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Are you learning about the Animation Technologies of some best animation studios in the world? Before the Disney name came to be associated with the massive global empire that it is today, it was simply the moniker of a young firm dedicated to pushing the animation industry at all costs.
The first animated short with a synchronized soundtrack was Steamboat Willie, the 1928 Mickey Mouse premiere. Soon after, the first colorized animation, Flowers and Trees, brought a forest of hues to life.
The result of this and other innovations was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the first animated movie ever made.
Many of Disney’s businesses have relied on technological advancements for almost a century, but before they made strides in live entertainment and theme park attractions, the company was responsible for some of animation’s greatest technical achievements, helping to pioneer the entire industry in the process.
Here are five of the company’s most cutting-edge animation technologies along with examples of where they were most effectively applied.
Top 5 Innovative Animation Technologies of Disney and Pixar
The Multiplane Camera
Disney’s Multiplane camera, which was created specifically for use on the studio’s animated blockbusters, added unprecedented depth to the conventional cel animation technique. A static background painting served as the backdrop for each frame of the action in standard studio animation.
Individually painted background pieces were overlaid on several sheets of glass and autonomously moved frame-by-frame in combination with the painted character cels with this towering descending camera. The early golden age of the studio’s feature films was given the appearance of spatial depth by itemizing the arrangement of different background components.
The Oscar-winning short film The Old Mill served as the multiplane camera’s initial test, showcasing the camera’s capacity to explore space and produce atmosphere through camera movements. After that, films like Snow White, Pinocchio, Bambi, and all the way up to its final appearance in 1989’s The Little Mermaid adopted the multiplane camera as the industry standard effects.
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Xerography
They believe that necessity is the mother of invention. In the 1960s, animated films at the studio no longer received the budget or schedule they had grown accustomed to as the company’s top priority due to Walt Disney’s attention being divided between television, theme parks, and live-action films.
The animation pipeline was changed at the company to include xerography in order to save costs and speed up production.
The xerox process photocopied the animators’ precise drawings straight onto the cel itself, eliminating the necessity for hand-inking each individual animation cel. This produced rougher and darker outlines than previous methods.
The adoption of the xerox machine gave the Disney films of the 1960s and 1970s a decidedly sketchy look that translated the animators’ pencil work and draftsmanship directly onto the screen, while the beautifully colored outlines of the early studio films were lost with this invention.
Xerography gained a reputation for being used to skimpily recycle animation in movies like 101 Dalmatians, The Jungle Book, and Robin Hood to balance production costs and save time.
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CAPS
Disney Animation Studios underwent a digital revolution with CAPS after more than 50 years of conventional cel animation (Computer Animation Production System).
A post-production application that digitally colored and stitched together scanned-in artwork within the world of the computer was created by technicians from Disney and the newly joined computer division Pixar at the start of the studio’s animation renaissance of the 1990s.
CAPS, which was first used in one of The Little Mermaid’s climactic scenes, not only streamlined the Disney production cycle, allowing more movies to be made and released each year, but it also completely changed how the movies looked, making them look smoother and cleaner than had ever been possible.
CAPS was used throughout the entire new wave of hand-drawn Disney classics, from The Rescuers Down Under to Home on the Range, to deliver a new standard of animation clarity and more easily incorporate CGI effects and environments, such as the dramatic wildebeest stampede in The Lion King and the ballroom scene in Beauty and the Beast.
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Deep Canvas
Major animation studios started experimenting with fully fusing CGI effects and characters with conventional hand-drawn animation towards the turn of the new millennium.
This took the form of the Deep Canvas software at Disney. This software, developed during the making of the 1999 motion picture Tarzan, operated in tandem with the CAPS system to produce fully three-dimensional environments for the hand-drawn characters to live in.
Using a painter’s pen and tablet, rudimentary geometric models made in 3D space were digitally colored to give the electronic assets a brushy appearance that merged with the traditionally produced characters.
The arboreal canopies of Tarzan’s jungle house, the steampunk-inspired cars from Atlantis: The Lost Empire, and nearly all of the settings and effects from Treasure Planet were built using this technique.
The Deep Canvas program was a precursor to the combination of computer graphics with hand-drawn draftsmanship later seen in Sony Pictures’ Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and The Mitchells vs. the Machines, despite its employment at Disney being brief, lasting only three animated features.
RenderMan
The innovations created by Pixar Animation are the innovations of the larger computer graphics industry as a whole because they are the pioneers of computer animation since its inception. Long before the original Toy Story hit theaters, Pixar spent years creating internal rendering software that would combine all of their computational parts into a seamless and realistic image.
All of the digital components of a scene or effect are gathered by RenderMan into a single engine and assembled into a single frame. Through the use of industry-standard software, every effect, simulation, model, environment, and piece of animation is combined on the screen.
RenderMan is best known for its work on the reanimated dinosaurs in Jurassic Park and the liquid-metal threat of Terminator 2’s T-1000 during the rise of CGI effects in Hollywood.
RenderMan has dramatically increased the credibility of computer graphics, as shown most recently in 2021’s Luca, to create creativity and realism that are unrivaled in contemporary computer animation.
The engine is a not-so-secret component of Pixar’s technical wizardry because RenderMan has been made available for purchase by both private persons and public organizations like NASA and Lucasfilm’s ILM.
Above are the top Innovative Animation Technologies of Disney and Pixar. We hope that through this article, you can learn more about the animation industry. In addition, visit Animost for the latest posts.