Here's a brief clip from the animated short cartoon "Popeye the Sailor Meet Sinbad the Sailor." This was produced in 1936, roughly 50 years before animators would be using digital technology to create '3D' envionments. (By '3D' I don't mean the kind with glasses where the image pops off the screen. I mean the kind where the characters and background seem to exist in space, and if you turn the camera, the background turns with you. Think Pixar. As opposed to traditional hand-drawn cel animation where the backgrounds were '2D' and basically just tracked left and right or up and down.)
As you watch this clip, be sure to pay special attention to the background.
Pretty cool, huh? See how it moves and shifts? Here's another one:
Here's the question: how'd they do that?
Well if you ask me it looks as if they have several layers of film over the other to make the background seem 3-D. It looks as if the background is made of clay, or a set. Such as one of the mini figure ones that you see people make for hobbies. Or an even simpler way to put that it is the type of model that people who spend their entire lives making a real live train set, such as the one in The Museum of Science and Industry. Or it could also be a clay figure of some sort, but I'm pretty sure about the train set idea though. They filmed it with a regular camera so they had a reel for that. Then they put in a painting of the very far background, such as the sky and clouds, and they had that synchronized up with the scenery background. Then they put in the animations. So all together they had two separate reels, because the clouds and the animated characters go together. I think they over lapped the two reels together to make the effect that the scenery background and the animation look as if there on the same reel, and thus causing the 3-D effect of the scenery background.
ReplyDeleteFirst of all, I love Popeye the Sailor Man (one of my favorite childhood cartoons). Its classic. My best guess as to how the background was made three dimensional is that the background is layered. Perhaps there was a painting (it might have been on glass because then you can see behind it) and there were layers of this and each time Sindbad moved you put a new layer (slide) over another or maybe they moved the whole thing and added the new stuff making it seem that as he walked along he was walking through actual land and through new environments. The background could have also been a stop motion kind of thing were they could have added drawings and then later played it all together. I actually have a lot of theories on this. It looks so cool. Personally, I don't like any (well most) of the new cartoons- though i do like popeye (and looneytoons and tom and jerry, etc.).
ReplyDeleteCaleb is closest so far.
ReplyDeleteAfter watching these i did kind of notice something different about them but wasn't so sure it was anything too elaborate and difficult to do. I felt that there really wasn't much to the animation process except for paintings and animations. I felt that the background was obviously paintings (but in less detail) and the foreground was at the same time also a painting but in better detail and then the animation of the figures was added to the already drawn paintings. I also thought thought that if anything special where to have been used the only really likely thing could be that the were rollers used to stretch different parts of the painting in the foreground and make it somewhat pop from the screen . I was interested about this technique and when I researched Popeye animation techniques all i could find was about how they said Popeye was made like any other animations film of its time with transparent paper that was photographed multiple times but I could really find anything else that gave reference to what I or any of the other people who posted were talking about.
ReplyDeleteWill - check out how the backgrounds move dimensionally. They are 3D. And yes, for the most part Popeye cartoons were made conventionally. But they did employ a process for their backgrounds that Fleischer Studios themselves created to make Popeye and Betty Boop cartoons.
ReplyDeleteok ya i understand what your saying with the objects in the back ground moving and how you can see a side of a mountain and then it disappears and the other side appears to make it look 3d. After watching the sequence a couple more times I think I might have an idea for how it happened. What I think they did is that they made actual clay 3d models like what caleb said in his comment and they took cut-outs of the closer parts of the back ground and stood them in front of the clay models. They then tracked horizontally filming from the front of the clay models and cut-outs. After words they added the animation of the character and animals to the film like all other animation films of their time. I don't know if this is correct but its what i thought may have been happening.
ReplyDeleteVery close...
ReplyDelete