Planes Crazy: Transformations of Pictorial Space in 1930s Cartoons

À regarder les courts métrages qu’ont produits les studios Disney durant les années 1930, il appert que la façon de penser la représentation de l’espace a beaucoup évolué au cours de cette décennie. À l’époque, les grands studios cherchaient tous à améliorer l’illusion de la troisième dimension dans la composition des dessins. L’intention était peut-être de produire des courts métrages qui, plutôt que de contraster avec les longs métrages aux côtés desquels ils figuraient dans les programmes, fonctionneraient selon des codes visuels similaires. Le présent article s’attarde aux innovations dans la représentation de l’espace ainsi qu’aux usages de nouvelles techniques dans les films des studios Disney et des studios concurrents.It is apparent from viewing the short films produced by the Disney studio in the 1930s that the concepts of pictorial space changed dramatically during the decade. All the major studios experimented with increasing the three-dimensionality of their compositions. The motivation may have been to produce films that complemented, rather than contrasted with, the visual norms of the feature films they accompanied on film programs. This article looks at the spatial innovations and evidence of new techniques found in the films of Disney and competing studios

Computer-assisted animation creation techniques for hair animation and shade, highlight, and shadow

制度:新 ; 報告番号:甲3062号 ; 学位の種類:博士(工学) ; 授与年月日:2010/2/25 ; 早大学位記番号:新532

"Disney is the Tiffany’s and I am the Woolworth's of the business": A critical re-analysis of the business philosophies, production values and studio practices of animator-producer Paul Houlton Terry

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.Animator-producer Paul Houlton Terry has been portrayed as having little passion for the animation he produced and being more concerned with making a profit than producing entertaining cartoons with high production values. The purpose of the dissertation is to re-evaluate Terry‘s legacy to animated cartooning by analyzing his business philosophies, production values, and studio practices. Application of four psychodynamic factors to the early life and career of Terry, 1887-1929, found that his economic decision making was characterized by: an external locus of control, risk-averse financial behaviour, extreme saving behaviour through precaution, and shrewd money management practices. Based on Terry‘s historical responses to twelve major economic, technological, or institutional forces of change for the period 1929-1955, the psychodynamic factors were found to provide accurate explanations for his studio practices and production decisions. There was no evidence to support the conclusion that three early career disappointments undermined Terry‘s intrinsic motivation to create animated cartoons. Rather, Terry‘s lack of risk taking, external locus of control, tight studio production schedule, desire to compete with neighbour studio Fleischer, difficulty in separating financial rewards from creative processes in animation, and practice of undertaking surveillance measures on staff may have undermined his and his studio‘s creativity. Archival research found Terry to possess strong passions for and to have made significant creative contributions to the field of animation. Biographical research found that Terry retained a stable nucleus of highly talented artists who dedicated a significant portion of their working careers to the studio. An analysis of the cel aesthetics of a random sample of animated cartoons produced during the years 1930-1955 found that Terry created animated cartoons with above average cel aesthetics when compared to the other studios thereby supporting an inference that Terry was motivated to producing quality crafted animation. Further research is suggested into the role psychodynamic factors and economic decision-making play in the film production process and a clarification of Terry‘s legacy to the field of animated cartoons

Lotte Reiniger’s career in animation and her first full-­‐length animated film, The Adventures of Prince Achmed

Title from PDF of title page, viewed on May 22, 2015Thesis advisor: Burton DunbarVitaIncludes bibliographic references (pages 66-76)Thesis (M.A.)--Department of Art and Art History, 2014Lotte Reiniger was the woman responsible for making the world’s first full-­‐length animated film, Die Geschichte des Prinzen Achmed (The Adventures of Prince Achmed, 1926). Along with her collaborators, she worked on the film for three years during the era of the Weimar Republic in Germany. The Adventures of Prince Achmed was shown in theatres all over the world including Berlin, France, London, New York, and Tokyo, and was always met with many positive reviews. Reiniger’s career was a long and prominent one, but her work is virtually unknown outside of animation studies. While there is not a lack of materials written on Reiniger and her work, there is still very little assessment of her accomplishments. The purpose of this thesis is to establish the art historical significance of Reiniger’s career, specifically that of The Adventures of Prince Achmed. This thesis treats Lotte Reiniger and the artists who collaborated on her films, their animation techniques, and how their films were made. Reviews from The Adventures of Prince Achmed’s earliest showings and Reiniger’s contemporaries’ assessments of her workmake it clear that she was a brilliant artist. I compare The Adventures of Prince Achmed with other animated films being made at the time, and consider the artists that have been inspired by Reiniger’s work up to the present in order to more fully assess the impact of the film on historically significant forms of film art.College of Arts and SciencesIntroduction -- Animation: definitions and explanations -- Lotte Reiniger's bibliography -- The Weimar Republic in Germany -- The Arabian Nights and the narrative of the Adventures of Prince Achmend -- The making of The Adventures of Prince Achmed -- The Adventures of Prince Achmed's premiere -- Reiniger's contribution to animation -- Conclusionmonographi

