How Walt Disney created his cartoon characters. Walt Disney Animation Studio! How masterpieces were created

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Who among us doesn’t love the good old Disney cartoons, full of goodness and magic and giving the audience extremely positive emotions? However, not all of us, when watching, notice the unusual details inherent in our favorite plots and characters.

website invites you to take a closer look at famous cartoons and find surprises that the creators have in store for the most attentive viewers.

1. Of all the princesses, only Rapunzel has green eyes.

Majority disney princesses have blue, blue or brown eyes. And only Rapunzel was drawn with light green.

2. The monster from the cartoon "Beauty and the Beast" has the features of 7 different animals.

Artists spent a very long time creating the image of the Beast. As a result, it was decided to reward him external signs 7 different animals. The Beast got his blue eyes from the prince he eventually turned into.

3. Ariel from the cartoon “The Little Mermaid” was copied from actress Alyssa Milano.

The main character of the cartoon “The Little Mermaid” was based on 11-year-old Alyssa Milano, who later became famous for her role as Phoebe in the television series “Charmed.” In addition to her appearance, they also took some character traits from the actress, as well as her demeanor.

4. Eeyore and Optimus Prime from Transformers speak with the same voice.

Actor Peter Cullen voiced both the plush Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh and the robot Optimus Prime from the blockbuster Transformers.

5. The vultures from The Jungle Book were copied from The Beatles.

The manager of the legendary four agreed to voice these characters in the cartoon “The Jungle Book”. However, John Lennon responded for the entire group with a sharp refusal. Nevertheless, the necks themselves turned out exactly like the famous Liverpool musicians.

6. Simba from The Lion King doesn't roar like a lion.

It turns out that in the cartoon it was decided to use a tiger's roar instead of a lion's roar, because the lion's roar was too quiet.

7. In the cartoon “City of Heroes” you can see Hans from “Frozen”.

Remember the seductive villain prince from the cartoon “Frozen”? The creators of the recently released City of Heroes decided to play a joke on the villain and placed his photo on the wanted board at the police station.

8. In the cartoon "Ratatouille" you can see the shadow of the dog from the cartoon "Up".

The main character Remy in one of the scenes stumbles upon the shadow of a dog. At the time of the filming of Ratatouille, Disney was only planning the creation of the animated film Up. The appearance of the dog Doug from the future cartoon is a kind of joke and a hint at the next project.

9. In one scene in Tarzan, the stuffed toy that falls out of the professor's bag is actually Little Brother the dog from Mulan.

The creators of Disney cartoons are not averse to making jokes sometimes. One of my favorite tricks is to supplement cartoons with elements from past films. Only a very attentive viewer can notice such references.

Today, animation is familiar to almost everyone. This genre has a huge cultural significance, after all, it is cartoons that become the first educational materials for children; they lay the foundations of culture and education. However, cartoons can also be interesting for adults - some of the works can have a deep and complex plot, which the child is unlikely to understand. We invite you to familiarize yourself with how cartoons are made today. We will tell you about the main genres, as well as one of the most successful projects modern Russian animation.

How the cartoon "Masha and the Bear" was filmed

The creators of the first animation masterpieces, who drew every frame by hand, would have been surprised to see modern technologies, which are used to create Masha and the Bear. Everything is different in this animated series. Each character is drawn once, but in detail and from all sides; this work takes about a month. Then, the created model is used in each new series many times. The movements of some characters are calculated by the program, others (for example, Bear) are read from human ones using motion capture technology.

However, that's not all. Making characters and thinking through movements is only a small part of the work on a cartoon. It is necessary to “settle” the characters in the living world, voice their speech, and add special effects. Complete work on one episode of “Masha and the Bear” takes about 4 months, while the studio simultaneously works on 4 episodes at once, so as not to force young viewers to wait too long for new releases.

This animated series is shining example high quality computer animation. In this direction, artists work on the image of the characters and key movements, and the intermediate frames are calculated by the computer. However, there are other ways of creating cartoons that are used today.

