18 ms·

Disney Filmmaking Process

276 points by mariuz 5y ago

bspear 5y ago
This is really cool
samwillis 5y ago
Slight aside, but Encanto is a brilliant film, we watched it together as a family first but my 7yo daughter has watched a few more times since. We have had to listen to the sound track each way on the school run for the last couple of weeks, which to be honest is no bad thing as its so good. The "Welcome to the Family Madrigal" sequence at the begging of the film is absolutely jaw dropping, if you don't watch the whole film at least watch that sequence to see what is now possible. The fabric simulation for her dress while dancing is so incredible.
- atonse 5y ago
  It’s a massive hit in our house for all of us (mom, dad, son, daughter). We have watched it together probably a dozen times now. That never happens. And for weeks, sung every song, played along with it on the piano while the instrumental versions play, etc.
  - bladegash 5y ago
    Glad I am not the only one. Have even watched it without my kids and listen to the soundtrack when they’re not there! Haven’t done that with a Disney movie, aside from maybe Moana with the soundtrack, probably ever.
- dmitriid 5y ago
  That's my problem with Encanto: technically it's very impressive. All the rest: standard Disney movie with forgettable songs, forgettable characters, forgettable story that rushes from plot point to plot point with no time to breathe. And given all the magic in it it's so highly unimaginative with it. Isabella's lament was the best part of the movie (filled with emotion, meaning and imagination), but it's literally just a "meaningless stepping stone to discover Bruno" within the movie.
  - amelius 5y ago
    Yes, the eye candy on the average cereal box marketed at children looks impressive too, for some definition of "impressive". A movie needs more than just good graphics.
    - bregma 5y ago
      Disney animated features are not cinema; they're visual entertainment. All you need for good visual entertainment is to be good at entertaining visually. On that score there is no argument that they're very good at what they do.
  - rm445 5y ago
    Catching up with a couple of friends recently, it came up that our daughters, all of similar ages, are crazy about watching Encanto and even more keen on the songs. It's perfectly reasonable to have normal movie-criticism opinions about the film, but for the target audience, it's a smash. Another 'Frozen'.
    - samwillis 5y ago
      Exactly, the songs are an absolute hit with my daughter and her friends. Just take a look at the UK top 10, three Encanto songs with "We don't talk about Bruno" at number one for last three weeks: https://www.officialcharts.com/charts/uk-top-40-singles-chart/ https://www.officialcharts.com/charts/uk-top-40-singles-char... Literal definition of a hit. Somewhere I read that Disney had to make submissions to the Academy Awards before finishing screenings of Encanto and weren't sure which song to submit (if they submit multiple songs it risks splitting the vote), so they submitted "Dos Oruguitas" and haven't had it nominated. Clearly picked the wrong song, should have gone with "We don't talk about Bruno", would have had a very good chance of getting an Oscar.
      - gabythenerd 5y ago
        Part of the problem might have been that "Dos Oruguitas" is a smash in Spanish but doesn't as have much emotional impact if you don't understand the lyrics. I saw the movie in a local theater in Latin America and several people cried with that scene. As a fun fact, every single voice actor is famous in Colombia because of their singing, for example Maribel is the leader of a popular girl band. The Spanish dub is incredible, one of the few movies I would recommend seeing in Spanish instead of English if you are bilingual.
- coldcode 5y ago
  I don't have kids at all and I found it a fun movie. It's not a heavy plot (there really is no villain) but so refreshing after a steady diet of superhero movies. Look at the average broadway musical and the plot is even lighter; every movie doesn't have to be Citizen Kane. The movie is a perfect embodiment of the culture (from people who are Columbian, not me), the music is very broadway but still in keeping with the country and well written and sung, and the animation is of course magical. There is no comparison with tripe such as Sing 2. I wonder what it would be like to work on something that takes 5 years to make, the longest I have ever worked on 1.0 apps (since the 80s when I started) is 14-16 months. Just coordinating thousands of people for 5 years is mind boggling.
  - sho_hn 5y ago
    > I wonder what it would be like to work on something that takes 5 years to make, the longest I have ever worked on 1.0 apps (since the 80s when I started) is 14-16 months. Just coordinating thousands of people for 5 years is mind boggling. In software, automotive projects can come quite close to this. Building a modern high-end headunit ECU with software can take a couple of years, 100-150 dev teams, 2k engineers and coordinating with many other groups/departments around it.
  - Aloha 5y ago
    To be totally honest - I think in this day and age, for right now anyhow there is a desire for less Citizen Kane, and more Music Man.
  - swasheck 5y ago
    i read an article about a month ago about how disney animation has steadily migrated away from a villain, to the self (or some other internal conflict) as the primary antagonist. frozen moana frozen 2 encanto during that time there were also traditional "villain" types: big hero 6 zootopia ralph breaks the internet raya and the last drago agree or disagree, it's an interesting read: https://screenrant.com/encanto-movie-villain-disney-pixar-copy-good/ https://screenrant.com/encanto-movie-villain-disney-pixar-co...
    - 5y ago
- foobarian 5y ago
  Aside on your aside, Kubo and the Two Strings is also really impressive. Until I saw the behind the scenes short video I had no idea it was done stop-motion.
- dtgriscom 5y ago
  Oh my goodness, the cloth animation is amazing. Watching "We Don't Talk about Bruno" again and again, watching how the skirts move as they're grabbed, tugged, and swirled. Even Mirabel's sleeve as her father gently pushes her aside to look at the vision, is amazing. (Yeah, I'm a hetero male, but that isn't the main attraction. At least I don't think so.)
open-source-ux 5y ago
