Paperman

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SWillie!
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Post by SWillie! »

Yes, it definitely seems like that would have been the early idea stages of what this turned into. The lines really do look great - in the software they showed us, the "brushes" they were using were named "Glen Keane", "Jin Kim", "Shiyoon Kim", etc... all artists at the studio. So they have converted their style of drawing into a brush that can be consistent and show throughout the film.
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Post by Rumpelstiltskin »

Sounds like it then ended up as something more than what was originally planned. It's always exciting when Disney decide to experiment with the animation medium. Except from Pixar, Disney is the only studio I am aware of that is actually trying to move both hand-drawn and CGI forward. DreamWorks and others are making great animation too, but they are mostly just improving what is already there.

A quote from an article I just found:

"Keane’s dedicated draw over has been institutionalized — the studio now does it routinely, and there’s even a new interface being developed that translates hand-drawn into CG. Meanwhile, there’s the upcoming Paperman short being directed by John Kahrs and featuring a technique co-created by Eric Daniels. They have Keane to thank for helping pave the way."

Link: http://www.billdesowitz.com/?p=4940

Whatever his future plans are, I wouldn't complain if starting his own blog was one of them, a place where he could post his thoughts and ideas.

Either way, it's gonna be interesting to see if the new style can offer everything the traditional animation on paper can, for instance in the production of a new Donald Duck or Mickey Mouse cartoon. Or how much time and money there is between the production of a movie like The Princess and the Frog and a movie made with this technique. If the answer is yes to the first question, and about the same or less to the other, then I guess the old way of doing things will really be gone for good in the nearest future. What this means for Toon Boom Animation remains to be seen.
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Post by Sotiris »

SWillie! wrote:The lines really do look great - in the software they showed us, the "brushes" they were using were named "Glen Keane", "Jin Kim", "Shiyoon Kim", etc... all artists at the studio.
Do you remember anything else from the behind-the-scenes presentation about 'Paperman' you haven't told us yet? Any other interesting tidbits about the short's production history?
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SWillie!
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Post by SWillie! »

Sotiris wrote:
SWillie! wrote:The lines really do look great - in the software they showed us, the "brushes" they were using were named "Glen Keane", "Jin Kim", "Shiyoon Kim", etc... all artists at the studio.
Do you remember anything else from the behind-the-scenes presentation about 'Paperman' you haven't told us yet? Any other interesting tidbits about the short's production history?
Sorry I never responded to that before haha... but no, not really. Unless someone says something to spark my memory, that's all I got for now. We'll have to wait and see it!!
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Post by Disney Duster »

SWillie! wrote:Yes, it definitely seems like that would have been the early idea stages of what this turned into. The lines really do look great - in the software they showed us, the "brushes" they were using were named "Glen Keane", "Jin Kim", "Shiyoon Kim", etc... all artists at the studio. So they have converted their style of drawing into a brush that can be consistent and show throughout the film.
Now this is very interesting and something I don't get... What's the point of making brushes that are like specific artists? Why did they do that? And how do they draw just like those artists? You mean the Keane brush always makes enormous-eyed skinny-waisted girls and muscular men? Or something else like the sketchiness of their lines? Huh?
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Post by SWillie! »

Disney Duster wrote:
SWillie! wrote:Yes, it definitely seems like that would have been the early idea stages of what this turned into. The lines really do look great - in the software they showed us, the "brushes" they were using were named "Glen Keane", "Jin Kim", "Shiyoon Kim", etc... all artists at the studio. So they have converted their style of drawing into a brush that can be consistent and show throughout the film.
Now this is very interesting and something I don't get... What's the point of making brushes that are like specific artists? Why did they do that? And how do they draw just like those artists? You mean the Keane brush always makes enormous-eyed skinny-waisted girls and muscular men? Or something else like the sketchiness of their lines? Huh?
The brushes would just put down a line that is similar to the way in which that artist draws. So, the "Glen Keane" brush would be a very heavy, sketchy, pencil-like line. "Shiyoon Kim" would be a smooth, dark black calligraphic line... and so on.

You know how you can see the animator's pencil lines from the xerox process in films like 101 Dalmatians, The Aristocats, and other films around that time period? Well the artists had to make sure their lines were all at least somewhat uniform, or else the lines from character to character would look different - obviously done by different artists. The film wouldn't seem like a unified whole.

As I've mentioned, the final look of Paperman is somewhat sketchy - the lines are not cleanly inked lines like you see in early Disney films or in CAPS films. So, in order to maintain the textured look of the lines from shot to shot, they can't have each artist working with different brushes, or the film would have the same problem - it wouldn't look like a unified whole. And so what they probably did was say "Okay, all the lines on the girl's skin will be Keane. All the lines on her clothes will be Kim. The guy will be ____, and the environments will all be ____."

Now for all I know the screenshots we were shown were early tests and they didn't end up using actual "artist" brushes in the film. But regardless of what the brushes were named, the idea is still there - they created custom brushes in order to keep the characters unified throughout the film, while still retaining that hand-drawn, sketchy line feeling.
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Post by Disney Duster »

Oh. That's pretty cool. Except, I didn't know they had to make their lines uniform in 101 Dalmatians.

You see, I'm surprised to hear that since I remember the artists saying they liked that in 101 Dalmatians there was no re-tracing for the cels so you could see their work more raw and with all the life they originally put in it.

I would think them having to watch their lines would really stifle that.

