Speaking from my experience in high school art class, my instructor advised the whole class to never try drawing from memory as without some kind of reference, your subject will not be consistent or fully formed. The same techniques goes for animators. Before any animated film goes into production, studios would hire actors to play out and film scenes in the film’s narrative. This process offers many benefits to an animated production, “As resource material, it gave an overall idea of a character, with gestures and attitudes, an idea that could be caricatured. As a model for the figure in movement, it could be studied frame by frame to reveal the intricacies of a living form’s actions” (Johnston and Thomas, 1981, p. 320-321).
By filming actors, their performance gives the animators rich insight in body language, the intricacies of the face when it expresses emotions, or how costumes would behave if the character did this particular action. Sometime the actors would make a big impact in the little things put in their performance, “Helene Stanley…portrays the gentle Anita in 101 Dalmatians while Mary Wickes is her overbearing flamboyant friend Cruella de Vil. Each actress contributed her own ideas on personality and mannerisms within the framework of the action devised for this particular scene” (Johnston and Thomas, 1981, p. 320). Or sometimes out spontaneity, the actor provides their behavioral tics and idiosyncrasies. For example, actress Sherri Stoner would serve as reference actress for both Princess Ariel and Belle, and between takes she would bite her lip in nervousness like Ariel or sometimes brush away a lock of hair from her face like Belle.
When shooting reference material, the following questions are considered. Is the material ready for animation? Does it fit in the story, the character, the mood, tempo, or overall idea? Is it entertaining? Is it just exposition or character building? If we get some entertaining material, can it be used effectively? Am I helping the animator? And in the words of Stanley Kubrick, “Is anything happening worth putting on film?”
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| A rotoscope image of Gandalf. Ralph Bakshi was infamous for this. Link |
Also when filming for animation, care is needed when using it. Animation is a caricature or parody of real life, and it is important to never trace over the material to produce an animated performance. That would be rotoscoping and it’s not animation. Rotoscoping is an animation technique, however, it’s a technique exclusively for inanimate objects like vehicles, to help the animator save the trouble in drawing a rigid, three-dimensional object in motion. The most famous example being Cruella de Vill’s car, which was a white model with black outlines that would photograph as it was animated via stop-motion, to appear it was in motion. The photographs would be Xeroxed and the animators had an inked car cel that need to be colored.
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| Animating the car chase. Link |
When dealing with animal characters, studios would introduce the animators with real animals in order to associate its movement and behavior. An animator would study how an animal would display emotion through its ears or the state of its tail. Mythical creatures on the other hand, an artist was forced to use their imagination. Johnston and Thomas (1981) reported this was an experience Woolie Reitherman had when animating the dinosaurs in Fantasia’s “Rite of Spring” sequence: “It was a disarming request since there was little research possible on what a real dinosaur might have been like, but Woolie was not bothered. He dipped into his imagination, combined that with a few raw animal things he had seen, and, working closely with Bill Roberts, who was directing that sequence, came up with scenes dinosaurs that seemed to be just the way people always imagined these giants should be, if ever they had thought about it before!” (pp. 345).
Works Cited
Johnston, O., & Thomas F. (1981). The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation. New York: Disney Editions.
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