This is really nice. Although Disney is only currently producing 3D animation films, it's a bit of a shame that nothing about 2D animation is included. The 3D animated film Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) has a refreshing 3D/2D hybrid visual look that breaks away from the 3D aesthetic common across the industry. I suspect in the future we'll see more animated films with a 2D aesthetic but created with 3D software. Aside: Disney produced lots of behind-the-scenes for their 2D animated films in the 50s and 60s. Here's one on the MultiPlane Camera - a camera setup that gave 2D animation greater depth: Walt Disney's MultiPlane Camera (1957): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdHTlUGN1zw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdHTlUGN1zw
- somishere 5y ago
  I own an amazing coffee table book called the illusion of life. It essentially lays out the history and key techniques of cell animation. I haven't opened it for a few years now, but it still has pride of place within my design books. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disney_Animation:_The_Illusion_of_Life https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disney_Animation:_The_Illusi...
  - dagmx 5y ago
    It's interesting hearing the Illusion of Life referred to as a coffee table book, since it's actually a learning resource and reference book for those in animation. I know it wasn't meant as a diminutive etc... It just caught my eye because it made me think what the delineation would be between a coffee table book and a reference book
    - somishere 5y ago
      Yes, interesting point. I worked in book stores for years and use the term coffee table book specifically for the format. I'd certainly use it interchangeably with a certain style of reference book.
- nkozyra 5y ago
  This is likely because the approaches and techniques are not measurably different with a "2D" animated movie in 2022 or recently, unless they're doing some retro cel animation. Disney's last was The Princess and The Frog (which is a very good one that predates the story-in-a-box Pixar plots), which of course was still partially made in the same animation software used by others at the time. If Disney made another traditional animation movie I suspect it would be a lot like spiderverse: mostly an aesthetic change to the existing process.
guiriduro 5y ago
Not to denigrate the fine work of many great animators and storytellers, but the missing element from this Disney filmmaking story is also the worst part of Disney: its commercial and political choices over why films get made and stories bent and subjects avoided and to what end and whose benefit. Tell that story.
- RandomLensman 5y ago
  I get the point but most art needs funding. If we go down that route, maybe we should start with Mozart or Beethoven? Or some prominent classical writers? I guess what I am saying is that this is not a particular unique situation.
  - AlecSchueler 5y ago
    Why Beethoven? Wasn't he the first to fund the composition of a significant works with the return of bank shares, which was relatively progressive in that it freed the composer from the whims of the arisotcracy/church dichotomy which existed before?
    - RandomLensman 5y ago
      AFAIK he used shares as collateral to get loans, but he generally had a fair amount of royal/aristocratic patronage from quite early on (with compositions dedicated to some of them, e.g., the Archduke Rudolf).
      - AlecSchueler 5y ago
        In the early days yes, as that was the only way at the time, but as his career progressed he actively pioneered new ways of financing his work, so I think it's a bit unreasonable to single him out.
- jb1991 5y ago
  Many of us, or most of us, are probably not sure what you’re referring to, so it might be more useful to offer some focus to your argument rather than the vague suggestions you’re making.
wodenokoto 5y ago
A long time ago I saw a rather good behind the scenes of Aladdin. I was quite surprised to see that after writing the script they had stand-in actors do the entire script, which they then did animatics (storyboards times to the recorded audio) to, after which they edited the story. Only then did final actors record. Then redo animatics and editing before doing final animation. Imagine my surprise watching the documentary on Hayao Miyazaki, where he has a 100 animators working on final animation, while he is still storyboarding, undecided on the ending of the movie and hasn’t even casted the voice actors!
- tomphoolery 5y ago
  This goes back to the days of Snow White and Sleeping Beauty! One of the pieces of old footage Disney likes to show off is animators sketching the movements of a girl dancing around the room and then merging that into the final product for Sleeping Beauty where she's in the dress and it's spinning around.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- hammock 5y ago
  >I was quite surprised to see that after writing the script they had stand-in actors do the entire script, which they then did animatics (storyboards times to the recorded audio) to, after which they edited the story. Only then did final actors record. Then redo animatics and editing before doing final animation I have no experience in animation, however that process is not unlike the common process in music production: a song is written, a demo is cut by the songwriter, a "scratch track" is cut by the chosen lead vocalist and an instrument or two, then the arrangement is recorded by the band (to the scratch track), then final vocals are cut to the band's backing track, and often after that tweaks to the accompaniment are still made.
  - lc9er 5y ago
    Yup. I've recorded several albums, some in small home studios and others in pro environments. It's always been scratch track -> drums (me) -> guitars/bass (bass almost always direct to console) -> vocals.
saadalem 5y ago
i guess 3D animation costs 1 million per minute, while 2d animation costs about 15k a minute. could AI help reduce the costs in the future ? imagine making a movie in a short time and also x0.1-0.001% costs here's a good read too: http://web.archive.org/web/20201121143218/https://arr.am/2020/09/15/the-generative-age/ http://web.archive.org/web/20201121143218/https://arr.am/202...
- wodenokoto 5y ago
  I don’t know where you get those numbers from, but obviously animation price for both 2D and 3D are dependent on level of detail. Naive calculation says that princess and the frog (disneys last 2D) was 100mill for 97 minutes, while Up (released same year) was 175mill for 96 minutes. I don’t think either movie had particularly bigger stars than the other, so i think the overall budget ratio gives an okay idea of how far your estimate is off for cinema animation.