I am not sure if you're correct in saying they did that. Wouldn't the clean-up artists be the ones to make the lines look uniform. Or is that what you meant, the clean-up artists did it, not the animators?
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Post by SWillie! »

Well yes, it has a whole lot more life to it than previous films... because you can still see pencil lines. But those lines still had to be watched. They couldn't just go nuts with the drawing, because they knew their drawings would be seen on screen.

There were no clean-up artists on such films, and as such the animators had to do their own "clean-up". The drawings they were used to doing were much rougher than the ones they were doing for these films.

So yes, while they would naturally like the xerox process better because their drawings ended up on screen, they still had to be more careful with their lines. The more stubborn artists like Milt Kahl said screw that, and so their scenes are much more noticeable. I personally like that better, but it does make for a less unified feeling.
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Post by Disney Duster »

Interesting. Well, thanks for letting me know. I wonder if they felt it stifled their drawing at all, unless, of course, they just did the clean-up themselves for each drawing after their very rough first bursts of life that was each drawing, as you said they "were the clean-up artists" maybe they did it that way.
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Post by SWillie! »

Yeah, I'm sure that's how they worked most of the time. I can't find the images online, but there's a few fantastic comparisons in The Archive Series: Animation book of King Louie. It shows Ollie Johnston's rough drawing, which is VERY rough, in the style he would normally animate in, and then it shows the "clean-up" of the same drawing. It's still done by Ollie, and you can still tell it's his work because it isn't at all like an actual clean-up drawing that you might see in earlier films. But he would have had to be more careful about his line-work than normal.
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Post by Sotiris »

'Paperman' Movie Poster Unveiled
http://www.therotoscopers.com/news/2012 ... eiled.html

First Poster For Disney’s Paperman Hints At Its Amazing, Groundbreaking Look
http://www.bleedingcool.com/2012/04/26/ ... king-look/
Last edited by Sotiris on Thu Apr 26, 2012 5:54 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by SWillie! »

They had a lot of different posters up at the studio for Paperman, and all of them were really beautiful. There's one with a close up of the girl's face this is particularly gorgeous.

Here's hoping they continue putting new art up at a regular intervals over the next few months. Glad to have an actual "premiere" date.
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Post by SWillie! »

Here's a pretty good article on Paperman - http://www.bleedingcool.com/2012/04/26/ ... king-look/

Now I'm no expert by any means - I still hardly understand the process myself, but I don't think Bleeding Cool have it quite right - from what we were shown, the cg model is not posed based on the hand drawn animation. I certainly hope they release some kind of making-of video or book or something, so we can get a better understanding of how this worked.
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Post by Rumpelstiltskin »

I think can predict what a lot of people are gonna say; "Why not just do it all by hand, instead of letting a computer look like it's drawn by hand?". After all, a single frame is said to look like it is just a normal drawing. But a single drawing is one thing, a whole movie is something very different.

Since I havn't seen it myself yet, I'll just have to wait and see. But from what I read, it seems like the cooperation with computers makes it possible to do stuff with hand-drawn animation that would otherwise only be possible if the animators had all the time and the money in the world to experiment with space, angles and dimensions.
An early experiment was done in Three Orphan Kittens from 1935, where we could see the objects in a room from different angles in some scenes. But it was too time consuming to use in a whole feature. With computers, that is no longer a problem. And with Paperman, it looks like you can do even more.

The problem with the word "hybrid", is that many think of it as a heterogeneous mixture like oil and water; hand drawn characters in a computer animated world or vice versa, instead of a heterogeneous mixture.
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Post by Jules »

SWillie ... I wonder ... does the new technology on Paperman make the finished film look as rich as a Richard Williams-style animation? You know how Williams tends to do insanely complicated stuff in his films.
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Post by SWillie! »

I know what you mean, and no. I wouldn't say so. They haven't used the cameras or done anything more complicated in that sense than in your average CG film. They do get to move the camera around more than in an average traditionally animated film, though.
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Post by Elladorine »

Every time I see a new post in this thread I click on it in hopes of seeing a clip. :lol:
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Post by Rumpelstiltskin »

For good and worse, the Xerox process freed the studio from hand inking. CAPS made it a lot more easy to add colors. And this technology takes away some of the needs of an in-between artist (at least when it comes to the last "hand drawing" stage). Then there is the anatomy; the head, hands and feet must always have the same size compared to the rest of the body, and the arms, legs and spine must always have more or less the same length even when bent (except from short squash and stretch moments perhaps). And one character always has to have the same size compared to another character. This is something the animators always have to be careful about.

But now they don't have to worry about that either, thanks to the new tools. I guess that can be both good and bad; it makes some parts of the animation a bit easier and more time can be used on other stuff. But on the other hand, the animators doesn't get to use all their skills any longer in the way they used to if this is the future of traditional animation. On the other hand, animators that struggles with some of these issues, now have the potential to succeed. (And I'm sure Walt would have loved it.)

What I'm curious about is if this new style is just an alternative to the more traditional hand drawn animation (and "traditional" computer animation for that matter), or if it represents its future, just as three-strip Technicolor, Xerox and Caps once did.
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Post by DisneyAnimation88 »

enigmawing wrote:Every time I see a new post in this thread I click on it in hopes of seeing a clip.
I do exactly the same thing :lol: . I don't think I've ever been more excited to see a glimpse a Disney short cartoon.
We're not going to Guam, are we?
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Post by SWillie! »

As if anyone needed another excited source, Catherine Hicks from Pixar tweeted a couple days back -
Paperman might be the coolest animated short I've ever seen.
I definitely agree with her. It could very well be my favorite animated short, ever.
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