist, Windsor McKay, put himself in the very final scene of the film. The scene at the very end of the film is when McKay, Windsor McKay, walks behind the projection screen and you actually see him appear on screen and get onto the dinosaur’s back riding out of frame, which actually makes this the very first film to combine live action footage and hand drawn animation.
Also in 1914, the process of rotoscoping was developed. Rotoscoping is when you, when the animator uses a film as a reference point for the animation. If you’ve ever seen the behind the scenes of a recent film like The Lion King, for example, all the animators use real objects, real films as the reference point of their animation.
In the early 19, excuse me … In the late 19 teens and the early 1920s is when we start getting some really iconic animated characters. This is the first time we start seeing Betty Boop and Popeye the Sailor Man. Then in the 1920s is when we start seeing characters like Felix the Cat.
In the 1920s is when Walt Disney begins developing his repertoire and his characters. We first see Steamboat Willie in 1928. Steamboat Willie is the very first time that we see a fully produced, and by fully produced I mean fully produced post production soundtrack featuring voice and sound effects printed on the film itself. It was the very first cartoon to do that. Steamboat Willie was a huge breakthrough success for Disney. This was actually the third installment of the Mickey Mouse series. This really pushed Disney to the forefront of the animated scene.
In the 1920s, animated films and films in general became very popular because of the crash of the stock market. The crash happened in 1929, October in 1929, which caused most Americans and most people in the world to lose most of their money during that time period. People couldn’t afford to go, do, have extravagant vacations or do big things on the weekends. Films and the theater became very, very popular and so did animation. This is the time that we really see it start growing into it’s own art form.
Coinciding with The Great Depression and animation becoming its own art form is when Walt Disney really started pushing and becoming a huge name in animation. The 1930s is when Walt Disney really came into his own. In 1937, he produced the very first full length animated feature film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. By full length feature animated film, that’s really defined as a film that was made completely using hand drawn animation. There were other feature full length films that came out before Snow White. However, many of those films or all of those films used cutout, silhouettes and stop-motion. Snow White and the Seven Dwarves was the very first to use completely hand drawn animation for an entire feature length film.
Snow White was a huge success. It was released to the general public in 1938 and it earned four times as much as any other film released in 1938. At the 11th Academy Awards, it won the Academy Honorary Award. There was no animated Academy Award at the time. This was the very first time the Academy Awards gave an award to an animated film. This was an honorary award, like I said, because there was no, at the time there was nothing, there was no category. What they said when they gave it to Walt Disney was this was for significant screen innovation, which has charmed millions and pioneered a great new entertainment field.
This set the standard for animation moving forward. Walt Disney, at least in the west and in Hollywood, began setting the standard for how animated films were produced and how they looked moving forward through the 20th century.
It was around this time that Disney’s core group of animators defined the 12 basic principles of animation. These 12 basic principles of animation are: Squash and stretch, anticipation, staging, straight-ahead action and pose to pose, follow through and overlapping action, slow in and slow out, arcs, secondary action, timing, exaggeration, solid drawing and appeal. These 12 basic principles of animation are really what defined how animation looks throughout the 20th century and through animation today as we see it. These principles were produced, they were put together by the core animators at Disney in order to define how to produce the illusion of characters adhering to the basic laws of physics, but they also dealt with more abstract issues like emotional timing and character appeal.
If you have any interest in getting started in animation, I highly recommend picking up a book that two of the core group of animators wrote together called ‘The Illusion of Life’. Excuse me. This was a book that came out in the 1980s and there’s a ton of animators and studios that refer to this book as ‘The Bible of Animation’. If you’re really interested in learning more about The 12 Basic Principles of Animation, I highly recommend just giving a quick Google search. I’m not going to go into each of these 12 different principles right now. It’s just going to take way too much time, but do a quick Google search and see exactly how these different principles apply to animation. If you want to become an animator, start thinking about these things. Start thinking about how you can use these principles in your own work and your own repertoire.