  - loudthing 5y ago
    3d movies require a lot more technical r&d, experimentation and tool development. This was true for 2d in the past, but Princess and the Frog was made in more or less off the shelf 2d animation software. The biggest challenge to doing 2d though is finding the talent and the justification. Take a look at what most art school are offering as far as animation goes...
    - Andrex 5y ago
      At least we finally seem to be moving on from the CalArts style.
    - wodenokoto 5y ago
      I’m not really sure what you are arguing for, but if an expensive 3D film is only 1.75 times more expensive than a cheap 2D film, then that’s a pretty strong argument that 3D isn’t much more expensive than 2D (OP was saying it was 1000 to 15 ratio) > The biggest challenge to doing 2d though is finding the talent and the justification. I disagree. There is a lot of great 2D cinema animation coming out of the East. It’s not just Ghibli that makes beautiful, well-told cartoons.
rom1v 5y ago
Cool page (although I had to disable uBlock Origin to be able to see it correctly). > There are 24 frames in one second of animation. Why don't they target 60fps now?
- chottocharaii 5y ago
  1) very expensive to do more in betweens 2) 60fps looks uncanny to viewers. we’re culturally accustomed to associating 24fps with feature films
  - rom1v 5y ago
    > 1) very expensive to do more in betweens That's maybe a bit native, but for an animated movie, I think that the intermediate frames could be computed automatically, for a small additional cost. I don't dispute that there might be a bit more work (I guess some frames might need to be adjusted manually), but I am not convinced that it is that much expensive to do 60fps rather of 24fps.
    - martin_balsam 5y ago
      Not really, yes some interpolation is done automatically, but most character animation, especially for high budget films like Pixar is hyper finely tuned to the frame level, manually adjusting the interpolation curves to get the most expressive animation. And then you have films like Spider-Man Into the Spiderverse where they did a mix of 24fps and 12fps for a more punchy and cartoony effect. In the end it’s not about realism but emotion and artistic representation
- chronogram 5y ago
  The low FPS also helps in disguising the theater. Lots of things in movies are fake, and if it was in 60 FPS you’d be able to see clearly what is happening. Additionally it helps in making still things stand out, like scenery or the main character in a crowd. For real things like sports and esports, more FPS is used because instead of hiding things you want to show things.
angryGhost 5y ago
I found the Disney video on path tracing quite interesting too! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frLwRLS_ZR0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frLwRLS_ZR0
- sweetheart 5y ago
  Now _that_ is how you ELI5.
pcmaffey 5y ago
Does anyone else enjoy the 2d storyboards almost even more than the final 3d film?
- jb1991 5y ago
  Even with the old 2D movies, I've always liked the rough sketched animations even more. That rawness really makes you feel close to the artist and their process and is the most magical for me.
  - aceazzameen 5y ago
    Beauty and the Beast has a feature on DVD (Blu ray too?) where you can watch the entire movie in animatic form. It's great! I don't know if Disney ever did that again with any of their other releases.
- Joeboy 5y ago
  I really liked the artwork at the end of The Mandalorian, which I guess was meant to look like Ralph McQuarrie concept art.
quartz 5y ago
I really enjoy that Disney puts a lot of effort into making the "behind the scenes" edutainment to the point where it's a natural part of their brand. I remember watching the making-of videos for the Lion King when I was little and being blown away that the artists went and watched actual lions and live-sketched them to try and capture the physical motions and emotions of the animal. These kinds of steps are obvious to an adult but as a little kid it really helped me understand that movies like that are made through more or less obvious steps (want to draw a lion well? go look at a lion!) vs. magically coming into being.
- illwrks 5y ago
  We recently took our daughter to see the Harry Potter Studio Tour. With the magic of movies, it's easy to forget what goes into a film. It was eye opening the amount of detail and thought that goes into every little thing. No wonder they can be so expensive to create.
- sho_hn 5y ago
  > These kinds of steps are obvious to an adult but as a little kid it really helped me understand that movies like that are made through more or less obvious steps (want to draw a lion well? go look at a lion!) vs. magically coming into being. I think I know what you mean. As a kid I sometimes felt really intimidated and dispirited by things that appeared to be overwhelmingly hard or seemed to require rare talent to accomplish. Kind adults breaking down how it's done and how many people or what level of preparation it takes made a huge difference then. Understanding how an average person in the normal range of abilities can do it, and that an accomplished professional has worked hard but is only "cooking with water", too. An example: As a young kid I took guitar lessons. I was struggling with keeping time, I was very frustrated and I concluded I'm just no good at this and gave up. Later on I told this story to a professional orchestra musician and he told me that keeping time is simply hard for humans, and he still has to practice it every day and will practice for the rest of his career. It's just something he accepts as a part of what he likes to do. This completely reset my expectations of what playing music should be like, and allowed me to work on the skill and progress further. Unfortunately I think a lot of professionals try to shroud what they do in a certain level of mystery instead, because they enjoy being looked up to and consider it the reward for their toils and hardships. Programmers are frequently guilty of this - when non-IT people naively assume every programmer is a math wizard and programmers do nothing to correct this idea, for example. I tell people that if you wake up in the morning and sketch out the steps of an algorithm for how you get from there to your cup of morning coffee, you're essentially doing what programmers do. You could do it too if you choose to dedicate the time. It's fun to see how this sometimes makes people's level of genuine interest bloom.
