Lotsa questions about animated film making

**liolev** · May 5th, 2009, 04:31 PM

Well.. Honestly, It's kind of hard for me to ask specific questions, since
my knowledge in this area is very limited. I think for now I'll start asking a few
more general questions, and hopefully this will develop into a full discussion,
allowing also other interested people to ask what's on their mind.

For now I'm specifically talking about 2d animation, and refer to traditional
paper-pencil one and also the digital one.

About traditional animation:
What exactly are the tools needed for it?
Are there special papers,pencils?
Are the animation table and disc critically needed?
What camera is needed to work with the light-table?
And where the hack do I get all this Equipment from?

About digital hand-drawn:
What programs are recommended for the making of a short film?
What is the correct resolution and size one should work with ?
(If I'm exporting my frames from Photoshop to After Effects, for example)
And a really stupid one - I apologize: Are the black rectangles at the top
and bottom of the frame made by the movie creator? Or it happens while
screening it?

Sorry again for the tons of questions, and thanks ahead for
the ones who have the time and will to answer!

**DanielBodinof** · May 5th, 2009, 11:31 PM

About traditional animation:
What exactly are the tools needed for it?

An animation Disc, animation paper, lots of pencils, a good pencil sharpener, a light for the disc, a scanner, and a computer with photoshop and after effects or something similar.

Are there special papers,pencils?
Yes, i use acme standard punched paper, and ticonderoga HB soft pencils.

Are the animation table and disc critically needed?
If you're considering spending 8 or more hours a day on animation, then it makes a lot of sense to get one.

What camera is needed to work with the light-table?
screw the camera, just scan your drawings in sequentially and save as a png seq.

And where the hack do I get all this Equipment from?
website companies that specialize in 2-d animation equipment.

About digital hand-drawn:

What programs are recommended for the making of a short film?
Flash, and a video editing program, i like sony vegas

What is the correct resolution and size one should work with ?
This depends, 720 X 480 is a good place to start

(If I'm exporting my frames from Photoshop to After Effects, for example)
And a really stupid one - I apologize: Are the black rectangles at the top
and bottom of the frame made by the movie creator? Or it happens while
screening it?
I have no idea what you're talking about. keep it simple Flash >export png seq, import to quicktime pro as a sequence, dump out a high quality .mov, edit in vegas, dump out final

these are pearls i'm giving you here! took me many years to get it down to a science so use it well.

**liolev** · May 6th, 2009, 12:52 AM

Thank you very much for the comment!

By the way, My last question referred to these cases:

**airman** · May 6th, 2009, 01:09 AM

If you love traditional animation then try tvpaint too
http://www.tvpaint.com/v2/content/article/home/

**mbarq** · May 9th, 2009, 08:11 PM

Gonna add to this as well:

If you do end up getting a digicam, make sure you get one that has the function for remote shooting (most point-and-shoots don't do this). Also, if you plan on making "HD" videos, get a cam that can shoot at 1600x1200 (most of them do this). You can export the images to photoshop, run a batch script on all the images and resize them to a nice 720 resolution which will translate well into an HD res.

I personally use premiere since I have no idea how to use after effects. I did use vegas (7) before (much more user-friendly) fore regular movie editing, but premiere has some neat features vegas did not have (like its bridging to other adobe programs like media encoder, soundbooth, and photoshop). I'm sure there are easier ways to shoot animation, but that's the method that works with what I have.

If you REALLY want to make your life easy, get a cam with firewire and download AnimatorDV (it's free). You'll pretty much end up with a live cam that puts everything in sequence for you, and lets you play what you have so far. To make your life even simpler, than that, make sure it has a remote, then all you'll need to do is switch the frame and press a button.

A scanner is also a great tool, mine doesn't work anymore since I got vista...

Oh, and...you can make pretty much everything else

Just need to buy a cam/scanner some paper, pencils, and a computer.

Recommended book for all this: The Animation Book by Kit Laybourne. Checked it out of the library and I'm gonna try and purchase it soon. It really goes into detail about EVERYTHING animation, from a registration system, to field guides, oxberry cams, and suggestions on how to make even camera stands. This book has it all, seriously. For theory and all that other stuff, you'll want Illusion of Life, Animator's Survival Kits, etc, etc. If you want the technical aspect, get this book, the information in it was something I could not find anywhere, be it books (save for maybe Preston Blair), the internet, or even forums; truly for the complete noob

.

Also, for camera diy, check this out:

http://www.diyphotography.net/

Probably one of my favorite sites in the world. Good luck!

**kikindaface** · May 9th, 2009, 08:29 PM

Hey dude ! Yeah, i totally agree with airman, tvpaint is a great software, i sue it, and it works well ! For the square on the top and the bottom, i think you might talk about the pegbar and the punched paper, well, it's only the way to hold the paper, you know, nothing specal ! For the books, it's the same than metalclay, richard William's book, and the illusion of life ! But if you wanna start bey the begining of the beginning

i found a nice blog of a student at animationmentor.com, he posted some of his 3d basic exercises, but you can do it in 2d, it's the same : http://www.dave-logan.com/weblog/?cat=16&paged=2 ! Enjoy dude ! And begin your animation's sketchbook here ! I think there are many great artists who will be glad to help you ! Cheers

**liolev** · May 10th, 2009, 09:02 PM

Wow, thanks for the warm and helpful comments you all!

