Did people literally just draw thousands of pictures that looked almost identical and then they stitched them together, like a flip book? How did they do it, and how was it even remotely cost-effective and worth the effort?
In: 40
They rarely did every frame because it was simply not worth it for the small increase you could get from it. Between TVs and the human eye, you don’t really catch 24 frames per second when viewed at that speed.
Traditional animation (and even CGI) is based on 24 frames per second. Which has been the film standard for many years based on the speed of traditional film through a camera. Even updated methods are still “based on” 24 fps as both 48 and 60fps are derivations of 24fps.
Each frame consists of overlaid layers of detail called “plates”. Usually only a few things actually need to move in the animation, so rather than redraw every element for each frame, only the element that’s moving is changed. Like a background may not move at all, so that plate is kept still until the background needs to move.
Animating every frame is called “Animating on 1s”. It’s good for high detail, but unnecessary most of the time. This is for when you want extremely smooth animation and effects.
Animating every other frame is called “Animating on 2s”. It means you hold a single image for two frames. Meaning instead of 24 unique frames per second, you have 12. It’s kind of the default in the west.
“Animating on 3s” means you have 8 unique frames per second. This is a real budget saver, especially if you don’t have a lot of crisp details, smooth motion, or plan to use lots of “smear frames” where you draw the motion between two movements overlaid into one frame. This is used in anime a lot. You may notice a lot of, especially older, anime essentially freezes everything in the scene except for a few elements like mouths or animated emotions like the anime sweat drop.
Even then, work was split between more skilled “keyframers” and the “in-betweeners”. Keyframers draw the important frames with the most action, and the job of the “in-betweeners” was to draw the frames that come between those. Usually because the key frames require more detail and crisper image, the amount of skill required is higher, while the in-betweens will include more volume of work but less exacting skill.
Honestly, it’s not a dead art. Some people have picked up on traditional animations ability to create more graphically interesting elements than available in traditional CG effects.
Michel Gagné is something of the picture boy for this. Seen “Into The Spiderverse”, “The Iron Giant”, “Space Jam” or, played Battleborn? You’ve seen his hand drawn effects animations. He’s really adept at combining hand drawn effects with 3D environments in a unique and stylized way that catches the eye.
There’s some things that traditional drawing is better at than CG, and some that CG is better at. So it never really goes away.
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