I’ve always wondered this. If there are x amount of people working on an animation project, how are they able to keep their animation styles, and even art styles, so incredibly consistent?
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There are style guides for animators which have rules to what the characters look like, how they move, behave, etc. Then there’s other reference materials like concept art, storyboards, or even previous animations. You can see in old Disney movies that they even reused animation guides and just changed the characters costumes.
They use standards, called style sheets. If you draw figures that don’t look like the style sheet, you get told to redraw them.
I’m not an expert in the field. I’m not even a gifted artist. But:
a) Different people probably DO have idiosyncrasies in their personal styles but when they’ve been drawing the same things for a significant amount of time I would imagine that their styles converge to produce the final style
b) I think talented artists have the ability to draw and animate in a consistent way even if they are emulating someone else’s work I am sure they have the ability to produce work that is consistent with the standard
c) There is an oversight process, I’m sure one member of an animating team reviews the teams work and can either instruct other team members to fix inconsistencies OR just fix them themselves and then THEIR idiosyncrasies are what we see as the final product.
also, if you look at a show you often *can* see minor differences over the years.
Some people can only draw in their own, personal style. Other people may have their own style but are also very good at closely following another style if they have a reference.
So the people who make the original art make a lot of different reference poses and make annotations to describe what details they think are important. And people who are good at copying styles follow those descriptions.
There are also people who are REALLY good at it and they are charged with making “key” frames of animation that the eye is most likely to see. There are other, slightly-less-skilled people charged with making “tween” frames in between the key frames. Tween frames tend to be blurred or have exaggerated features so it’s not as important to make sure they are completely on-style.
I studied animation at University back in the pre-digital 90s days and worked a brief stint at a small animation studio. Specifically, on a commercial for Honey Nut Cheerios. I was an in-betweener working on animating the little bee mascot for the brand.
I was handed a character model sheet. This was basically the character drawn in a variety of static views front, side, 3/4, back etc. It had proportions measured out so things like ‘the head is X units tall, the body is X.5 units tall, the arms are X units long etc. I was also given a load of reference material of the character in action – expressions, poses, etc. I had to practice drawing them so that they were indistinguishable from the model sheet. It took very long but there were tricks that helped like character breakdowns into basic shapes. The head was a sphere and at certain points you would add additional shapes and then connect the lines with contours to make the outline etc. Not only did the character have to match perfectly but the line weight of your drawing had to be consistent, clean, steady, and almost machine-like (for this particular style). I got my start at a young age emulating my favourite comic book artists like Byrne, Buscema, Miller, Adams, Simonson etc., and of course the inspiring Chuck Jones, who all had very different styles so I was familiar with putting aside my personal style and sticking to someone else’s. Still, it took me a long time of practicing to get it right.
Once the higer-ups were satisfied with my drawing output (it was scrutinized with magnifying glass), I got to work the entry-level gig of in-betweener. Basically, one of the higher ups would draw a series of key frames which is the start of an action and the end of an action, sometimes a drawing of approx where the character should be in the middle of the action. My job was to take those key frames and draw the character in all the in-between frames based on a time-sheet. The timesheet was synced to the sound so you had calculate how many frames at X frames per second do I need to draw to get the timing right. Also, you had to keep ‘acceleration/deceleration’ in mind when planning the in-betweens to make sure the action wasn’t robotic, along with stretch and squash to emulate a character who wasn’t made out of solid steel. These concepts are still alive and well today in modern applications under ‘Ease In/Out’ … It was challenging work because it was all done by hand on paper that was fitted to a light table and backlit so you would stack all the drawings and shuffle through the sheets to get a sense of the motion and timing. During peak hours, all you’d hear in a room of in-betweeners was the shuffling of paper. they call this ‘onionskinning’ in modern applications because the paper was thin and transluscent to make it easier to see through.
So once my stack of in-betweens were done, they were checked for consistency by the higher ups – usually the assistant director or director himself to ensure quality was good. I recall there was an electronic camera hooked up to an special computer whose sole purpose was to take pics of illustrations in black and white low resolution and play them back in real time to test the animation. This was cutting edge shit back in the day but saved the hassle of shooting to film and processing for testing animation. Sometimes tweaks were needed to smooth out the motion or change the timing and then you’d get handed another set of key frames so you could do the in-betweens. And the cycle repeated, over and over. Eventually, the drawings went to the paint department who would transfer the pencil drawings to cells (plastic see-thru film) either by photocopying them or by tracing over the drawings with ink/brush/pen. Then those would get handed to the next person who would colour the cells with paint… handed off to the production crew who would shoot each cell frame by frame on a film camera… Edit on the steenbeck to sync the sound and voila, an animated film, lol.
It was grunt work and felt like an assembly line. It was an assembly line. It definitely wasn’t the glamour and fun I was expecting when I went into the animation field and it was a taste of what the future held in store. Not everyone in the field worked on the Simpsons or Ren and Stimpy or other fun, wacky animation where you imagined everyone having a wild time laughing and joking… It was all business and factory-like, especially on the advertising side of things… and back then most indie animation studios did this shitty commercial work because it paid well and allowed the owner/director to work on their pet projects and short films with their cliquish inner circle while everyone else just toiled away. Honestly, it got old really fast… Shortly after that time, the industry changed with the introduction of digital and new tools like Toon Boom animation software and the cost of computers dropping. You didn’t need a $60k SGI Octane to do cool stuff, you could use a regular PC…
Nowadays, with software, model sheets are all digitial and studios just create a shitload of assets that are used in a copy/paste fashion. That’s why it’s so easy to keep everything consistent. Even if it’s drawn and a bit off, once digitized it’s easy to tweak and get it right. Also, the quality of today’s 2D animation is mostly like old-school Hanna-Barbera where they found creative shortcuts to avoid having to draw a crapload of frames for animation. Think Flintstones where only the mouth is moving in any typical scene or, my favourite, having characters walk behind objects like bushes so animators didn’t have to draw feet and walk cycles which were tedious to do. Lots of copy paste going on now, basically reusing every asset over and over… that’s why you don’t see animation like looney toons with wild drawings and exaggerated animation. Everything is stiff and rigid. Also, 3D became huge and dominated sometime around Toy Story and cel animation was relegated to TV and less flashy properties.
But by then, it was the birth of the WWW and I transitioned out of my job as an in-betweener and got in on the ground floor of the internet revolution… No regrets. I learned Flash, web development and used all my formal design/drawing/animation skills making a shitload more money on my own terms and got out of the sweatshop animation racket. Haven’t looked back but still love the medium although I feel that 2D animation as an art form for the mainstream has lost a lot of its charm since the 90s.
Hope this helped shed some light.
Edit: typos
This is for old fashioned hand drawn animation. Things are a little easier for modern digital animation.
On a show or movie, one of the first things that happens is that the chief animators/artists will decide on how the characters and backdrops will look. They create a reference book of “style sheets” which show each of the characters from different angles, with notes on expressions, clothes, motions, etc. Here is an example of a style sheet from an early Disney cartoon: https://www.animationresources.org/pics/veg11-big.jpg
Once the style sheets are created, the a high ranking animator will create “key” frames of a scene. Those key frames are turned over to more junior animators, who use the key frames and the style sheets to fill in additional frames in between the key frames. Once the scene is done, the work of the junior animators is carefully reviewed and changes are made as necessary to match the master animator’s intent.
Modern digital animation often uses pose-able character models, just like in a video game. An artist creates the original model as virtual 3D puppet, then the animators can pose and move the puppet as appropriate. This way, the same model is always being used, so the look always matches.
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