Eli5: how did animation work before computers?

Question

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

Answer 1

Yes, they just drew all the scenes.

There were shortcuts, of course. For one thing, they drew characters on transparent plastic called “cel”, which is short for “celluloid”. This allowed them to move characters around in front of a backdrop, and avoid having to redraw the background image for each frame.

The most sophisticated version of this was pioneered by Disney, called the “multiplane camera”. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiplane_camera](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiplane_camera)

Backgrounds and various layers of foreground images could be installed on rollers, and moved independently of each other. This allows for an illusion of depth, where different layers of the image move more or less quickly as the camera perspective changes.

But for character animation, they were reduced to hand drawing each frame in turn. Because they were working on transparent plastic, they *could* quite easily trace from the previous frame, with slight modifications for movement.

In fact, because this tracing work was easier and didn’t require a great knowledge of how to create the character from scratch, it was often done by people called “in-betweeners”.

The highly paid character animators would only draw a few “key” frames to show the beginning, end, and significant parts of a given movement, and the lower paid in-betweeners would fill in the missing frames by tracing their art.

Some early animators even experimented with rotoscoping, where an actual actor is filmed performing the movement, and the animators simply traced over the filmed image. This type of animation was famously used in the original Star Wars movies to create the lightsaber effects.

You’re right that allowing computers to do a lot of this work is easier, but it simply wasn’t possible until fairly recently in the grand scheme of things. And the way things were done back in the day continues to influence how computer software works. If you’ve done any animation, you’ll recognize various concepts I’ve mentioned in this post, especially things like key frames which are still used to this day.