coolhand1 5y ago
This was a super cool read. I miss the days of when of when I would spend hours trying to build models in 3ds max.
jpm_sd 5y ago
I hate hate HATE this style of web site design. Great content but why does it all have to be scrollbar-triggered-dynamic? It never works right for me. It's completely unusable on mobile and incredibly tedious on desktop.
mrtksn 5y ago
"Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life" is also a great read. Here is short video demonstrating 12 basic principles of animation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiGY0qiy8fY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiGY0qiy8fY
iqandjoke 5y ago
Imagine if DIsney+ allows access to 65,000,000 assets from Disney Animation's nearly hundred-year history...
DrBoring 5y ago
Could you imagine if Disney decided to open source one of their 3D films? How much fun would that be to play with? It would be like when Doom was open sourced (I pick Doom because it's one of the first major video games that I can remember being open sourced, and the creative results have been vast) I'd like to see Toy Story 1 re-rendered using the Toy Story 4 models (assuming Disney also made those available). Imagine all the technical challenges you'd face to do that: Write code to convert the models, sets, skeletons, animations. Upscale/create new textures, etc.
- oaiey 5y ago
  I can imagine. And I am pretty sure I know the industry which - as usual - will move first to new technology/data. And I am pretty sure, Disney will not like that.
- kinghtown 5y ago
  Pixar has already released production ready, rigged models of the toy story characters as well as the kid’s bedroom. You can download them into blender or maya as assets and animate them into scenes.
- alksjdalkj 5y ago
  They have open sourced some assets: https://disneyanimation.com/data-sets/ https://disneyanimation.com/data-sets/. Obviously not a full movie, but enough that a researcher/developer could begin to experience the kind of technical challenges that arise at "Disney-scale". IIRC a single frame from the movie Moana used something like 100GB of assets.
billconan 5y ago
I'm curious how do film studios manage this process using software. Do they have something similar to jira?
- jedberg 5y ago
  Each studio has their own (usually crappy) tools. Sometimes it's just spreadsheets. One thing I hear Netflix is doing right now is focusing on making better studio tools so that creatives prefer to work for Netflix because they have better tools.
  - asdff 5y ago
    Its not the tooling keeping people away from wanting to work for Netflix though. People want to work where they have creative freedom and reasonable expectations.
- egypturnash 5y ago
  When I was working in the industry around the turn of the century it was mostly just folders. One per scene. They'd start with just the scene number and the storyboard panels on them; they'd go off to layout and get drawings of key poses and background roughs, then go back to the set of shelves designated for that episode. After directorial approval they'd go on to further parts of the process - we were a Flash studio so the layout drawings would get inked, get approved, get scanned and cleaned up and put into a file (with a studio-wide standard for naming both the file and every single piece of art in the file so as to avoid conflicts when putting the final file together), get colored, then get handed off to the Flash crew who would make the animation happen. If you had wanted to sabotage our process, the set of shelves that held all the scene folders would have been a great place to go. Every scene lived there when it wasn't being worked on by someone. If you want a glimpse at the modern process for 2D animation, have a look at Toon Boom's suite of software. https://www.toonboom.com https://www.toonboom.com - not everyone uses it but it's pretty widespread. Though realistically? I'm not in the industry any more but the bits I see of the process from my friends who are directors lead me to believe that it's still not uncommon to have a checklist that lives on a wall in the director's office, tracking the journey of every scene from storyboard to finished shot.
jedberg 5y ago
If this kind of stuff interests you, there is a good documentary on Disney+ about the making of Frozen 2. They filmed the documentary from the beginning of the process to the end with the intention of making a deeply detailed doc. The directors had a lot of access. It's really interesting and I recommend it (but also make sure you watch Frozen 2 before you watch it if you aren't already familiar because it's more interesting if you can recall the scenes they are talking about). https://www.disneyplus.com/series/into-the-unknown-making-frozen-2/6PWutGrMQzCI https://www.disneyplus.com/series/into-the-unknown-making-fr...
pomian 5y ago
This was really interesting to see, and update our knowledge on production techniques. But, Why? The big heads?
barbs 5y ago
On a similar note, I highly recommend the documentary "The Sweatbox", which is a behind-the-scenes look at the process behind the creation of "The Emperor's New Groove". It was originally meant to be a very different, more serious film, but despite all the effort into creating the storyboards, characters, music etc the producers rejected it and they had to change direction. The documentary was never supposed to be released, but it eventually was leaked. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sweatbox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sweatbox https://archive.org/details/SweatboxDocumentaryUneditedVersion https://archive.org/details/SweatboxDocumentaryUneditedVersi...
echelon 5y ago
Film is ridiculously expensive and time consuming, and at the end of a film you throw everything away just to do it all again later. (I painfully know this as I've made films.) With the GPU and ML revolution, this entire industry is ripe for automation and disruption. Everything from scripting, camera work, location scouting, set dec, editing, and effects. 2D animation, 3D animation, and live action. In the future, kids will be making their own Star Wars films in their basement over the weekend. This will put a big dent into IP as well. (I'm working on this.)

