Production of cartoons....

Dustin Kesselberg

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I have been looking for some information on how cartoons are produced to answer a few questions I have but I can't find much.
My question is this: How are cartoons produced? When I say produced I mean the animations produced.

For instance when I watch a TV episode of the Simpson’s and I see homer moving around. How is that done? Is that done by drawing each and every single frame separately? Wouldn't that consist of literally tens of thousands of separately drawn frames? Wouldn't that take a team months just to produce 1 episode?

Is it done on paper? Isn't that a huge waste of paper?

When ever I see illustrations drawn on paper or painted I always see tiny little errors on the page where the artist has made a mistake and colored outside of the line or has drawn lines into each other showing it was clearly drawn by hand. However when I watch a cartoon on TV I don't see this. Why is that?
 
Dustin said:
I have been looking for some information on how cartoons are produced to answer a few questions I have but I can't find much.
My question is this: How are cartoons produced? When I say produced I mean the animations produced.

For instance when I watch a TV episode of the Simpson’s and I see homer moving around. How is that done? Is that done by drawing each and every single frame separately? Wouldn't that consist of literally tens of thousands of separately drawn frames? Wouldn't that take a team months just to produce 1 episode?

Is it done on paper? Isn't that a huge waste of paper?

When ever I see illustrations drawn on paper or painted I always see tiny little errors on the page where the artist has made a mistake and colored outside of the line or has drawn lines into each other showing it was clearly drawn by hand. However when I watch a cartoon on TV I don't see this. Why is that?
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I think these days, it depends on the cartoon. The techniques have changed over the years. Originally, it was done just as you suggest above: each frame is hand-drawn, and hand-coloured. They used transparent cellphane, not paper. That way, one guy could draw the background once, but somebody else could layer the character illustrations on top. (that's why Spider Man swings past the same buildings over and over again)

Modern shows, such as the Simpsons, are computer-animated, although the originals were certainly hand-drawn. I'm sure there was a transitional period where there was a mix.
 
The Simpsons is done on computers, but animations such as Studio Ghibli's (Spirited Away, Howl's Moving Castle etc) are hand-drawn, although some elements are CGI for depth.
 
There are a number of good books,magazines, videos and internet sites addressing animation and animation technique - they can provide far more/more accurate than you will get from random answers on this thread - and many of them will be the equivalent of peer-reviewed in scientific areas. Try Amazon, look at the reviews.

I own a good number of them - and have read most (not the bibliographies or collected biographies - they are research at 2nd level which I look up in when necessary). Some Disney related, But others too. Lot of good material on the computer end from ACM-Siggraph publications/DVD's. I'm on and off member of SIG national (off right now) and ongoing local chapter member.
 
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tkingdoll said:
The Simpsons is done on computers, but animations such as Studio Ghibli's (Spirited Away, Howl's Moving Castle etc) are hand-drawn, although some elements are CGI for depth.
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Even on hand-drawn animation, there's usually a lot of computer support and such.

Traditionally, most animation is done jointly between three separate groups.

A "key" animator will draw "key" frames, typically one or two per second that illustrate the bulk of the action. Of course, if you're showing frames at 24 fps, then that means that he's doing at most 1/12 of the work.

An "in-betweener" will draw the other frames. There are usually more of them and they are typically less-experienced than the key animator. Nowadays most in-betweening is done by computer, even at non-CGI shops.

The "clean-up" artist will then go and try to fix the problems that Dustin mentioned with drawing outside the lines and such. Although such problems are rarely an issue, since any individual frame will be on the screen for such a brief fraction of a second, a little paint slop here and there will not be noticeable.

The other trick is that much of the animation is done via stock footage of some sort. For example, Homer has the same walk in every cartoon. The real reason for this is that someone just made a thirty-frame loop of Homer walking and they use that loop every time they need it, putting in new backgrounds and clothes and stuff as needed.
 
If it's a traditional cel-animated cartoon, there are several stages. Usually the dialogue is recorded first. Then a team of keyframing animators create what amounts to "guide" animation based on a storyboard, where the action hits all the major beats, but leaves out all the intermediate frames. This usually accounts for maybe one frame for every second or two of animation. The animation then goes to an army of (lower-paid) artists to do "tweening," which fills in the animation between keyframes. Nowadays this part is frequently farmed out to studios in Korea, who pay sweat-shop wages to starving animators for this extremely tedious work. The medium differs from studio to studio, but pretty much everyone is working in a purely digital format now. Some software (Flash is one, and is used often for broadcast animation) can partially automate the tweening process, with varying degrees of success.

In the case of the Simpsons and other traditional cell-style TV animation, the frame rate is WAY lower than the 29.97 fps NTSC frame rate. More like 4-5 fps, I would guess. This keeps the process manageable (and cheaper)

3D animation is a completely different beast, and I'll leave it others to describe, as my own 3D project is beckoning -- nay, demanding that I get back to work before my deadline looms.
 
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I started buying animation cels a couple years before that "collectible" market really exploded. I was only getting "production" cels, i.e., those where I could freeze-frame a show/movie and say "That's my cel!!!"

