The Weekly Filmschool #1: Cel Animation
These days the concept of a "hand-drawn" animation is quite alien. Even shows that still animate on paper eventually send everything into a computer program to be inked, colored, or composited. But there was a time when cartoons were inked, colored and composited painstakingly by hand.
First of all I should mention that cel is a horrible, HORRIBLE medium. It's frustrating, tedious, and expensive. However, there isn't an animation or graphics program out there that doesn't base some part of itself on what cel used to do, so it is an important thing to understand. Cel is short for celluloid, which is what animators used a long time ago, but nowadays the sheets are made out of cellulose acetate, a plastic.
So here's how I made this animation.
First off, I made storyboards (which I don't have anymore) to get the basic gist of the layout of all the scenes, and the character's actions.
Then I went onto the computer and made rather large backgrounds. 12 inches by 10 1/2 @ 600 DPI. I was fortunate in that I had access to a plotter that could print everything all at once on one large sheet of glossy paper... for free! The college also has an Acme hole punch. After this I could make the characters interact with the environment.
Every action was painstakingly drawn on animation paper. I used "12-field" size because I wanted these to look good if I decided to make this HD, or even a higher resolution like 4K. Animating was aided with a "field guide"- A plastic grid laid beneath the paper.
After all the action was dawn, I laid a sheet of cel over the paper and traced using a quill pen. It was a bit janky because I used the vinyl paint which clogs the pen tips within a matter of minutes, so I had to work fast. I also had a small fan to help expedite the drying of the lines.
Next came the color! After drying, the cels were flipped over and paint is applied very thick to the back. I mean VERY thick. The rule of thumb is to make pools of paint so it'll look even.
Each cel (and there are hundreds of them) took about a half an hour to complete, and another hour to dry. I had to buy a wire frame shelf unit so air could flow around the cels.
Now that all the cels were painted, it was time to shoot it all onto film. My college has a way of getting a hold of excellent film equipment nobody ever uses. This little treasure is an Oxberry 35mm motion controlled camera stand. It can pan, zoom, or rotate. As well as have two layers of cel move independently of each other. This stand has a lot of history behind it. It shot pretty much every cereal commercial character up until the late 90's, and Matt and Trey used it to animate their South Park pilot episode.
Operating the machine involved tinkering with a very difficult to use computer program. You have to program in every move with a set of wheels, as well as set the parameters for acelleration/decelleration between keyframes (or "easing.") After all that, you shoot a frame by stepping on a foot peddle.
Developing 35mm film is very expensive. I could've just bought a work print of my film (a "positive") but since I couldn't think of a time when I'd be projecting this on an actual 35mm projector, I opted to just get the negative and transfer it to video in a preocess called "telecine" (tell-a-siny.)
The telecine machine is basically just an digital SLR camera mounted on an old photo printer. A photo printer is normally a projector and a film camera pointed at each other, but on this one they removed the film camera so they could build a video to film transfer machine in another room. The telecine machine can take one picture every 10 seconds and deposit it into a folder on a computer as discrete images. These images not only have to be combined into video, but processed quite a bit in Adobe AfterEffects.
Now, film negatives aren't just negatives. They're what are what is called an "orange mask." The exact reason as to why they're orange is complicated, but that's just the reality. It can be very difficult to get the image to look right if you don't know what you're doing.
This can either be done in AfterEffects or a batch process in Photoshop. What you basically have to do is after the colors are inversed, you get out the levels adjustment (or filter in AE) and find an area that is 100% black, and another area that is 100% white with the eyedropper tools. The colors will magically right themselves afterward.
Well, that's basically it. This took over two months of hard work. Once the video was good, I imported it all into Adobe Premier and added sound effects.
Let's say you wanted to create a cel animation. Well you're going to have to buy supplies, dummy! Cartoon Colour is the internet go-to place to get any supplies you need. For just basic stuff, you will need:
- 1 x Acme Peg bar. This is important! You can't animate by hand without some way of aligning the drawings over one another.
- 1 x Light table. You will need to be able to see the previous 3 or 4 drawings. This is called "onion skinning" in digital media.
- 1 x Set of cartooning quill pens. To draw your lines.
- 1 x set of Vinyl water-based paint. To add color.
- Several pairs of white cotton gloves. To make sure you don't smudge or contaminate the cel.
- A pack of cel and animation paper (pre-punched.) Pretty obvious this one.
- LOTS of free time
- No friends
- A humidifier. Cel builds up a static charge and will attract whatever garbage is around.
- A series of wire-mesh shelves. To allow the freshly painted cel to air dry.
- Access to a massive robotic motion control camera (if you want pans or zooms.)
Now, if you're interested in animation, I wouldn't recommend this right off the bat. An Acme peg bar and a pack of pre-punched paper are fairly cheap. A stop-motion program like iStopMotion or Monkey Jam coupled with a cheap camera can go a long way to making your pencil drawings come alive. You could even import those frames into Toon Boom Studio, or Flash and digitally ink and paint them.