276 points by mariuz 5y ago

This is really cool

Slight aside, but Encanto is a brilliant film, we watched it together as a family first but my 7yo daughter has watched a few more times since. We have had to listen to the sound track each way on the school run for the last couple of weeks, which to be honest is no bad thing as its so good. The "Welcome to the Family Madrigal" sequence at the begging of the film is absolutely jaw dropping, if you don't watch the whole film at least watch that sequence to see what is now possible. The fabric simulation for her dress while dancing is so incredible.

atonse 5y ago
It’s a massive hit in our house for all of us (mom, dad, son, daughter). We have watched it together probably a dozen times now. That never happens. And for weeks, sung every song, played along with it on the piano while the instrumental versions play, etc.
- bladegash 5y ago
  Glad I am not the only one. Have even watched it without my kids and listen to the soundtrack when they’re not there! Haven’t done that with a Disney movie, aside from maybe Moana with the soundtrack, probably ever.
dmitriid 5y ago
That's my problem with Encanto: technically it's very impressive. All the rest: standard Disney movie with forgettable songs, forgettable characters, forgettable story that rushes from plot point to plot point with no time to breathe. And given all the magic in it it's so highly unimaginative with it. Isabella's lament was the best part of the movie (filled with emotion, meaning and imagination), but it's literally just a "meaningless stepping stone to discover Bruno" within the movie.
- amelius 5y ago
  Yes, the eye candy on the average cereal box marketed at children looks impressive too, for some definition of "impressive". A movie needs more than just good graphics.
  - bregma 5y ago
    Disney animated features are not cinema; they're visual entertainment. All you need for good visual entertainment is to be good at entertaining visually. On that score there is no argument that they're very good at what they do.
- rm445 5y ago
  Catching up with a couple of friends recently, it came up that our daughters, all of similar ages, are crazy about watching Encanto and even more keen on the songs. It's perfectly reasonable to have normal movie-criticism opinions about the film, but for the target audience, it's a smash. Another 'Frozen'.
  - samwillis 5y ago
    Exactly, the songs are an absolute hit with my daughter and her friends. Just take a look at the UK top 10, three Encanto songs with "We don't talk about Bruno" at number one for last three weeks: https://www.officialcharts.com/charts/uk-top-40-singles-chart/ https://www.officialcharts.com/charts/uk-top-40-singles-char... Literal definition of a hit. Somewhere I read that Disney had to make submissions to the Academy Awards before finishing screenings of Encanto and weren't sure which song to submit (if they submit multiple songs it risks splitting the vote), so they submitted "Dos Oruguitas" and haven't had it nominated. Clearly picked the wrong song, should have gone with "We don't talk about Bruno", would have had a very good chance of getting an Oscar.
    - gabythenerd 5y ago
      Part of the problem might have been that "Dos Oruguitas" is a smash in Spanish but doesn't as have much emotional impact if you don't understand the lyrics. I saw the movie in a local theater in Latin America and several people cried with that scene. As a fun fact, every single voice actor is famous in Colombia because of their singing, for example Maribel is the leader of a popular girl band. The Spanish dub is incredible, one of the few movies I would recommend seeing in Spanish instead of English if you are bilingual.
coldcode 5y ago
I don't have kids at all and I found it a fun movie. It's not a heavy plot (there really is no villain) but so refreshing after a steady diet of superhero movies. Look at the average broadway musical and the plot is even lighter; every movie doesn't have to be Citizen Kane. The movie is a perfect embodiment of the culture (from people who are Columbian, not me), the music is very broadway but still in keeping with the country and well written and sung, and the animation is of course magical. There is no comparison with tripe such as Sing 2. I wonder what it would be like to work on something that takes 5 years to make, the longest I have ever worked on 1.0 apps (since the 80s when I started) is 14-16 months. Just coordinating thousands of people for 5 years is mind boggling.
- sho_hn 5y ago
  > I wonder what it would be like to work on something that takes 5 years to make, the longest I have ever worked on 1.0 apps (since the 80s when I started) is 14-16 months. Just coordinating thousands of people for 5 years is mind boggling. In software, automotive projects can come quite close to this. Building a modern high-end headunit ECU with software can take a couple of years, 100-150 dev teams, 2k engineers and coordinating with many other groups/departments around it.
- Aloha 5y ago
  To be totally honest - I think in this day and age, for right now anyhow there is a desire for less Citizen Kane, and more Music Man.
- swasheck 5y ago
  i read an article about a month ago about how disney animation has steadily migrated away from a villain, to the self (or some other internal conflict) as the primary antagonist. frozen moana frozen 2 encanto during that time there were also traditional "villain" types: big hero 6 zootopia ralph breaks the internet raya and the last drago agree or disagree, it's an interesting read: https://screenrant.com/encanto-movie-villain-disney-pixar-copy-good/ https://screenrant.com/encanto-movie-villain-disney-pixar-co...
  - 5y ago
foobarian 5y ago
Aside on your aside, Kubo and the Two Strings is also really impressive. Until I saw the behind the scenes short video I had no idea it was done stop-motion.
dtgriscom 5y ago
Oh my goodness, the cloth animation is amazing. Watching "We Don't Talk about Bruno" again and again, watching how the skirts move as they're grabbed, tugged, and swirled. Even Mirabel's sleeve as her father gently pushes her aside to look at the vision, is amazing. (Yeah, I'm a hetero male, but that isn't the main attraction. At least I don't think so.)