Once the market took off, cels got to be outrageously expensive and I stopped getting them. I usually only paid $15-20 -- I think my most expensive one was $65. No, I never got one of the Disney cels, but several from the early 80's (Heavy Metal, Lord of the Rings, Anime, etc).

Still kinda wish I'd gotten that one cel of Kaa from The Jungle Book. ($600)
 
FYI, Snow White by Disney was the first animated full length feature. It was also the first animation to move the various layers of cells at different speeds. They moved the background slightly slower than the foreground to give a 3D effect to motion.
 
RenaissanceBiker said:
FYI, Snow White by Disney was the first animated full length feature.
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A common mistake. Snow White was released in 1937.

The first animated full length feature was The Adventures of Prince Achmed, released in 1926, a 65 minute long stop-motion animation that moved paper silhouettes around on a backlit screen. I really recommend watching it, it continues to be breathtaking even today.

ETA: my avatar is from that movie.
 
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RenaissanceBiker said:
FYI, Snow White by Disney was the first animated full length feature. It was also the first animation to move the various layers of cells at different speeds. They moved the background slightly slower than the foreground to give a 3D effect to motion.
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Some of the stuff the Fleischer studio was putting out a few years earlier was even cooler, IMO. They integrated actual model backgrounds with their cel animation, so Betty Boop and Popeye were walking through full, "real" 3D environments.
 
More basically. they are produced by the illusion of movement, or the Phi phenomenon, just like movies. A series of slightly different images is presented to your eyes and, if the timing is right, produce a smooth illusion of movement.
When I was a kid, I would take a bunch of 3X5 cards and draw slightly different pictures on each. When flipped, the illusion of movement was produced.
The first Powerpoint workshop I attended, I did the same thing.
 
Cartoons -- Usually 12 Drawings per Second

Buckaroo said:
In the case of the Simpsons and other traditional cell-style TV animation, the frame rate is WAY lower than the 29.97 fps NTSC frame rate. More like 4-5 fps, I would guess. This keeps the process manageable (and cheaper)
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Without going into the complication of NTSC video, which is 0.1% slower than film, so with rounded numbers for frame rates...

Most film and animation for TV is run at 24 frames per second. However, for cel animation, like the Simpsons and back to Snow White and Prince Achmed, drawings are most typically "double-framed" where each drawing is photographed twice unless very smooth of very fast motion is called for.

So, a typical cartoon really shows 12 drawings a second, which is adequate for most scenes. It's very dynamic. A character's running legs may be at 24 drawings a second, the talking head at 12 frames a second, and the body may be a single frame on for several seconds -- all on separate cell layers. A walking character may be animated at 12 drawings per second while the background is shifted 24 times a second. A character may be talking at 12 drawings per second, then need to gesture quickly, and for just a half second switch to 24 per second then back. Etc...

A primer on fame rates:

Movies ran at 24 frames per second (fps) since the sound era began, except in Europe and some other places where they run at 25 fps. (ergo American movies run slightly fast in Europe. European movies run slightly slower in the USA.)

European video runs at 25 fps -- same as their movie frame rate.

American movies (and cartoons) run on 30 fps American TV by showing, alternately, one film frame for one video frame, then the next film frame for one and a half video frames. This makes up the 24 -> 30 frame difference between film and video.

American video ran at 30 fps until the introduction of color, when it was reduced by 0.1% to allow efficient interleaving of the chroma signal with the monochrome signal and isolation from the audio signal. If you want to know why, read about it here, because it's way out of scope for a posting on how cartoons are made.
 
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Dustin said:
I have been looking for some information on how cartoons are produced to answer a few questions I have but I can't find much.
...
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Go rent some DVDs of animated movies. Many like Chicken Run, Hunchback of Notre Dame, Shreck, and some collections of the old cartoons (like Looney Tunes) have special features which explain how they made the cartoons. There is even a documentary on one of more famous animators: Chuck Jones. It even has a feature called "A Chuck Jones Tutorial: Tricks of the Cartoon Trade".
 
Jeff Corey said:
When I was a kid, I would take a bunch of 3X5 cards and draw slightly different pictures on each. When flipped, the illusion of movement was produced.
The first Powerpoint workshop I attended, I did the same thing.
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Then you discovered animated gifs?

:D
 
Mr. Scott said:
So, a typical cartoon really shows 12 drawings a second, which is adequate for most scenes. It's very dynamic.
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Thanks for that, Mr. Scott. I didn't realize the frame rate of newer TV cartoons was so high -- my perception must've been skewed by all the Bullwinkle and awful Hanna Barbera stuff I watched as a kid!

Mr. Scott said:
American movies (and cartoons) run on 30 fps American TV by showing, alternately, one film frame for one video frame, then the next film frame for one and a half video frames. This makes up the 24 -> 30 frame difference between film and video.
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That 3:2 pulldown is for the BIRDS. How I dearly wish we'd adopt a modern standard.

And don't even get me STARTED on interlacing... :)
 
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