This is a classic direction of animation. Its essence lies in the fact that each frame of the scene is drawn separately and is a copy of the previous one with minimal changes to ensure the dynamics of what is happening. As a rule, characters are depicted on transparent sheets, under which the main background is placed.

Today, hand-drawn animation is by no means losing ground under pressure high technology. Not at all - she managed to put them at her service: instead of transparent films and canvases, layers in graphic editors, shooting frames with a camera has given way to the use of video editing programs. Thanks to this, the genre is still used by leading animation studios such as Disney and Warner Bros. Professionals know many tricks that allow them to create masterpieces in this genre, and we can tell you at home.

Puppet animation

From the point of view of filming, it is practically not inferior to a hand-drawn one, with the exception of one nuance: dolls act as the heroes of the plot. Their movements are filmed frame by frame, which creates the appearance of real movement after editing. The birthplace of the genre is Russia, and the first puppet cartoon was filmed by Vladislav Starevich in 1911.

Plasticine, silhouette, collage and other cartoons that use physical objects can also be classified as the puppet genre. In terms of the detail of what is happening, such animation is inferior to the capabilities of hand-drawn and computer animation, since there is no way to correctly convey dynamics, emotions and many other nuances. Exceptions are possible if the material filmed with puppets is then subjected to additional processing - but in this case we are talking about mixing genres, and not about a purely puppet cartoon.

Is it possible to make a cartoon at home?

Of course you can! Moreover, today it will be much easier thanks to the ubiquity of computers and cameras. Photo technology will be useful for those who decide to engage in puppet animation, and to create hand-drawn cartoons you will need a graphics editor.

The Russian version of Windows Movie Maker allows you to collect all the frames together. You can follow the link to try your hand at animation. After all, now you know how cartoons are made, and you can take your first step in animation yourself!

In the history of animation they always like to say “it all started with a mouse.” But in fact, it all started with the pioneer and visionary Walt Disney. The Walt Disney Animation Studio was created by him. At that time, Americans very much liked to call their companies by their first and last names, and the Disney studio was no exception.

Walt Disney's legacy is large collection cartoons that shocked the whole world: “Snow White”, “Donald Duck”, “Pinocchio”, “Alice”, “Bambi”, “Cinderella” and, of course, “Mickey Mouse”.

Now we will tell you about how these cartoons were created at the Walt Disney Animation Studio.

The process of creating animation or where miracles were created!

1. When the preliminary script was ready, all the directors and animators got together and discussed the storyboard, that is, the storyboard. The storyboard itself represents the story itself in pictures. ()

2. When the story is already ready and the characters' dialogues have been recorded in advance. That is, this is done so that the animators know what the characters are saying in advance, so that it is easier for them to animate and create the correct image of the cartoon characters.

3. When all the dialogues have been recorded, the animators draw sketches (the Americans call them sketches), and only for the characters. Often, animators draw rather sloppily and without color, or even without a background. For one cartoon, as many as 50 thousand individual drawings with characters could be drawn!

The best animators drew only a few drawings or sketches to create the animation, for example, after two or four frames, and left empty frames. Then there was a person who was directly involved in filling out these empty frames (he is also called an inbetweener or the one who fills in the empty field).

4. When the entire cartoon was drawn on paper, the animation drawings went straight to the ink department. Here, animation drawings (that is, character outlines and shapes) were transferred to a transparent film, onto which gouache can be easily applied.

5. And after the ink department finished applying the contours to the film, he sent them to the painting department. The artists would put paint on the transparent film there, but before applying it, they would turn them over to the other side so as not to blur the outlines of the characters and so that they could see where the different parts of the characters were.

6. Before these animation drawings or a series of drawings were sent for photographing, it was necessary to add the background, because there is nothing else on film yet except the characters. Basically, the background was painted with water-based paints and tempera. In some Walt Disney films, the backgrounds were painted on glass and combined with other backgrounds that were painted separately to give a sense of speed and extremeness. Walt Disney Animation Studios used this technique in Snow White and the 7 Dwarfs.