open-source-ux 5y ago

This is really nice. Although Disney is only currently producing 3D animation films, it's a bit of a shame that nothing about 2D animation is included. The 3D animated film Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) has a refreshing 3D/2D hybrid visual look that breaks away from the 3D aesthetic common across the industry. I suspect in the future we'll see more animated films with a 2D aesthetic but created with 3D software. Aside: Disney produced lots of behind-the-scenes for their 2D animated films in the 50s and 60s. Here's one on the MultiPlane Camera - a camera setup that gave 2D animation greater depth: Walt Disney's MultiPlane Camera (1957): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdHTlUGN1zw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdHTlUGN1zw

somishere 5y ago
I own an amazing coffee table book called the illusion of life. It essentially lays out the history and key techniques of cell animation. I haven't opened it for a few years now, but it still has pride of place within my design books. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disney_Animation:_The_Illusion_of_Life https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disney_Animation:_The_Illusi...
- dagmx 5y ago
  It's interesting hearing the Illusion of Life referred to as a coffee table book, since it's actually a learning resource and reference book for those in animation. I know it wasn't meant as a diminutive etc... It just caught my eye because it made me think what the delineation would be between a coffee table book and a reference book
  - somishere 5y ago
    Yes, interesting point. I worked in book stores for years and use the term coffee table book specifically for the format. I'd certainly use it interchangeably with a certain style of reference book.
nkozyra 5y ago
This is likely because the approaches and techniques are not measurably different with a "2D" animated movie in 2022 or recently, unless they're doing some retro cel animation. Disney's last was The Princess and The Frog (which is a very good one that predates the story-in-a-box Pixar plots), which of course was still partially made in the same animation software used by others at the time. If Disney made another traditional animation movie I suspect it would be a lot like spiderverse: mostly an aesthetic change to the existing process.

guiriduro 5y ago

Not to denigrate the fine work of many great animators and storytellers, but the missing element from this Disney filmmaking story is also the worst part of Disney: its commercial and political choices over why films get made and stories bent and subjects avoided and to what end and whose benefit. Tell that story.

RandomLensman 5y ago
I get the point but most art needs funding. If we go down that route, maybe we should start with Mozart or Beethoven? Or some prominent classical writers? I guess what I am saying is that this is not a particular unique situation.
- AlecSchueler 5y ago
  Why Beethoven? Wasn't he the first to fund the composition of a significant works with the return of bank shares, which was relatively progressive in that it freed the composer from the whims of the arisotcracy/church dichotomy which existed before?
  - RandomLensman 5y ago
    AFAIK he used shares as collateral to get loans, but he generally had a fair amount of royal/aristocratic patronage from quite early on (with compositions dedicated to some of them, e.g., the Archduke Rudolf).
    - AlecSchueler 5y ago
      In the early days yes, as that was the only way at the time, but as his career progressed he actively pioneered new ways of financing his work, so I think it's a bit unreasonable to single him out.
jb1991 5y ago
Many of us, or most of us, are probably not sure what you’re referring to, so it might be more useful to offer some focus to your argument rather than the vague suggestions you’re making.

wodenokoto 5y ago

A long time ago I saw a rather good behind the scenes of Aladdin. I was quite surprised to see that after writing the script they had stand-in actors do the entire script, which they then did animatics (storyboards times to the recorded audio) to, after which they edited the story. Only then did final actors record. Then redo animatics and editing before doing final animation. Imagine my surprise watching the documentary on Hayao Miyazaki, where he has a 100 animators working on final animation, while he is still storyboarding, undecided on the ending of the movie and hasn’t even casted the voice actors!

