Animation Tests and Process!

Hey, I figured I would show you some cool stuff today. So, you know how you keep hearing how animation makes drawing all "alive" and stuff? Jeesh, how exactly it do that? It's a freaking piece of paper! How does it go from the drawing to the things on the TV?
Well, it's something these genius can just do, OK?
Don't believe me?
Watch this.
These are pencil tests. Pencil tests are after an animator finishes some drawings, he photographs them and puts them into a short clip to see how they move. Animators do this a lot to figure out how their character moves.

OK, I think I'm getting carried away.
Hey, did you know before they had computers, people had to color every single frame by hand? That's 24 frames per second and feature length films can be 90 minutes long. Then they would shoot every single drawing. That's pretty insane.
If you're interested in how the whole process of making a film works, this is a good video.

Pretty cool, right? That video was still from a while back though. Some movies are made using 3-D animation. That's way more computer work.

Wow, that was interesting. And complicated looking.

Sorry, I don't know anything about this.

This is cool too.

Yeah, cool stuff. Combining 2-D and 3-D. That is the future.

Some people say that 2-D animation will die out someday. Everything will be done on computers so no one will need to draw anything. I disagree. There is this special appeal of hand drawn animation that computers will never be able to capture. A human touch, maybe? The computer translates our lines into computer lines. So some of our original meaning is lost. With drawing, our hands are on the paper and everything that we want to be there is there. Does that make sense? I don't know, I feel that some control is lost.

However, on the other hand, I think 3-D animation opens up a whole new world that 2-D animation can't. It's really amazing in its own way. 

Oh, by the way, if you haven't seen Paperman yet, you really should. 

That's it for today! Piece!