I love animation but I have no desire or skill to actually do it. I was brought up in the 70s and my childhood viewing included a rich assortment of Eastern European and Canadian cartoons as well as the usual WB, Tom and Jerry, and stuff like the now renewed and revitalised Roobard. And now I'm still seeing great animations on TV, often for kids, sometimes not. At 6 o'clock I ritually sit down to watch Charlie and Lola with my 5 year old. It is a work of unbridled genius.
But as a musician I just love the very special relationship between animated images and music/sound. As I've said on a couple of other posts here, I'm keen to try and do some audio. So I could really do with someone pointing me to a primer on the practical aspects of making animation, not because I want to learn how to do it, but because I just want to know more about it.
How many people does it take to make a 5min film? What do they do? What does the production process involve? How long does it take? What kind of techonligy is involed? How are computers used in Cell animation these days? How and when is music included? And.... and..... and?
Can anyone give me a couple of pointers? Thanks in advance. I've learned a lot from this great forum already.
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Suzuki GSR600
How are animations made?
How are animations made?
Some say that there is no such word as "animations," although there was a major motion picture recently produced by a company called Aardman Animations. (Leave it to the English to not know their own damned language, as evidenced by some of our forum members.)
According to some, and according to all the dictionaries I could reference, there is no plural form of "animation."
Similarly, you'd never say "I sure like all the musics that are out there" or "I like the filmmakings of some directors."
As for your questions, you should probably just pick up a book at a library.
I am with Harvey Human on this, you need to get to a library or book store. There are a number of basic how-to books for you to choose from. Oh and there some good info right here on AWN main page, internet, you got to love it.
I would not base any English gammar lessons on the English. Everyone that I know from the UK speaks the language terribly.
"Don't want to end up a cartoon in a cartoon graveyard" - Paul Simon
Thanks for the reading list L_Finston. I'll have to see if I can find any of these. It's really an overview of the production process rather than a technical walkthrough I'm looking for, so I'll have a look.
@ Wontobe and Harvey. You don't use the word 'animation' as a shorthand for 'animated film' then? As in "there was a really quirky animation on Channel 4 last night"?
Oh well. I've found something out already. Even if only that animators are just as pedantic as musicians ;)
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Ducati Apollo
As I said, "animation" is a singular word with no plural form, so saying "there was A(n) ... animation" is fine. "I like that animation" can refer to one film or many, just as "I like that music" can refer to one song or many.
Saying "animation are ..." or "animations are ..." or "cartoonings are ..." would be frowned on by many professors.
Hey, you're the one who wanted to learn. :rolleyes: Might as well start by learning how the word is used.
If you can say there was 'an animation' you can say there were 'two animations'
Your music example is different. If the word 'animation' was like the word 'music', you'd be able to watch 'animation' but not 'an animation' just like you can listen to music but not 'a music,' so you're sort of being inconsistent.
In grammar it's a universal rule that if a word can take the definite or indefinite article you can pluralise it. See. Musicians are great at pedantry. ;)
Anyway, as Harvey said, maybe it's a UK/USA thing.
I think you just made that rule up, Fidelio.
We can say "Salsa is a music for lovers," but can we say "Hip-hop and grunge are some musics of the young"?
You can say "I like the brightness of this room," but you can't say "I like the brightnesses of these rooms."
I could go on: "the journalism," "the Christianity," "the cartooning," "the milk," etc.
Similarly we say "I watched the anime" and "I watched an anime," but I don't think "I'll watch some animes" is a correct use of the word.
You may be correct that "animations" should be accepted. I'm just telling you that it often isn't, although it may eventually become more acceptable since language is an ever-evolving thing.
You can pluralise all these things. "At the gallery I was surprised by the different brightnesses of the rooms" etc. 'The Christianities of the Roman Catholic and the Greek Orthodox churches, although they bear some similarities, are markedly different.'
A bit clumsy, but grammatically OK. I'd certainly say that if a noun takes the indefinite article (as you've agreed 'animation' does) then it's always OK to pluralise.
At this point, I think we really need an English scholar.
The only reference I could find, after a quick search, was the following from the English Language Institute at the University of Delaware:
http://www.udel.edu/eli/questions/g02b.html
I'll start a thread to see what the local community thinks of this issue.
If it's a non-count noun then you can't use 'a', the indefinite article, with it. There's a mistake in that quote BTW, enthusiasm is a count noun, but excitement is not.