tomphoolery 5y ago
This goes back to the days of Snow White and Sleeping Beauty! One of the pieces of old footage Disney likes to show off is animators sketching the movements of a girl dancing around the room and then merging that into the final product for Sleeping Beauty where she's in the dress and it's spinning around.
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hammock 5y ago
>I was quite surprised to see that after writing the script they had stand-in actors do the entire script, which they then did animatics (storyboards times to the recorded audio) to, after which they edited the story. Only then did final actors record. Then redo animatics and editing before doing final animation I have no experience in animation, however that process is not unlike the common process in music production: a song is written, a demo is cut by the songwriter, a "scratch track" is cut by the chosen lead vocalist and an instrument or two, then the arrangement is recorded by the band (to the scratch track), then final vocals are cut to the band's backing track, and often after that tweaks to the accompaniment are still made.
- lc9er 5y ago
  Yup. I've recorded several albums, some in small home studios and others in pro environments. It's always been scratch track -> drums (me) -> guitars/bass (bass almost always direct to console) -> vocals.

saadalem 5y ago

i guess 3D animation costs 1 million per minute, while 2d animation costs about 15k a minute. could AI help reduce the costs in the future ? imagine making a movie in a short time and also x0.1-0.001% costs here's a good read too: http://web.archive.org/web/20201121143218/https://arr.am/2020/09/15/the-generative-age/ http://web.archive.org/web/20201121143218/https://arr.am/202...

wodenokoto 5y ago
I don’t know where you get those numbers from, but obviously animation price for both 2D and 3D are dependent on level of detail. Naive calculation says that princess and the frog (disneys last 2D) was 100mill for 97 minutes, while Up (released same year) was 175mill for 96 minutes. I don’t think either movie had particularly bigger stars than the other, so i think the overall budget ratio gives an okay idea of how far your estimate is off for cinema animation.
- loudthing 5y ago
  3d movies require a lot more technical r&d, experimentation and tool development. This was true for 2d in the past, but Princess and the Frog was made in more or less off the shelf 2d animation software. The biggest challenge to doing 2d though is finding the talent and the justification. Take a look at what most art school are offering as far as animation goes...
  - Andrex 5y ago
    At least we finally seem to be moving on from the CalArts style.
  - wodenokoto 5y ago
    I’m not really sure what you are arguing for, but if an expensive 3D film is only 1.75 times more expensive than a cheap 2D film, then that’s a pretty strong argument that 3D isn’t much more expensive than 2D (OP was saying it was 1000 to 15 ratio) > The biggest challenge to doing 2d though is finding the talent and the justification. I disagree. There is a lot of great 2D cinema animation coming out of the East. It’s not just Ghibli that makes beautiful, well-told cartoons.

rom1v 5y ago

Cool page (although I had to disable uBlock Origin to be able to see it correctly). > There are 24 frames in one second of animation. Why don't they target 60fps now?

chottocharaii 5y ago
1) very expensive to do more in betweens 2) 60fps looks uncanny to viewers. we’re culturally accustomed to associating 24fps with feature films
- rom1v 5y ago
  > 1) very expensive to do more in betweens That's maybe a bit native, but for an animated movie, I think that the intermediate frames could be computed automatically, for a small additional cost. I don't dispute that there might be a bit more work (I guess some frames might need to be adjusted manually), but I am not convinced that it is that much expensive to do 60fps rather of 24fps.
  - martin_balsam 5y ago
    Not really, yes some interpolation is done automatically, but most character animation, especially for high budget films like Pixar is hyper finely tuned to the frame level, manually adjusting the interpolation curves to get the most expressive animation. And then you have films like Spider-Man Into the Spiderverse where they did a mix of 24fps and 12fps for a more punchy and cartoony effect. In the end it’s not about realism but emotion and artistic representation
chronogram 5y ago
The low FPS also helps in disguising the theater. Lots of things in movies are fake, and if it was in 60 FPS you’d be able to see clearly what is happening. Additionally it helps in making still things stand out, like scenery or the main character in a crowd. For real things like sports and esports, more FPS is used because instead of hiding things you want to show things.

angryGhost 5y ago

I found the Disney video on path tracing quite interesting too! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frLwRLS_ZR0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frLwRLS_ZR0

sweetheart 5y ago
Now _that_ is how you ELI5.

pcmaffey 5y ago

Does anyone else enjoy the 2d storyboards almost even more than the final 3d film?

jb1991 5y ago
Even with the old 2D movies, I've always liked the rough sketched animations even more. That rawness really makes you feel close to the artist and their process and is the most magical for me.
- aceazzameen 5y ago
  Beauty and the Beast has a feature on DVD (Blu ray too?) where you can watch the entire movie in animatic form. It's great! I don't know if Disney ever did that again with any of their other releases.
Joeboy 5y ago
I really liked the artwork at the end of The Mandalorian, which I guess was meant to look like Ralph McQuarrie concept art.

quartz 5y ago

I really enjoy that Disney puts a lot of effort into making the "behind the scenes" edutainment to the point where it's a natural part of their brand. I remember watching the making-of videos for the Lion King when I was little and being blown away that the artists went and watched actual lions and live-sketched them to try and capture the physical motions and emotions of the animal. These kinds of steps are obvious to an adult but as a little kid it really helped me understand that movies like that are made through more or less obvious steps (want to draw a lion well? go look at a lion!) vs. magically coming into being.

