A question about animators and animation

C

cynthia.lopez88

New member
I never knew until I got to this site that some of the Batman TAS episodes were animated in Korea. My question is, what exactly did Bruce Timm do? Sure he made the designs but what else? If he didn't animate them or anything, is my fan worshiping been wasted all of these years? Also, what's up with the storyboard guys in animation? I see stuff on tv where they draw a lot of blocks but isn't that just giving the idea of what's happening? The animators put in color, animated, and add extra things in the background. I don't see why Bruce Timm, Paul Dini and other popular animators get credit for others' work.

If I got any info wrong it's because I don't know much about animation, I'm used to watching it and not learning it so try to be too sarcastic please. :D
 
Not entirely sure I understand your question, but America does'nt really animate anymore. We either use computers or get workers in Korea animate it (in this case, just translating the poses and expressions into animation, without being able to express one's unique animating style).
 
I know the way it works on some shows. The stories are written, boarded, laid out, animated in pencil, and recorded in America, and then the animation drawings are sent overseas to be colored (since that step is too time-consuming to undertake here and still meet the schedules demanded by TV). I think it was a little different for the Silver Age Warner Bros. shows, though - I'm pretty sure most (if not all) of the animation was done by outside studios. I believe the American directors like Timm and Dini oversaw the storyboarding and layout process, so that the finished result would look the way they had envisioned.

Don't quote me on that, though. I'm just going by what I've been able to surmise from years of watching Silver Age WB shows and analyzing the different animation styles. I know Jon McClenahan of StarToons posts here on occasion - if you contact him, he might be able to clear things up for you.
 
Actually the animatic is just storyboard images put in time with the voice recording, to give the guys overseas a better idea how to aniamate it. There are very few animation studios left in america since it gets costly unless it's made in Flash. And on some shows, the people who truly animate it overseas get credited. But that's rare.
 
To be more accurate, the only animation done in America is for commercials, animated shorts, and feature length films (like the WDFA canon). When it comes to animated television series, unless it's done using Flash or it's CGI, the animation is exported overseas.
 
There was a pretty good series from the Los Angeles Times that explained how an animated show was produced by looking at creating an episode of Avatar the Last Airbender from start to finish. Unfortunately, it's either dropped off their site or gone behind the "cough up for content" wall, but you might be able to grab older versions using the Internet Wayback Machine or some other archival service.

Otherwise, I think visiting your local library and checking out any book about animation will answer a lot of your questions. Tony White's Animation from Pencils to Pixels is pretty exhaustive about the art, craft, and business of making cartoons, and thus probably covers the part of the process that you're curious about the most thoroughly, as opposed to his earlier Animator's Workbook or something like Preston Blair's classic animation text or Thomas & Johnston's Illusion of Life. White also gave us a very nice interview about the book and about the animation biz in general, he said self-promotingly.

Even if whatever book you find gets more into the technical aspects than you want (I'm still not entirely sure what anybody means when they say something was "animated on the ones" and why it makes a difference), the general process of script/design to storyboard to voice recording to animatic to full animation to editing/post-production will be explained. My understanding is that most animation does all but the animation step in-house, export the full animation (i.e., the grunt work of drawing 24 pictures a second) overseas because labor is a lot cheaper, and then do edit/post on the returned animation. There are some shows (like Avatar) that gives the overseas studio a lot more liberty to change, contribute, or adjust to both alleviate some workload and to give the studio a sense of ownership, but that's the exception and not the rule.

The short version is that your worship of Bruce Timm can remain perfectly intact, though.

-- Ed
 
Heh, welcome to Animation Land :p Animators usually get almost no credit whatsoever... especially on TV productions.

Correct, both are animated in Korea. I believe it's Rough Draft who does it.
 
What up with us. If I was a show creator, I would defintiy credit the animators. They do a lot of hard work. We just draw and write it, they actually have to bring it to life. :sweat:
 
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