7. When all the elements were combined into one whole, then it was possible to move on to photographing. But the final product itself is not a finished film, it is what was made precisely with the help of a projector that shines onto the frame. The background and character were fixed separately from each other. So the character could walk and not leave this frame, moving only through this environment. And the pictures of the character themselves were changed and inserted under glass one frame at a time and photographed on a camera so that each frame was recorded on film.

8. After all the frames were shot with a camera, the cartoon itself was ready for showing. Of course, you will need to add music and edit moments later. But these are minor things.

9. Walt Disney Animation Studio created and released hundreds of its cartoons this way.

Illustrations for the text – working material for the studio’s new animated film “The Mystery of the Desert”TouchFX . The project has not yet been announced anywhere, so the footage is exclusive.

About animation

Animation (to put it very roughly) is the creation of a visual series from changing images (for example, 24 frames per second). Depending on how the image is obtained, animation can be hand-drawn (the frame is drawn by hand), puppet animation (the frame with dolls is photographed), computer animation (the image is generated using computer graphics).

Visual development and concept art

Computer animation, in turn, can be raster, vector, three-dimensional (depending on the selected software and method of work). We will talk about three-dimensional computer animation - that is, about creating animated films using three-dimensional computer graphics programs. And let’s immediately define the concepts. Animation will be the process of creating a film, and animation will be the process of “setting in motion” the characters and objects of the film. But more on that below.

Where does the cartoon begin? From an idea. The producer sets the task of developing preliminary materials on the theme of the future film. The screenwriter begins working on the story. Artist and art director on the visual solution.

The finished package is sent to the supervisor (technical director). The supervisor reviews the project proposals with a kind smile and calmly explains that the technical and human resources studios are limited. Therefore, the film cannot have a super mega-epic battle scene involving two thousand characters. It's better to make do with a fight between the main character and the antagonist. Forty-seven unique locations is also a bit much. Three will be enough. When the shouting and swearing between romantics and pragmatists subsides, the new stage creating a cartoon is a process of finding consensus between the producer, supervisor, director and art department.

From model to render

An animated film is the result of adapting existing technology and resources (including financial ones). Classic 2D hand-drawn animation is no exception. There, too, there were problems finding ways to implement ideas. Remember the Disney cartoon 101 Dalmatians? It was the result of using black-and-white photocopying technology, new to the studio. Unromantic, but very effective. It's the same story with 3D animation. At one time, computer-generated images were seen solely as entertainment for geeks. But John Lasseter (the current head of Pixar) saw in this technology the potential for realizing his creative ideas. Thanks to the synthesis of the principles of classical animation and the latest technologies, the first full-length computer animated film, Toy Story, was born. The choice of the plot, by the way, is also not accidental. The technologies of that time did a poor job of creating organic characters - people and animals. But it was easy to make a plastic toy. And it was easier to animate her than a human. Then there were “The Adventures of Flick” - about insects (visually the same plastic). And only the development of production capacity and an increase in budgets made it possible to begin large-scale use of animals and people in cartoons.

Let's go back to our studio. After numerous rounds of negotiations, discussions, debates, disputes and quarrels, the concept of the future film is approved. The “pre-production” stage begins. The script is written, and visual development of the film begins.

Pre-production and production

The main feature of computer animation is that everything that is in the frame must actually exist in three dimensions. This means it must have been invented and created by someone. An animation studio is like a conveyor belt. The first person on it is the artist. He draws characters, surroundings, interior items, plants.

When there is ready-made concept art and sketches, direct production begins. In 3D animation, drawings themselves are not used. They are a kind of “drawing” or “scheme”, on the basis of which three-dimensional models will be created and visualized.

Three-dimensional modeling is the construction of objects from points, lines and polygons (polygons). It sounds boring, in practice it looks even more boring, but the result is already pleasing.

The three-dimensional model moves further along the “conveyor”. The technical development department, if necessary, adds the necessary attributes to the model. A virtual “exoskeleton” (rig) is created for the character, which allows him to be animated, facial expressions are developed, hair is created, and much more.

