The Animated Scene: Classical Hand-drawn Special Effects Animation — Facing Extinction?
A really big chunk of my animation career has been spent animating “special effects” in the old school meaning of the term. Hand-drawing things — water, smoke, fire, explosions, bubbles and pixie dust galore for over two decades. Learning was through trial and error and a great deal of drawing and study the classical way effects should be handled to ensure they were beautifully designed and elegantly animated with convincing physics. It is not an art form for dabblers. Animating hand-drawn effects well requires and an absolutely insane amount of labor, and the pencil mileage can get downright scary! There are no shortcuts to doing it well, no easy outs, especially if a director wants big scale special effects in his film, which most usually do.
Back in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, working for Don Bluth in Los Angeles and in Ireland, special effects were thrown liberally at almost every single scene in a feature film. Don and his animation director/partner Gary Goldman just loved special effects. If a character was wearing glasses, or a medallion around his or her neck, they would have to have a glistening hi-light every time the character moved (à la The Secret of NIMH). If a character was holding a bottle or mug, or glass, or bucket, chances are it would have to be half-full of some sort of liquid, and slopping over the edges with every move, and of course the liquid should have hi-lights on it as well a transparency, and beneath the surface bubbles.
On the character animation side of things, the Roger Rabbit “look” which had become all the rage, required that every single scene in a feature film be lavishly lit with hi-lights, tones and shadows. Preferable with long cast shadows falling over complex background shapes over which they would have to conform to. This gut-wrenchingly unpleasant and repetitive task fell on the shoulders of the effects animators, who had spent their careers learning how to animate the magical elements, only to be relegated to the dull task of simply lighting character scenes.
In the back hallways of the effects department working on The Lion King the show was called the “Tone King” as every single character in every single scene was called upon to have tonal sculpting, added via painstakingly hand-drawn mattes, whether the shot called for dramatic lighting or not. It was an opulent look that Joe Public apparently demanded since seeing the characters so cleverly integrated with the live-action characters in Roger Rabbit. Not only was it a fairly big drag to draw this stuff, but every scene also became twice as time consuming, and, therefore, twice as costly to produce.
Another really difficult aspect of animating special effects was the handling what we call “props.” This could cover almost any object you could possibly conceive of, but the best way to define the objects that would be considered props to be handled by the effects department, was basically “anything that no other department wanted to do, or knew how to handle.”
While the character animators might handle a gun prop while it was being held by their character, if the character throws it, or drops it, or it gets blown up, chances are that the character animator would drop it like a hot potato and it would end up being drawn by the special effects crew. Doors or windows opening, vehicles, trees blowing in the wind, flower petals on a breeze, wagons, carts, lawnmowers, bicycles, axe grinders, snow shovels, water skis, ski boats, Spanish galleons — you name it — the effects department had to draw it. That was until the marvels of modern technology freed us, and we were quite suddenly given tools that enabled us to handle most of these “rigid body elements” using CGI techniques. Phew! What a relief.
But the path was riddled with roadblocks. Integrating 2D and 3D elements to make them look like they are drawn by the same artist, and painted with the same brush, is not an easy task. Conventional software was set up to do one thing or the other. To make the two techniques really integrate seamlessly took finesse and stroking. It was often difficult and prickly, rife with unexpected challenges and collaboration between artists and technical experts cut from a completely different cloth brought a whole new managerial twist to the traditional animation studio.
Take for instance the CGI clock tower workings of Disney’s The Great Mouse Detective. While it was quite marvelously well done, it did stand out, and the wheel and gears and cogs looked somehow “different” than all the other elements on the screen. But it did work, and it was hugely exciting. To have done scenes like this entirely by hand was unthinkable! We were entering in to a whole new dimension of animated possibilities. As the years went by and the traditional artists got more comfortable with the highly technical tools, and the technicians got used to the strange and temperamental artist folk they were expected to work with.
So here we are, a couple of decades later, and we’ve all survived the enormous upheavals of the animation industry. At least, I’m assuming you have if you are reading this. We’re all still here, animating our little butts off, whether on a light table or a PC, a toon’s a toon. We’re all stuck on this psychedelic cartoon trip together!
Printer-friendly version
Post new comment