Hey, I am an English scholar, or a language scholar at least. I have a joint honours in linguistics.
If you can have 'an animation' you can certainly have 'animations'
Unless, and I kid you not this is perfectly possible, animation is the only word in the language that takes the indefinite article but can't be pluralised. Which would be kind of cool.
Did I mention already that I'm a pedant too?
I don't want to hijack your thread any further, so I'll move my response to the new thread. :)
Thanks again Laurence. I suppose I was just wondering how the process of animation relates to filmmaking in general, and other creative things like making music or photography.
20 years ago it took tens of thousands of £££s worth of kit and hours and hours of time to make a decent 3 minute piece of music. Now it can be knocked up it a home studio worth about £1200 in a matter of days. Animation is still far more labour intensive I suppose. When I first logged on here asking for someone to collaborate on my Moby Dick piece I sort of expected the animation scene to be a bit like the music scene.
I thought some enthusiastic semi-pro could get results that the man on the street couldn't tell from the stuff being produced by pro production companies. It's not really like that, though is it? So my chances of getting my 'animated film' ;) made are slim, unless I can get some funding.
I'm doing some work on sound and music for a grad film, so I guess I'll find out a bit more about it in due course. I'll try and do a few more. The only work I've really done that actually involves synching to visuals is TV idents.
That was an really informative post BTW. Thanks.
Thanks Laurence. You're a toff and no mistake.
Adding sound would have to be done with a video editing application. Maybe he can get some free time at his local college, if he knows the right people or is a student.
I don't really want to become an animator. (I couldn't anyway. I can't draw to save myself) I'm just interested in scoring animation and doing sound design, so I wanted to find out more about how it is made. Like I said, I'm working on a grad film just now, so that should give me more knowledge, and, not least, a decent showreel. I know a fair bit about adding synched sound; I can do that in Cubase.
I've done music for TV and video quite a bit already.
I've ordered a couple of these books at the local library though. That should help me a bit.
You need to go to the book store and look up "Desigining Sound For Animation" by Robin Beauchamp; published by Focal Press.
Since I'm a layman, I can probably describe the process (as I know it) in layman's terms.
First thing: Write the script. What do you want to happen? What do you want said? What do you want to see happen visually? Animation scripts "run longer" than live-action scripts. Live-action runs about one minute of film-time per page. There is a special way of formatting the descriptions and dialog of a live-action script that makes it work out very closely to this 1:1 ratio.
Live-action directors are given locations and dialog and very little else. Most of the visual appearance of the film is left to his discretion, so the physical descriptions are generally left open to interpretation.
Because of this, live-action can be reshot if the director is not happy with it. You've seen it on TV, "Take 32! Take 86!" With animation having to be drawn one frame at a time, it would be financially impossible to do 32 takes of a one-minute sequence. Once in a while, finished animation is scrapped or changed, but if so, it's only done once. Usually, those decisions are made while the animation is still in the "rough" stage.
Second thing: Character design. Artists take the input from the writer and director to create visual interpretations of the characters and settings. This is the "casting" part of the movie.
Third: Storyboard. They know the story and they know what the pieces look like. The storyboard artist puts these together and draws out the story like shots in a live-action film, similar to a comic book but with directions drawn in that show movement.
Fourth: Animatic. Before taking this storyboard and spending a ton of money turning it into a film, companies will spend a little bit more money and make a rough version of the movie. This is the point where I am right now in my own film. Story is done, characters are done and Jabberwocky drew me a ton of artwork. For our first pitch, we just showed the sketches. This time, I used the simple "Windows Movie Maker" and "Magix Music Maker" to create my animatic.
I started with a rough soundtrack. MMM lets me piece sounds, music, dialog, whatever I want to, together to make an audio track. If I want to change something, I can move it, add it, remove it, distort it or a lot of different things.
Step one was to just read the dialog for the whole cartoon. I cut it into pieces and placed it on the timeline according to the pacing of the cartoon. Then I scouered the 'net for "free to download/free to use" sound effects, and cut them into my soundtrack.
Step two was to take my audio file, place it into WMM, import all of Jab's drawings, and tweak how long each picture was on screen, to coincide with the soundtrack. When this was done, I had a rough version of my cartoon. I can see where I need sound adjustments. I can see where I need more pics. I can even see where some story tweaking takes place.
