Animation Before Computers

when you're watching any animated piece of media I think it's easy to forget that you're watching drawings move excuse me what kind of Harry Potter dark magic is this since when did drawings move I drew a picture of a dog once but it hasn't moved at all not even to play fetch well what you're really watching isn't actually moving what you're really watching is a series of individual frames played at a rapid speed on a liquid crystal display screen that emit phot protons into your eyeball receptors that get processed by your brain into what it perceives as movement it was all a trickery you see a ruse that you fell for hookline and sinker now a lot of you probably already know about the concept of the frame rate but what I want you to understand is that in cartoons every head turn every blink every everything that happens had to be meticulously drawn by a person who studied anatomy and knows about physics and movement knowing full well that their drawing was only going to be seen for a fraction of a fraction of a second and you weren't even watching you are on your phone today I would like to turn back the sands of time and talk about some of the ways animators were able to achieve the illusion of life without the help of modern technology I hope by watching you can better understand and appreciate the medium of Animation as much as I do because the amount of dedication and hard work that goes into just making drawings move is unreal and if you're like me and already know a bit about animation history and find this kind of stuff fascinating don't worry I didn't have a lot of friends growing up either now we know that animation is just copious amounts of drawings being shown in Rapid succession but how the are we going to get people to look at copious amounts of drawings in Rapid succession without a computer well believe it or not there's actually quite a few things we can do without even having to use a camera one method we can try is by drawing out all of our frames on a stack of paper I know that's the timec consuming part but after we're done doing that we'll hang up all our drawings side by side on a very long wall then we'll ride a bike next to the wall and continuously have our head turned facing the wall and if we pedal fast enough we'll Zip by the drawing so fast that it'll look like they're moving Hey look it's a horse okay you're probably thinking that's not how I animation is made and you're right this method of Animation is totally impractical but not impossible this type of human transportational animation has been done before in subway tunnels with the results looking pretty legit I mean this minion looks like he's totally moving I might as well be in the cinema and for those of the gamer variety YouTuber pale of paars was able to achieve this method of Animation flawlessly in in Minecraft but if you wanted to do something more practical you could instead take your drawings off the really long wall and then stack them up like a book and then just flip through the paper quickly making a flip book if you have some sticky notes lying around that you forgot about in a junk drawer somewhere you can make a pretty simple ball bouncing animation really quickly with the results being you know kind of cool a fun fact this type of Animation was featured in every single copy of the anamorphs books which I never read I would just flip through the pages and watch the children in the corner transform into elephants and starfish and this weird blue alien Centaur thing and what the heck was going on in these books man okay this next method of showing people drawings and Rapid succession it's going to be a little bit crazy I don't want to freak you out but it's basically on the same level as rocket science okay we're going to have to jump up a whole dimension for this one what you're going to do is sculpt out a threedimensional figure of whatever you want to animate let's animate I don't know this guy jumping so first I'm going to sculpt my guy just standing there just being a dude this will be frame one now okay I know some of you are probably thinking oh I see where this is going you're going to take a picture of the sculpture then change its pose slightly take a picture of that and then slightly change the pose over and over while continuously starting and stopping the camera making it seem like her subject has some sort of motion no actually we're not going to be doing any of that cameras haven't been invented yet in this hypothetical what we're doing instead is making a whole new sculpture that will be the next frame of our animation so it'll be our guy again bending his legs a little bit getting ready for the jump all right neat that's frame two now let's do this a total of I don't know 16 times that sounds good let's also make the 16th sculpture look like it came before the first sculpture so you understand it's going to go from the 16th sculpture back to the first one it's it's a loop like a Tik Tock we're doing a ticktock loop now we're going to take all 16 of our sculptures and space them out evenly on a round table sorry Arthur I'm going to need this now make the table spin that's that's on you to figure out how to do I don't know maybe get the bike guy from the first example to pedal or something I doubt any of you are actually following along but if you are put all your sculptures on a spinning table right now and make it quick all right I'm not going to wait for you and now for the final step turn your lights on and off really quickly and if we did everything right the effect we get is mesmerizing what's happening is that the light shines at the first sculpture and then we turn the lights off cool then as the table spins the light will turn back on when the second sculpture is in the same position as the