Questions about the animation process

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WilliamJ

New member
When cartoons are sent to another country to be animated, the people just animate the drawings, right? They can't change the characters, content or outcome of the cartoon can they?
 
I don't believe they can. As far as I know, they are sent the material to be animated and do that, but they don't edit the story.
 
Nope. They're just the animation department that gets sent the model sheets, storyboards, and animatics. They really don't have much say in the show outside of the animation.
 
I'm not sure how it works today with computer but the way it used to work was that the main studio did the key frames for the action and the outsource studio were charged with 'filling' in the blanks and draw the 'in betweens' to make the scene flow smoothly.
 
I think I saw in a Family Guy featurette that they still do good old fashioned hand drawn inbetweening, but the color is done on the computer. I'm not too sure how they handle CGI over there. I believe they do all the modeling/texturing/animation/lighting in Korea.
 
The only thing they can do is make up their own background images or background character designs sometimes. I remember hearing the Foamy Mouth Guy from Avatar was made up by the Korean studio when the writers told them to "draw an excited guy" and they made the guy foaming-at-the-mouth rabid rather than just excited.

So if you see something minor in the background, it could be the animators sneaking something in, but other than that, they can't change the plot or main character designs, unless they draw off-model.
 
If they try to do any of those three things, they'd get fired on the spot, because the studios who hired them ended up paying for something they didn't want.
 
Most of the time Korea (or whatever country) just does inbetweening, arguably the longest process. Sometimes they'll do coloring, too, though it's my understanding that much of that is now done in America since it's on computers anyway, thereby it's much quicker.

Ironically, some overseas studios have gotten so conditioned to making everything "on-model" that whenever there's a pose which is supposed to be purposefully sloppy or off-model for the purposes of being expressive, they'll tone it down to make it on-model, but bland.

John K. has made some posts about this sort of thing here (please don't turn this into a John K. bashing topic- I'm just providing this link as an example of what I'm talking about): http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/search/label/Korea
 
I agree when he said "We oughta just bring animation back to the country." It's best to have full control over your work and just do it yourself. It amazes me what people do to save money, I'd rather have pride than money.
 
I think Bruce Timm, on his B:TAS commentaries, has pointed out little touches here and there that the animators added themselves that he didn't necessarily ask for but liked, such as Poison Ivy doing that little back-and-forth rock with the chair after she sits down in "Harley and Ivy."

Seth MacFarlane has also pointed out such little touches in various Family Guys. The one I remember most is "To Live and Die In Dixie," when one of the hillbillies walks up to Peter and the others on the bridge and gives the body a slight nudge with his foot, knocking it off into the river. MacFarlane noted that wasn't even in the script or storyboards, but was just a funny little addition the animators made themselves.
 
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