In order for the model in the frame not to look like a gray cluster of polygons, it needs to be textured and shading done. Essentially, this is painting the model and giving it light reflective properties. Any object you see is the result of light reflected from it entering your eye. Depending on the properties of the object, light is reflected differently. It's the same in 3D graphics. Depending on the reflection settings of the incident virtual light source, the ball model can be glass, stone, or iron. The more complex the material, the more difficult it is to achieve the desired effect. For example, human flesh partially absorbs the light falling on it, refracts and scatters it under the skin. All these indicators must be properly adjusted in order to get a picture that is pleasing to the eye (remember what was written about plastic characters?).

Storyboard

The character and environment models are ready. The time has come to “revive” them. Here we need to take a step back. While the three-dimensional world was being created, the screenwriter was finishing the script, and the storyboard artist and the director were directing the film. A storyboard is a kind of comic book, a hand-drawn prototype of a future film. The sequence of actions in the film, the main plans are determined, and some kind of situational humor is invented. Each of us can interpret the script we read differently. For some, “fruits on the table” are apples and bananas, and for others, kiwis and apricots. The job of a storyboard is to make sure everyone sees the film through the eyes of the director. The finished “comic” is superimposed on the sound and a semblance of a rough edit of the future cartoon is created - an animatic.

"Storyboard"

Animation

This is where linguistic hell begins. Based on the animatic, animators animate the characters.

Animation literally means “animation”, from the Latin “anima” - soul.

How does animation work? Imagine a puppet in puppet theater. Exactly the same, only “inside” computer program. The animator changes the position of the controllers on the character's exoskeleton in such a way as to obtain the movement he needs. The work is very painstaking. You can make a few seconds of good animation a day.

To speed up this process in animation, motion capture technology (mock-up) is used. In short, the mocap in the cartoon is the same thing that you know, heard and saw about “Avatar” and Golum from “The Lord of the Rings”. The technology used is the same. The actor wears a special suit with reflective markers, each of which is responsible for a controller on a three-dimensional character. A man moves, a cartoon character moves.

And again the conveyor. Virtual lighting, virtual cameras, and virtual special effects are added to the three-dimensional scene with objects, environments and animated characters. All this work goes into rendering - that is, into visualization.

Educational program on rendering

From physics lessons at school we remember that vision is the process of perceiving reflected light. It's the same in a 3D scene. A conditional “ray” from a virtual light source (say, a light bulb) hits the object. The beam is reflected from an object (taking into account the shading settings), hits another object, is reflected again and hits the “eye” (virtual camera lens). The number and manner of reflections depends on the complexity of the scene, the intensity and source of lighting, and many other factors. Rendering is the process of calculating and visualizing the results of this light reflection. The more physically correct the parameters of light sources, the amount of ray tracing and methods for reading them when they hit the “eye” are given, the more physically correct and photorealistic the final image will be. Rendering is technologically one of the most complex operations three-dimensional graphics. To understand, rendering one frame, depending on the complexity and the task at hand, can take from several minutes to several hours. A second of animation is 25 frames. 25 hours of processor time. On average, it takes about three months to render a project.

Walt Disney Animation Studio, thanks to its own technical developments and programs, was able to achieve the performance of its computing power at 1.1 million rendering hours per day. For comparison, with such technologies, the cartoons “Wreck-It Ralph” or “Frozen” would have been rendered in 10 days (the total need for each of the projects was about 11 million render-hours).

The rendered video sequence is then edited, special effects are added, and color correction is carried out. If necessary, the image is stereoized so that the film is available in 3D viewing format. By the way, to obtain a stereo image, you need to render each frame twice - calculating the displacement for the right and left eyes.

The edited and processed video sequence is synchronized with sound (character voice acting and inter-noise). That's it, the cartoon is ready. Enjoy watching.

PS. I will talk about each stage in more detail, yes. But a little later. Thank you for your attention.

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18.02.2013

A couple of computers, “smart” programs - and a film masterpiece is ready? No, making modern animated films is much more difficult. CHIP visited the Disney studio and is ready to talk about the fusion of filmmaking and programming.

Snow White, Cinderella, Pocahontas, Bambi and Mickey Mouse - they were all created in the studio, where, together with others, no less famous characters Disney stories, cartoon characters they joyfully greet us from the closets, from the shelves and from the drawings on the walls. Modern technology and the traditional idyllic art of painting - that is the essence of today's Disney.

