American cinematographer (Jan-Dec 1959)

FIG. 2— THE MULTIPLANE animation camera stand, designed by Walt Disney Studios, made possible the remarkable 3 dimensional effects in “Bambi" and other Disney animated fea¬ ture films. The horizontal units take various back¬ ground and action cells and each may be posi¬ tioned at various distances from the camera mounted at top of the multiplane unit. drawing or two, the inker will automat¬ ically leave it out, assuming the clean¬ up-man wanted it that way. The inbetweener has the rough inbetween to guide him in placing his fin¬ ished drawing in the proper relation¬ ship to the extremes. These rough inbetweens are done for the first rough test of the action. They help the inbe¬ tweener especially when the extremes are far apart, and he is obliged to pro¬ vide several consecutive drawings in¬ stead of just one, as in the case of drawing5 63, 65, 67 and 69 which are the inbetweens of the extremes numbered 61 and 71. Various tricks and time-savers are employed in the drawing of cleanups and inbetweens. There is the “held cell” — used when some portion of a character’s body is to remain station¬ ary for 16 frames or longer, while the rest of the body is in action. Instead of re-drawing the motionless portion over and over again, it’s drawn just once, and placed on a separate cell level. The active parts are animated on another level and superimposed over the held cell, in register. The only possible dis¬ advantage to this method is the fact that the held part generally undergoes a slight change of color, or “color jump”, when suddenly transferred to another cell level, as explained last month. Also, holding a held cell for too long a period is liable to present a “frozen” appearance to the stationary part. Another drawing-saver is the “traceback”. This is first cousin to the held cell, and is used when but a small por¬ tion of a character remains in the same size and position for a few frames. For example, if a character’s feet are to remain in one spot for sev¬ eral drawings, while the rest of the character moves, the animator will animate his action as usual, but will fail to draw the feet each time, indicat¬ ing for them to be traced from the drawing where they went into their held position. The cleanup-man and in¬ betweener will make their drawings complete except for the feet, calling for a traceback of the feet from the last drawing whereon they appeared. The traceback is also used to save unnecessary drawing in the case of a cycle of action such as a walk, where the same pattern occurs over and over again. Sometimes, in a cycle, the same drawings are shot repeatedly for the length of the action, but where some part of the character undergoes changes of position while other parts are in a cycle action, the traceback is employed. A typical example is a scene from one Donald Duck cartoon. Donald is marching along on a parade ground, meanwhile watching a num¬ ber of airplanes zooming along over¬ head. His feet and body go through a cycle of continuous action, but his head moves around, watching the planes. Here the animator drew' a complete walk cycle to animate each foot com¬ pleting a stride. Then, instead of re-an¬ imating these steps for each new stride, the animator indicated these original drawings were to be used, via tracebacks, and in the right order, again and again as long as the W'alking ac¬ tion continued. New animation was done for the head, which changed position con¬ stantly during the walk, and which was registered to the tracebacks. The use of held cells, tracebacks and other such shortcuts are encouraged in the professional studios, because every un¬ necessary drawing is a waste of money, time, and effort. If there’s a portion of the back¬ ground which a character goes behind during the action, the character is “registered to the background” during the process of cleaning up the draw¬ ings. The exact edge of this part of the background is carefully indicated by the layout-man, and the cleanupman uses this guide in drawing only that portion of the character which is supposed to be in sight. Similar guides are provided the inker and painter. If the part of the background is of such a nature as to require complicated regis¬ tering, such as a wire fence, clump of bushes, etc., it can be handled as an overlay, and placed on a top cell level. When the action calls for a char¬ acter to move outside of the limits of a 5 or 6^ field setup, a panorama or “pan” move is indicated. A pan move gives the effect of the camera dollying along beside a character in action, the same as in live-action photography. For this the background is drawn on a longer sheet of paper according to the amount of ground the character must cover. The cartoon camera is in more or less a fixed position at all times, and its movements are limited to the areas of the 5 or field. So, when the camera can’t move, the background must. In the average pan move, the character animates in one spot on the setup, while the background is moved behind him in the opposite direction at a fraction of an inch per exposure, de Continued on Page 58 JANUARY • 1959 39