The incredibly effective Wacom Cintiq 21UX interactive pen display is helping “paperless” animation become a reality. All Cintiq 21UZ images courtesy of Wacom.

After an almost two-decade stint in the animated feature film industry, I have been re-introduced to the world of television series work, bit by bit, over the last four years. In some cases actually working on an animated television series, but more often as a casual observer, watching my overly stressed-out animation industry friends, who always seem to be rushing off to work over-time on yet another on-going television series with an insanely short schedule. Storyboard artists, character designers, layout artists, animators, effects animators — you name it — they’re all out there trying to make ends meet, in what seems to be an industry of ever shrinking schedules and budgets.

Whenever I hear about the insanely tight schedules that these artists are working on, my head just spins! Shorter and shorter schedules, smaller and smaller budgets, but is the quality of the shows diminishing? Well, sometimes yes, but incredibly, a lot of the time it is not! We have at our disposal today the tools to make quality cartoons, faster, slicker and better looking than a great deal of the so-called “limited” animation of years gone by.

This trend that we’re seeing has taken off in the wake of a staggering plethora of new animation technology, hardware and software, which, for better or worse, has enabled us to create stories, storyboards, animatics, backgrounds, characters, animation and special effects in ridiculously short order.

This is much to the delight of distributors, broadcasters, and animation clients of all kinds worldwide, who find that in today’s animation industry, an idea or a script can get from early development, into location and character design, straight into production and actually on the air in a matter of mere months. Projects that would have taken at least a year to fully develop and begin to get off the ground, can now sprout wings and take off in a really big hurry, and at a mere fraction of the cost of an old-school hand-drawn cartoon.

There are some key technological advancements in the tools, both hardware and software, that we use to produce cartoon series these days that have contributed enormously to the speeding up of the overall process, and I’d like to discuss a couple of the most important ones, that I feel are changing the way we make cartoons today, besides the obvious technological developments that we have all come so familiar with, like Flash.

The combination of the screen surface with a sensitive grip pen makes artists comfortable with the drawing “feel” of Cintiq 21UX.

First of all, the whole idea of “paperless” production (Oh, how that concept used to make my blood curdle!) which has been batted around for the last two decades, is actually starting to successfully take place, largely due to a couple of truly innovative, effective tools that have finally come close to matching the needs of traditional artists, who are willing to work with digital tools, if they actually help, rather than hinder, the creative process. Now we finally have these tools at our fingertips, they actually work and they are rapidly changing the face of the modern animation studio. Not only the television series industry either, or only the “2D” animation industry. Every studio, from the smallest hometown commercial ventures, to the biggest feature animation powerhouses, is taking full advantage of this new software and hardware.

First of all, the incredibly effective Wacom Cinitq 21UX interactive pen display is an LCD monitor that enables artists to draw directly onto the computer’s screen, and it is the first product of its kind that really has artists getting comfortable with its drawing “feel” very quickly and intuitively. I had tried one of the earliest versions of this tablet many years ago, and it was at that point in time still a relatively frustrating tool for a traditional pencil and paper sort of an artist to deal with. The tactile quality of the drawing pen just wasn’t there, and there was an enormous disconnect between the hand and the image. I was skeptical that I would ever be able to become comfortable with such a tool, but that has all changed recently.

The folks at Wacom, in developing the Cintiq have put a lot of time, research and effort into creating a screen surface that actually has some “bite” to it, much like a real piece of paper, as well as a wonderfully programmable and sensitive pen, and the results are surprisingly successful. It seems that the developers have really been listening to us pesky artists after all! Up until now, getting a really natural drawing sensation that inspired an old school artist was inconceivable.

And I was one of the biggest naysayers to the tablet technology that has been emerging, precisely because of that very reason. The tactile sensation of a graphite pencil digging into the texture of a good quality piece of paper, well, there’s nothing quite like it. The sculptural feeling of “working” a drawing on paper is a key element of how I create design drawings, and, until recently, I had never encountered a tablet that was even remotely satisfying in that respect.

But today, of all the artists I know are using the Cintiq tablets, myself included, the vast majority are enjoying it a great deal and truly getting a good drawing feel with it. It speeds up many aspects of the animation pipeline, by finally doing away with enormous amounts of paper that needs to be scanned and put in binders and archived in filing cabinets. Artists can create everything from storyboards to character, effects, set and prop designs in literally half the time it used to take them, simply by the virtue of being able to undo things quickly and work in layers, which enable quicker development and experimentation with designs.