CHIP visited the studio with long history, located in Burbank, Los Angeles County, California, at the foot of the Hollywood Hills, to learn how animated films are born. Over the past two years, the company, founded in 1923, has been producing its 52nd animated feature, Wreck-It Ralph, in which a disillusioned video game villain seeks public acceptance.

Here, in the “Silicon Valley” of the American film industry, over these two years, through the efforts of 200 animators, programmers and artists, 188 characters and 79 locations were born. More than 10,000 computers processed scene by scene. The action takes place in four video game worlds. It all starts in the eight-bit pixelated game Fix-It Felix Jr., reminiscent of the arcade Donkey Kong. Then main character, Ralph, sneaks into the realistic shooter Hero%u2019s Duty, and then finds himself in the racing simulator Sugar Rush - a mixture of Alice in Wonderland and Japanese anime. The inputs and outputs of these games are located in the fourth world - the Central Gaming Station. Each universe had its own design, movements, colors and effects. “It was like making one film out of four... a very complex film,” describes this almost impossible technical and logic problem Renato Dos Anjos, animation team leader.

Between slot machines and jelly banks

In order for the presented worlds to be noticeably different from each other, but at the same time consonant, the production of the cartoon began with a lengthy study. “We were looking for elements that evoked emotion or nostalgia,” says director Rich Moore, already familiar to audiences from the popular animated series “The Simpsons” and “Futurama.” In Barcelona, the team of creators was inspired by the architecture of Antoni Gaudi. The developers also visited International exhibition confectionery in Cologne, went to a go-kart track and played a variety of video games. Moore is especially proud of the arcade machines throughout the studio that feature the Fix-It Felix game, developed by members of the film crew. These scratched boxes, supposedly from the 1980s, show animators, designers and programmers jockeying for record numbers during breaks.

In 2010, after meticulous planning, production of the film began. The script was already ready, and the actors voicing the characters, including even Oscar-nominated John C. Reilly (Wreck-It Ralph) and Sarah Silverman (Vanellope), began reciting each scene. Most often they did sound work together, in the same room, which is unusual for animated films. This led to some interesting improvised dialogue. In addition, the actors were filmed so that the animators could capture their facial expressions and gestures - a good help for subsequent work. At the same time, layout specialists superimposed computer-generated base character models onto scene locations, set camera positions, and set timing for sound recording.

Click the mouse - and... it's removed!

Finally, it's time to start animating the crude and still ugly scenes. In a darkened mini-studio equipped with a half-dozen computers, director Rich Moore explains to the animation team what the characters in a certain scene are doing, what they are thinking and feeling. Employees watch videos of voice-over artists, and some even stage the stage and record themselves. This gives you an understanding of how the character stands, when he moves his hand or blinks, as well as how he behaves in a particular situation. “Creating animation is not so much technical problem as much as artistic flair,” explains animation department head Renato Dos Anjos. All 67 animators working on "Wreck-It Ralph" sit down at their computers straight out of prep to model the movements on a base character model and create rough facial animation. These initial models are digital dolls with a skeleton that moves by clicking on the head or joints with a mouse. For implementation, it is necessary to have control structures in the model of each of the characters. Such sequences, defined in the animation program, transform all the simple and complex movements of the character's skeleton - from bending an arm to choreographic dance. “If we can't implement a movement, there's always someone smart enough to create a suitable control structure,” says dos Anjos. One of these “saviors” is Jan Berger, Technical Director of Characters. He studied his profession at the Film and Television Institute and has been working for Disney since early 2012. Ian designs controls called "rigs" and customizes them to suit the animators' desires. “For major characters this process can take a couple of months, with secondary characters we do it in a few days or weeks,” says Berger. When creating the moving models in Wreck-It Ralph, the team deviated a bit from Disney tradition, focusing more on video games. This is most noticeable in the world of the game Fix-It Felix. Here the heroes move only by jumping with sharp turns at an angle of 90%B0, as in classic arcade games, where there are no smooth body movements. Other worlds are also making their demands. “When we animate, we constantly have to move between cartoon, realistic, simplistic, emotional and comedy styles,” explains Zach Parrish, lead animator, on Wreck-It Ralph. At the first stage of work, the so-called “Blocking Pass” appears - rough, non-smooth animation at a speed of only 10 frames/s. Rich Moore studies it and gives his opinion, as well as the acting on film set. Only the scene changed, taking into account his comments, is converted into 24 frames by the animators - in this form the film will be shown on the movie screen. So what are 67 people needed for? With a tired smile on their face, they explain to us: everyone creates only 80 frames a week, which corresponds to three seconds of film. It takes an average of a month to animate a 12-second scene.