Assessing the Condition of Complex Poly-Material Artworks by Py-GC-MS: The Study of Cellulose Acetate-Based Animation Cels

The material composition of a group of Rodovetri, hand-painted animation cels, made in the 1950s and 1960s for Italian television, has been determined by Flash Py-GC-MS, Thermally assisted Hydrolysis and Methylation-(Py-)GC-MS and GC-MS investigations, where, for the pyrolysis applications, the pyrolyzer is connected septum-less to the GC inlet. The condition of the selected animation cels was generally poor (yellowing, exudation, warping, cracking). The cels are made of plasticized cellulose acetate (CA) and decorated with alkyd paint. Exudating plasticizers from the CA support migrated into the paint; this has softened the paint layers and made the cels stick together. CA is known to be very unstable and easily subjected to degradation, which cannot be reversed, only slowed down by preventive conservation. Most of the cels are plasticized with bis(2-methoxyethyl) phthalate (DMEP) and triphenyl phosphate (TPP). The research shows a relationship between the degradation of CA and the presence of TPP and DMEP

Pictonaut: movie cartoonization using 3D human pose estimation and GANs

This article describes Pictonaut, a novel method to automatically synthetise animated shots from motion picture footage. Its results are editable (backgrounds, characters, lighting, etc.) with conventional 3D software, and they have the finish of professional 2D animation. Rather than addressing the challenge solely as an image translation problem, a hybrid approach combining multi-person 3D human pose estimation and GANs is taken. Sub-sampled video frames are processed with OpenPose and SMPLify-X to obtain the 3D parameters of the pose (body, hands and face expression) of all depicted characters. The captured parameters are retargeted into manually selected 3D models, cel shaded to mimic the style of a 2D cartoon. The results of sub-sampled frames are interpolated to generate a complete and smooth motion for all the characters. The background is cartoonized with a GAN. Qualitative evaluation shows that the approach is feasible, and a small dataset of synthetised shots obtained from real movie scenes is provided.This work is partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation under contract PID2019-107255GB, and by the SGR programme 2017-SGR-1414 of the Catalan Government.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Ink-and-Ray: Bas-Relief Meshes for Adding Global Illumination Effects to Hand-Drawn Characters

We present a new approach for generating global illumination renderings of hand-drawn characters using only a small set of simple annotations. Our system exploits the concept of bas-relief sculptures, making it possible to generate 3D proxies suitable for rendering without requiring side-views or extensive user input. We formulate an optimization process that automatically constructs approximate geometry sufficient to evoke the impression of a consistent 3D shape. The resulting renders provide the richer stylization capabilities of 3D global illumination while still retaining the 2D handdrawn look-and-feel. We demonstrate our approach on a varied set of handdrawn images and animations, showing that even in comparison to ground truth renderings of full 3D objects, our bas-relief approximation is able to produce convincing global illumination effects, including self-shadowing, glossy reflections, and diffuse color bleeding

The Evolution of Stop-motion Animation Technique Through 120 Years of Technological Innovations

Stop-motion animation history has been put on paper by several scholars and practitioners who tried to organize 120 years of technological innovations and material experiments dealing with a huge literature. Bruce Holman (1975), Neil Pettigrew (1999), Ken Priebe (2010), Stefano Bessoni (2014), and more recently Adrián Encinas Salamanca (2017), provided the most detailed even tough partial attempts of systematization, and designed historical reconstructions by considering specific periods of time, film lengths or the use of stop-motion as special effect rather than an animation technique. This article provides another partial historical reconstruction of the evolution of stop-motion and outlines the main events that occurred in the development of this technique, following criteria based on the innovations in the technology of materials and manufacturing processes that have influenced the fabrication of puppets until the present day. The systematization follows a chronological order and takes into account events that changed the technique of a puppets’ manufacturing process as a consequence of the use of either new fabrication processes or materials. Starting from the accident that made the French film-pioneer Georges Méliès discover the trick of the replacement technique at the end of the nineteenth century, the reconstruction goes through 120 years of experiments and films. “Build up” puppets fabricated by the Russian puppet animator Ladislaw Starevicz with insect exoskeletons, the use of clay puppets and the innovations introduced by LAIKA entertainment in the last decade such as Stereoscopic photography and the 3D computer printed replacement pieces, and then the increasing influence of digital technologies in the process of puppet fabrication are some of the main considered events. Technology transfers, new materials’ features, innovations in the way of animating puppets, are the main aspects through which this historical analysis approaches the previously mentioned events. This short analysis is supposed to remind and demonstrate that stop-motion animation is an interdisciplinary occasion of both artistic expression and technological experimentation, and that its evolution and aesthetic is related to cultural, geographical and technological issues. Lastly, if the technology of materials and processes is a constantly evolving field, what future can be expected for this cinematographic technique? The article ends with this open question and without providing an answer it implicitly states the role of stop-motion as a driving force for innovations that come from other fields and are incentivized by the needs of this specific sector