first so we turn the lights on when the sculptures are in the same spot and we turn them off when they're not and what we end up seeing is all of our figures standing in a circle performing the animation and we don't even register that the whole thing is spinning and congratulations you all know what a zoat Trope is now which I know is a pretty fun word that you can whip out at parties like yeah I know a unique word that starts with the letter Z that isn't xylophone another fun thing about the zoat Trope was that a 3D rendering of one was featured in the season 2 opening of mob psycho 100 so that's what that spinning thing in the intro was it was a zo Trope zoat Trope okay let's talk about one more way we can show people drawings in quick succession without a camera and it's the easiest method by far so all we need is this glitchy abstract drawing like this huh pretty cool and random right except it's not it's not random at all I lied every line here is placed very deliberately let me show you something if we take this floppy transparent sheet full of vertical bars and cover up most of the drawing hey look at that the outline we end up seeing looks like one of them kitty cats now if we Slide the transparent sheet over and reveal different parts of the drawing huh it looks like a kitty cat but in a different position and if we keep sliding this sheet over revealing different parts of the drawing look at him go this is called a barrier grid animation and with the right bass drawing you can make all sorts of animations that don't hurt to look at at all and also I just want to point out that a barrier grid animation was also featured in the season 2 opening of mop psyo 100 hey do you guys want to watch anime later so all these different methods of showing people drawings in quick succession I don't know if there's a word for it but I'm calling it physical animation like animation you can hold and touch with your fingers you know all those warrior cat animation memes those that's digital animation right this is physical it's the real deal but there's one form of physical animation that we haven't talked about yet that's unarguably the most popular and the most important form of physical animation to have ever existed on Earth excuse me okay now we're going to use cameras okay they they finally figured it out with the invention of film showing people multiple images in quick succession had never been easier now we can take something from real life burn an image of that into a film strip process it and then shine a light through it again to get a recreation of the image and if we roll this whole strip of film over this strobe light we get moving pictures that's why they're called movies cuz they move what the a lot of times film was used to capture the movements of real people but it was also used in the same way to capture the movements of people of the animated variety let's take a look at an old old cartoon the 1968 animated Batman series The First Time Batman has ever appeared in the animation form you know the really really old Batman cartoon that had anaman AAS appear on the screen during fight scenes Boom Pow Kow except they didn't they didn't do that in the cartoon visually showing the verbiage of impacts was exclusively an Adam West thing in the cartoon you got to see those impacts hey can I ask you a thought-provoking question what the am I looking at I know it's Batman high kicking a goon but how is it moving this Frame was captured on film so there had to be a physical camera to capture it right so where is this drawing it's not on a computer computers in the 60s look like this so where is this so every animated movie and animated TV show and animated anime before the year 2000ish used what's called cell animation this Frame of Batman was hand painted that's right painted with special paint onto a transparent Celluloid sheet or cell and then this transparent sheet was laid on top of a hand painted background and then this goon that got kicked well he had to be painted on his own cell sheet too and then this image of sandwiched art was captured onto a film thing strip sh then the Batman cell would come off and be replaced by a whole new hand painted cell of Batman and then that frame would be captured and then the whole process would repeat again and again until the shot was done this one shot that lasted a little over a second used 14 different hand painted drawings of Batman and the Goon had six just for a second now because having to hand paint 20 different images for 1 second is insane there are some things we can do to cut corners without having to sacrifice too much quality like in this shot Robin takes five frames to turn his head but his body doesn't move so we can paint his body once on its own cell and now we only need to paint five different heads and since we already have all the frames painted we can just use the same frames in Reverse to make his head turn the other way and you don't need to pay a background artist to pain a background if you just use blue a big part of cell animation was being able to animate pieces of a character independently of each other that's actually why so many old cartoon characters had accessories around their necks so the animators could separate the characters's heads from their bodies making it easier to animate Fred wasn't rocking that ass cot just cuz it was trendy one of the nice things about using a computer to animate is that you can play back what you've animated and clearly see if your timing is correct and if there's any quick adjustments you can make being able to see what your previous frames are is so important there's actually a term for it called onion skinning but animators pre 2K didn't have computers to rewatch their work so here's what they did instead before they even put paint