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
The quick version is that yes, every frame needed to be drawn out and photographed on to the cinefilm.
In reality there were a few shortcuts that could be used, the biggest being using layers.
Rather than drawing out every frame in full, they split a scene into multiple layers, then painted those separately into clear sheets that could stack up to create the final image.
This means that you can use the same background repeatedly as often that will not change frame to frame.
They could then layer on a few foreground details on another layer so those could be moved relative to the background to show sooner motion, or characters could move behind them or otherwise interact with them.
The individual characters could then be drawn separately, and could be split up into multiple pieces depending on how they move – a body may stay static while an arm or other body part moves, so they will place those on different layers and reuse the body frame while using different arm, heads or faces to animate those.
Have you ever noticed in old animation how the background tended to be really nicely painted, but the characters were simply shaded in block colours? Or that you could tell when a character was about to interact with an object like a rock or log in a scene when one suddenly appeared that wasn’t painted as nicely as the background? This is why – putting a little more effort into painting the background that would be reused in a lot of shots was a nice way to make things look nicer, but putting the same effort into something that would only appear for a single frame would have been too time consuming and hard to match exactly frame to frame, so they were drawn in a simpler style.
Animating this way did give some other loopholes too, the most obvious being the ability to reuse animations. If a character is going to repeat the same movement in a different shot (or a different film altogether) why go to the bother of reanimating it when you could just reuse the same set of cells placed on a new background and in a new scene alongside a different supporting character (maybe even partly taken from another place too)?
It also allowed for work to be shared out. Different animators could draw different elements of a scene, with certain staff members drawing the key frames, and then other animators drawing the frames in between those and matching up the movements.
Add all of those together and it does take an incredible amount of effort to make a good quality animation – 24 different images being built up and photographed for every second of film, not to mention audio, storyboarding and all of the other tasks needed to pull everything together into the final product.
Even a shorter animation like one of three Merry Melodies shorts could be in the region of 8500+ frames of animation, while a feature length movie like Snow White could be in the region of 120,000 frames or more.
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