Simulation and manual optimization

Animators submit their work to the technical animation department. His team focuses on the way Ralph's hair flutters in the wind as he races around the race track in the world of Sugar Rush, or the placement of the folds in his clothes as he sits down. Here you remember the characteristic Disney physics - not realistic, but cartoonish, which at the same time should look convincing. Jan Berger is also involved in technical animation: “My experience is that top scores achieved through a combination of manual animation and modeling." The latter means that the program first indicates the initial position of the object. Then it is activated physical strength, such as gravity or wind, and determines the stiffness of matter, that is, hair or clothing. “Now adjustments must be made until the ideal result is achieved,” Berger explains briefly. Like most of his colleagues, he uses the most popular 3D animation program for these purposes - Autodesk Maya, for which he even developed his own plugin.

As Ralph and the other characters awaken to life, the world still dead. A team of effects specialists led by Cesar Velazquez will work on it. They animate everything that is not related to the characters: fire, water, smoke, destruction, explosions. Even these effects look different in each world of the film. In the shooter Hero%u2019s Duty, for example, Ralph's fight against aliens is depicted as realistically as possible. “To do this, we apply several layers of effects: first smoke, steam and fog, then particles and small debris, and finally light, flashes and sparks,” says Velasquez. It's worth noting that Wreck-It Ralph was the first film Disney studios, in which a so-called effects designer participated. At the same time, the creators wanted to give each world a unique style while maintaining the Disney tradition of drawing even in special effects, without relying entirely on computer graphics. Velasquez and his team had to test some effects in analog mode. The result is a combination of computer-generated and hand-drawn effects. This is especially noticeable in the scene where Ralph falls into the chocolate river. Computer animated river in the classic way, like a liquid, looks realistic. The chocolate drops on Ralph's clothing, however, are done in typical Disney fashion. cartoon style- they were drawn by the effects designer.

The effects animation is handled by Hendrik Panz, who joined the Disney team after completing his studies at the Ludwigsburg Film Academy. Pantz is one of the few who works with the animation program Houdini, which is better suited for complex effects than software from market leader Autodesk. Such effects also require enormous computer power, so the animation team works on real “monsters.” For example, Panz's workstation, running Linux, is equipped with 48 GB of RAM and an eight-core graphics processor.

Let's add lighting to the basement too

On last stage Adolph Lusinski's lighting team illuminates the scene and characters, creates shadows and reflections, and makes colors pop. All work begins in analogue mode - in a Disney photography studio, where various lighting schemes are tested for the subject. Armed with this knowledge, experts shed light on a specific scene in two stages. First, a real-time renderer (another Disney proprietary design called Figaro) creates shapes of light and shadow based on camera positions. “We're talking with director Rich Moore about how the lighting works,” Lusinski says. “The lighting technicians then work out the details for the final rendering.” For this film, Disney developed a new pixel shader. It calculates the parameters of individual pixels, allowing you to create a specific color, change light values, display shadows, translucency, highlights and reflections. After animating the movements, effects and lighting, the stage is sent to the studio basement. “Here we have about 10,000 computers that just render images,” explains Adolph Lusinski. And since even this power is not enough for such a labor-intensive film, the studio has to rent another computer center in Los Angeles.

And now two years of production are over: the computers have completed rendering, the Disney Christmas movie for a generation of video game lovers has been edited, and at the end of 2012 it opened in cinemas around the world.