Walid, I will be posting here soon. I'm studying rough sketches
with the Pencil&Paper program (also recommended).
And.. both of the books you've mentioned are probably crossing the sea right now waiting for me to read them. Soon, I hope!

Thanks again guys!

**Keng** · May 10th, 2009, 10:51 PM

For pencil tests make sure to use a video camera if you're drawing with paper. A digital camera will take a picture everytime and even a digital camera will open and close the shutters. These shutters wear out and even if you've only been using the camera for a week the shutters take a count of how many times they've opened and close. Their limit is somewhere in the thousands but when animating that adds up REALLY fast. You take it back to the store and complain after a week and they'll check the shutter count and tell you you're out of luck.

A video camera will give you lower quality of image, but it's not going to wear out as quickly. Toonboom is the current industry standard I believe, but there's also flipbook and then the free program Monkey Jam.

Scanning usually gives a better result for final images than taking digital photos. Or so I'm told by my teachers. Haven't really done a comparison myself.

As for the letterbox/envelope/black bars/resolution: and you were chiding me about worrying about the technical work. (sorry, had to say it

) That can happen either by stylistic choice placed there by the artist, or, as happened with my little youtube video: the original video was done in high def. I can't remember the exact ratio but mine was done at ... I think 1720 by 1080. In this case youtube puts the black bars on for you, but when we were exporting our standard def videos for sound editing purposes we had to resize our HD screen to fit into a SD screen. Thus, we created the black bars in that particular case, while youtube did it for me in the other case.

In the case you've shown it looks like it was shot at a ratio wider than HD. Something equivalent to 70mm film, then refitted to fit inside an HD ratioed box similar to how I resized my HD to fit into an SD box.

**Earendil** · May 12th, 2009, 06:38 PM

Everything regarding aspect ratios that will further illuminate where black bars come from.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspect_ratio_(image)

Books I'd recommend are the Animators Survival Kit, and The Illusion of Life for starters.

Analyze your favorite animated films as well. There's all kinds of deliberate visual and story choices going on. Ask why the creators chose one way or another, and see if you can find those answers.

**forsaken dreams** · May 18th, 2009, 06:47 PM

Originally Posted by liolev

About traditional animation:
What exactly are the tools needed for it?
Are there special papers,pencils?
Are the animation table and disc critically needed?
What camera is needed to work with the light-table?
And where the hack do I get all this Equipment from?

All you really need is paper and pencil and a scanner and computer. If you're not going to do clean up and color digitally, then you could use anything your mind can dream up - water colors, color pencil, markers, cut out, oil paint, etc. etc.
If you're interested in learning what is standard in the feature industry, then pick up some reams of 12 field punched paper. There's a special punch used for those papers, and you'll need to get a special peg bar to go with it.
The cheap solution is to use a three hole punch, three hole peg bar you could make yourself, and regular 8x11 sheets of paper.
Pencils, whatever you like to animate with is fine. Cheap colored pencil, blue or red used to be pretty common. I generally like any soft HB pencils.
Animation disc/table are not critical, but will help your back, arms, etc. There are cheap light table solutions with build in peg bars.
In the glory days, the source for a lot of this material and supply came from Cartoon Colour (they only exist online now):
http://www.cartooncolour.com/

About digital hand-drawn:
What programs are recommended for the making of a short film?
What is the correct resolution and size one should work with ?
(If I'm exporting my frames from Photoshop to After Effects, for example)
And a really stupid one - I apologize: Are the black rectangles at the top
and bottom of the frame made by the movie creator? Or it happens while
screening it?

There are lot of free pencil test type programs on the web you can use. For color finish, photoshop is popular. painter or photoshop for the backgrounds. after effects for compositing (great for effects, layers, etc - basically it's photoshop over time). premiere or final cut for final cutting of sound and picture.

Resolution/size is whatever you like. If you want something more theatrical, you'd go for a widescreen 1.85 aspect or 2.35, TV release 1.33, although today with HD you'd want to go for 16:9

Resolution of scans, depends on your final output. HD is 1920x1080, so you'd want to scan in your images to that final resolution if not higher.

Hardware - you need a computer, flatbed scanner that will fit your paper (12 field is large, but you don't have to use it all), cheap digicam for pencil testing.

The black bars you would likely put it on yourself, in aftereffects or premiere/final cut. The black letterboxing bars basically make up the difference between the aspect of your film and your output medium. If you're film is 16:9 or HD, you won't have any issues burning to DVD format. But if you plan to output to something like 1.33 TV format at say 640x480 pixel resolution, you will have to put in the bars yourself to make up the difference in the top and bottom. These days with digital media it's not really something you have to worry about as much, as most programs will handle it correctly when printing to tape media.