(**NOTE** With a professional animatic, they will do more than just show the storyboard sketches one after the other. They will take drawings, lay them over drawn bacgrounds, move them around with Flash or a similar program, do zooms and fades - basically really make a miniature version of the cartoon. I don't have the tools to do that. I do have a few frames where I played with Jab's sketches, turning one drawing into three so I could better communicate movement - but it's hardly "The Incredibles." The animatics on that DVD are a lot of fun to watch and I learned a ton.)
The main thing I learned through this was that animation really does read a lot shorter in the script than live-action. I had a twelve page script and was told it was too long. I trimmed it to nine, for a seven minute cartoon. Nine and a half pages actually only came out to 6 minutes of cartoon, because a lot of the length was tied up in physical descriptions that don't translate into actual screen time like dialog or movement would.
Anyway, fifth would be the soundtrack. Now that you know the pacing, you can record professional dialog and sound effects. Now, I have to be truthful here... I don't know where music fits into this. I"m going to make an assumption that, with a large theatrical production like "Lion King", ALL of the sound including music, is done first. It is my belief that, with a short like mine, the music is scored to the finished short since it's usually one guy with a lot of synth equipment and not the London Symphony Orchestra. However, I could be wrong in that because humor depends on pacing and making humor fit music seems smarter than making music fit humor. You can make a pie hit a guy on the fourth beat easier than you can make the fourth beat come when the pie hits the guy, know what I'm saying?
Finally, sixth, you do the actual animation. On a big production, each of the main characters will have a lead animator. On a small production, one guy - the director - will draw key frames, and other artists will fill in the blanks. Backgrounds are drawn. They are shot/scanned/imported/rendered or whatever, depending on the method of production. The soundtrack and the animation all have a time scale built in so they can be synched.
I did learn one cool thing from reading the books that I have. You know in live movies where the clapboard is slammed at the beginning of a take? They did that to make a loud "smack" sound so that they'd have a fixed point for synching the sound with the film. If that board coming down and the "smack" were in synch, then Clark Gable wouldn't look like he was talking in a Godzilla film. Now, it's all digital with time codes, but they still use the slate to show the take number and so on.
i have a link on our production blog as well on a short step by step thingy if anyone unfamiliar is interested.
You know, I think I do! Thanks
I should think so too: It's their film! I don't know if animations are generally given to composers with a temp track, but film and TV stuff is. The skill of the composer is about trying to listen to the temp track, talk to the director and get the sound that the director would create if he was a musician.
My last paid job was a TV ident. It came with a temp score which sounded like it had been knocked up in garageband, but between that and the speil I got from the company, I was able to come up with something which was sort of like what he had in his head, but better. Doing what you're told is an essential skill for media composers, especially lowly ones like me.
A film composer has to be prepared to do what he's told. I guess sound design is the same but I'm a bit of a neophyte.
Oh, One more thing.
With modern techonolgy, mickeymousing aside, it's really easy for a composer to come up with a score which get's all the hits bang on. Writing music a cue where the 4th beat syncs with the pie in face is a basic skill. 'Mickeymousing ' is used as a pejorative term in film scoring, where the music follows the action too closely and obviously.
I just wanted to ask, does animation still normally work by fitting the music to the animatic, and then syncing the animation to the music, or is music added later in post production, like in film and TV?
And thanks people. You've been a mine of information.
scratch dialogue, sound fx pre sync (animatic stage)
finals+score post sync.
I know people like Carl Stalling could do it on the fly, because first of all, he had an encyclopedic knowledge of music, and second, he honed his craft playing music for silent films. It didn't seem to phase him at all at Warners when he was restricted to public domain or Warner published titles only.
I know this is an animation discussion, but I couldn't help but imagine John Williams scoring music for Star Wars. You listen to "Duel of the Fates" and it seems obvious to me that the film footage was edited to fit the musical piece - timing (the rhythm of lightsabers clashing in time to the song), I don't even know what to call it, but when there was a dramatic point in the music, they zoomed in close up to Jinn and Kenobi and Maul individually in time with the music. I can't see anyone writing a complex piece like that that fits so perfectly with the film footage if the film footage wasn't shot/edited in a "musical" manner.
Does that make any sense?
makes perfect sense. and its not that hard to do i think. if you have know your characters and feel the music then someone with the resources of Lucas shouldnt have a problem with creating a montage like that