Up until this point, we’ve been talking about traditional animation or what is called ‘2D’ or ‘Cell animation’. It’s the older form of animation that you think about when you watch an older film or a cartoon. You can imagine what 2D or cell animation looks like. They’re sequential drawings drawn really quickly, one after another. These are all hand drawings or frames drawn on individual pieces of paper or drafting paper in which drawn in a very quick sequence and then stitched together to create a film.
I wanted to really pause here and define cell animation or 2D animation, because once you get past the 1940s and 1950s, there’s a bunch of new technology that begins to open new avenues for animation. With traditional animation, with 2D or cell animation, and within 2D animation you start branching out and getting a bunch of different types of animation. You think about anime as a very distinct type of 2D animation. Traditional animation, for example, uses, it’s 12 frames per second. By frames per second, that means the, how fast an image is moving on the screen. Frame per second or FPS is how quickly that image is moving on the screen.
There’s a distinction between older traditional films and something like anime uses fewer frames per second. If you go and Google just random anime examples, you’ll notice that the images are a little choppier, meaning that there is fewer images per second. The choppier a sequence is on screen, the fewer frames they’re using per second. Alternatively, the more frames that are being shot or animated, the slower. Slow motion is shot at a very high frame rate, where something that’s really choppy is a lower frame rate. I want to make that distinction because as we get into new technologies, we’re going to start talking about 3D animation and the rise of Pixar. Pixar uses 24 to 25 frames per second, which is standard. If you watch a live action film, they’re always using 24 frames per second. That is, that’s the standard across the industry and has been since the silent era of movies. I’ll get into frame rates in a later episode, but I just wanted to give you a little background on why some animated films, older animated films look a certain way versus anime, versus stop-motion Claymation, versus 3D animation.
I noticed I’ve been talking for a while about animation, so I’m going to make this last portion, I’m going to condense it a little bit. 3D animation, or computer animation is what really rose in the 90s and early 2000s and is the dominant force in animation today, and that’s because of the rise of Pixar. Pixar, there’s a really great documentary. I love, love, love this documentary. It’s called ‘The Pixar Story‘. It was directed by Leslie Iwerks. It came out in 2007. It gives a larger picture of animation, the animation history and then it explains how Pixar came about in the early 90s due to advances in technology and the foresight by John Lasseter who was an animator at Disney. He pitched Disney on 3D computer animation, but was initially rejected, so he branched out.
The whole rise of Pixar is really fascinating. I highly recommend the documentary because it goes into exact detail of how Pixar was formed, how it was an offshoot of George Lucas’ Lucas Film. It was started as just a division of Lucas Film and then it was bought by Steve Jobs of Apple, the Apple of Apple fame. Then Steve Jobs really pushed John Lasseter and Ed Catmull is the president of Pixar, to create it’s own unique brand of storytelling, which now at this point in time completely dominates animation. Pixar set the new tone for what animation is and what it means. The older 2D cell style animation has fallen away. It’s not as prevalent because Pixar completely dominates these days.
The last type of animation that I haven’t touched on a ton yet is stop-motion animation. This is the type of animation that Claymation or cutouts really falls under. When you think of something like, something produced by Lyca or Wallace and Grommet or the older type of South Park episodes which used cutout cardboard types of animation, that’s all stop-motion. That’s different than 2D cell animation and 3D computer animation because they’re actually using a physical camera to capture real life objects, which then are then stitched together in post production to create a film which looks different than the other two types of animation. Those are the three main types of animation, the three main styles. Those are, like I said, 2D cell animation is not as prevalent. Stop-motion is still around, but 3D computer animation completely dominates.
Alright guys, that’s all we’ve got for today. If you are interested in learning about the four different ways that filmmakers can make money online, go to filmmakingfootnote.com/free, where you can download our free guide and learn the quickest way to make money online as a filmmaker. Thanks again for listening, I will see you back here tomorrow.
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