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Making Cartoon Movies
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has taken nearly two years of constant work, in all the spare time he could devote to it, and the film is not yet quite completed! If you compare the amount of wrork on the piece of film reproduced here with that of the simple screen comics you have seen, such as "Mutt and Jeff," and then remember that it requires about thirty persons, working eight hours a day, t o produce one "Mutt and Jeff" film a week, you may get an idea of Mc Cay's undertaking. To make a single drawing of the sinking of a ship, with all the details of sky and water, would be a good day's work. There will be fifteen thousand such pictures in this film.
The trick of drawing on celluloid— now used in making almost all animated cartoons — is what made the Lusitania film possible. Only the part of the picture requiring motion had to have a separate drawing for each exposure of the camera. These drawings, made on the transparent surface, were placed, in turn, over a drawing of the background which remained the same throughout a large part of the film, and the two were photographed at once. To get the wave motion, only about two hundred draw
A strip from Winsor McCay's new film. Each picture is hand-drawn and depicts the sinking of the Lusitania.
ings were required, as the first one began again where the last one left off, in continuous rotation.
But if all animators — as artists who make screen drawings are called — • worked like McCay, the movie public
would go hungry for this sort of entertainment. With McCay, the thing is a hobby. H i s pictures make one marvel, but, though n o artist draws with greater ease and speed, he has produced only four films in seven years.
To J. R. Bray, a former staff artist on Judge, belongs the credit for having devised most of the short cuts that have made possible the extensive production of animated cartoons. Bray began his experiments in 1909. His first film was ready to release in 1912. To-day he has a staff o f nearly twenty artists and assistants, and is turning out a completed film every week. Bray's art staff includes half a dozen highsalaried men taken from the top ranks of newspaper and comic-weekly artists. And in other studios in New York, Chicago, and other cities, scores of other former cartoonists are now working at this queer trade. For in the last two years the business has growTn by leaps