Disney Inspiration

In cel animation, the frames are traditionally hand drawn on transparent acetate sheets and placed over static painted backgrounds and then photographed one by one. Nowadays, the use of cels is almost obsolete, drawings are now scanned in to computers and placed on computer generated backgrounds and digitally transferred to film. Cel animation is more commonly known as traditional animation and even though some things have changed character animator’s work has remained essentially the same over the last seventy years. Animations today that have been created using the tradigital techniques still retain the looks of the original cel animations which i feel is a tribute to early animators.

Cel animation was used in many of Walt Disney’s films, such as in 1937 in Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. It was the release of the Lion King in 1994 that saw a major development in Disneys Cel animation as they moved more in computer generated animation. There is a major scene in the Lion King where there is a wildebeest stampede and animators duplicated each animal instead of hand drawing each one. Toy Story was perhaps the biggest turning point for Disney as it was the first fully computer generated animation released. From this point all Disney animations became completely computer generated until 2009 when Disney released the Princess and the Frog. The Princess and the Frog was created using some more traditional techniques, the characters were hand drawn and was a tribute again to early animation.

I have found two interesting pdfs on the texture mapping used in cel animation and also multiperspective panoramas for cel animation. The links are below,

http://www.disneyanimation.com/library/multirama_1997.pdf

http://www.disneyanimation.com/library/2DTextureMapping_1998.pdf

I will also be using inspiration from the original Disney animations in my final animation. I will be using some basic principles of Cel animation.  I will be using computer software to create my cel animation effect. I will produce my animated character by rotoscoping over a piece of live footage using Flash and this layer will then be brought in to After Effects. I will then create two different backgrounds, one for the close up shots, one for the long shots. These will be on separate layers also and brought in to After Effects. All layers will then be composited together and separate effects will be added to make my final animation appear more like a silent film. I will be creating two backgrounds as the background doesn't change in my animation therefore it will be unnecessary to draw it in every frame!  

I want to successfully incorporate old and new animation techniques in my final piece!