onto a cell they first had to draw all their frames out onto a piece of paper and they didn't work on the frames in chronological order like they didn't go okay I just drew the first frame of Batman okay here's the second frame of Batman okay I'm going to do do the third frame of Batman okay okay you do the fourth frame though that way of animating is called Straight Ahead animation and some people use it but the results look pretty chaotic but it's still used pretty effectively for effects and concert visuals but most of the time animators will animate a character from pose to pose they'll draw out all the important key poses a character will make on paper and then they'll hold the pieces of paper between each of their fingers and then quickly flip between their drawings just just to get an idea of what a drawing that goes in between those key poses would look like that's called inbetweening just so you know and they still wouldn't be able to get a full playback of their animation until every pencil drawing was captured on film and processed they just had to trust their page flipping technique and their highly trained eyeballs and go yeah that looks about right let's bring out the paint and because there are hundreds of shots all having to be animated without a computer can you really blame the animators that some shots of Batman looked like this or this it was old remember old things are bad okay I kind of have a secret remember when I said let's look at an old old cartoon well I might have overemphasized how old the Batman cartoon is by the time the Batman cartoon came out the movie Bambi had been out for 25 years and are you you aware of how fluid the animation in Bambi is dude Bambi goes so hard Walt literally brought in Deer from the woods into their studio just so the animators could be like oh that's neat that's how deers move I okay I understand this more now what the I honestly thought the Batman show came out way earlier in the animation timeline because of how it looked obviously these two things were created by different Studios with different animators and different budgets and TV animation always has to create more animation per budget but all the same techniques and equipment used to make an episode of Batman were the exact same techniques and equipment used to make an episode of Bambi I don't mean that as a dunk on Batman I'm more so impressed with how amazing Bambi looks especially since while it came out World War II was currently happening so because Celluloid sheets were used to animate every TV show movie and Anime there has ever been before the year 2000ish by my calculations there are millions of cell sheets out there like this single frame of Batman kicking it's on a cell sheet somewhere and more importantly who owns it many of the cells that still exist have been sold to the general public but because of how the paint and time works cell sheets need to be kept very well preserved so since cells are very hard to preserve and because they're not making any new ones some cells are worth a lot of money this cell and original background from my neighbor todoro sold for $84,000 while I'm writing the script there's currently an auction going on for this cell from The Jungle Book for $110,000 and I own this cell of Squidward laughing that I got at of convention for $300 it's uh not an original background the background's a print and it's actually not even the correct background for the the shot but I'm just pointing out that not all cells are thousands of dollars you know they made millions of these so you can you can get a sell from a TV show for for a couple hundred and then you get to own a frame of Animation like you that belongs to you now which I think is super cool this moment of Squidward laughing belongs to me and you can't have it so if you ever visit some friends who really like cartoons there's a good chance that they have an animation cell somewhere on display and those are just a handful of ways that animators were able to achieve the illusion of life without a computer and I do just want to say just because something was animated on a computer doesn't make it any less artistic yes computers make the process easier and more streamlined absolutely it's still a human expressing their creativity and being in control of that did you hear me it's a human expressing themselves and being in control creativity creatively I hope you enjoyed learning a bit about animation history there's still quite a few things that I didn't get to cover like how did Walt animate this panning parallaxing shot of Bambi where the trees move on separate layers what kind of technology did they create to to make trees move at different speeds so much hard work and talent is involved in every piece of Animation you see and because of Animation we're able to tell incredible stories that are nothing like anything we ever see in our day-to-day lives and before I go can we talk about the intro to The Batman series please oh my God I just want to go over some quick announcements I'll be quick don't worry the scribble Showdown tour is coming back in January to a city near you but this time the kitties aren't invited that's right only the adults this time leave the children at home with the babysitter if you're like me and are behind on your Christmas shopping there's some new holiday merch in the merch store so check it out but if the shipping won't get there in time then there's also the oddballs graphic novel available in retail stores like Target and Barnes & Noble and Walmart I'll probably see you all in the new year so uh Happy new year thank you

Channel: TheOdd1sOut

Views: 8,153,232

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Id: 6ecTO22ulRM

Length: 18min 16sec (1096 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 16 2023