illwrks 5y ago
We recently took our daughter to see the Harry Potter Studio Tour. With the magic of movies, it's easy to forget what goes into a film. It was eye opening the amount of detail and thought that goes into every little thing. No wonder they can be so expensive to create.
sho_hn 5y ago
> These kinds of steps are obvious to an adult but as a little kid it really helped me understand that movies like that are made through more or less obvious steps (want to draw a lion well? go look at a lion!) vs. magically coming into being. I think I know what you mean. As a kid I sometimes felt really intimidated and dispirited by things that appeared to be overwhelmingly hard or seemed to require rare talent to accomplish. Kind adults breaking down how it's done and how many people or what level of preparation it takes made a huge difference then. Understanding how an average person in the normal range of abilities can do it, and that an accomplished professional has worked hard but is only "cooking with water", too. An example: As a young kid I took guitar lessons. I was struggling with keeping time, I was very frustrated and I concluded I'm just no good at this and gave up. Later on I told this story to a professional orchestra musician and he told me that keeping time is simply hard for humans, and he still has to practice it every day and will practice for the rest of his career. It's just something he accepts as a part of what he likes to do. This completely reset my expectations of what playing music should be like, and allowed me to work on the skill and progress further. Unfortunately I think a lot of professionals try to shroud what they do in a certain level of mystery instead, because they enjoy being looked up to and consider it the reward for their toils and hardships. Programmers are frequently guilty of this - when non-IT people naively assume every programmer is a math wizard and programmers do nothing to correct this idea, for example. I tell people that if you wake up in the morning and sketch out the steps of an algorithm for how you get from there to your cup of morning coffee, you're essentially doing what programmers do. You could do it too if you choose to dedicate the time. It's fun to see how this sometimes makes people's level of genuine interest bloom.

coolhand1 5y ago

This was a super cool read. I miss the days of when of when I would spend hours trying to build models in 3ds max.

jpm_sd 5y ago

I hate hate HATE this style of web site design. Great content but why does it all have to be scrollbar-triggered-dynamic? It never works right for me. It's completely unusable on mobile and incredibly tedious on desktop.

mrtksn 5y ago

"Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life" is also a great read. Here is short video demonstrating 12 basic principles of animation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiGY0qiy8fY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiGY0qiy8fY

iqandjoke 5y ago

Imagine if DIsney+ allows access to 65,000,000 assets from Disney Animation's nearly hundred-year history...

DrBoring 5y ago

Could you imagine if Disney decided to open source one of their 3D films? How much fun would that be to play with? It would be like when Doom was open sourced (I pick Doom because it's one of the first major video games that I can remember being open sourced, and the creative results have been vast) I'd like to see Toy Story 1 re-rendered using the Toy Story 4 models (assuming Disney also made those available). Imagine all the technical challenges you'd face to do that: Write code to convert the models, sets, skeletons, animations. Upscale/create new textures, etc.

oaiey 5y ago
I can imagine. And I am pretty sure I know the industry which - as usual - will move first to new technology/data. And I am pretty sure, Disney will not like that.
kinghtown 5y ago
Pixar has already released production ready, rigged models of the toy story characters as well as the kid’s bedroom. You can download them into blender or maya as assets and animate them into scenes.
alksjdalkj 5y ago
They have open sourced some assets: https://disneyanimation.com/data-sets/ https://disneyanimation.com/data-sets/. Obviously not a full movie, but enough that a researcher/developer could begin to experience the kind of technical challenges that arise at "Disney-scale". IIRC a single frame from the movie Moana used something like 100GB of assets.

billconan 5y ago

I'm curious how do film studios manage this process using software. Do they have something similar to jira?

jedberg 5y ago
Each studio has their own (usually crappy) tools. Sometimes it's just spreadsheets. One thing I hear Netflix is doing right now is focusing on making better studio tools so that creatives prefer to work for Netflix because they have better tools.
- asdff 5y ago
  Its not the tooling keeping people away from wanting to work for Netflix though. People want to work where they have creative freedom and reasonable expectations.
egypturnash 5y ago
When I was working in the industry around the turn of the century it was mostly just folders. One per scene. They'd start with just the scene number and the storyboard panels on them; they'd go off to layout and get drawings of key poses and background roughs, then go back to the set of shelves designated for that episode. After directorial approval they'd go on to further parts of the process - we were a Flash studio so the layout drawings would get inked, get approved, get scanned and cleaned up and put into a file (with a studio-wide standard for naming both the file and every single piece of art in the file so as to avoid conflicts when putting the final file together), get colored, then get handed off to the Flash crew who would make the animation happen. If you had wanted to sabotage our process, the set of shelves that held all the scene folders would have been a great place to go. Every scene lived there when it wasn't being worked on by someone. If you want a glimpse at the modern process for 2D animation, have a look at Toon Boom's suite of software. https://www.toonboom.com https://www.toonboom.com - not everyone uses it but it's pretty widespread. Though realistically? I'm not in the industry any more but the bits I see of the process from my friends who are directors lead me to believe that it's still not uncommon to have a checklist that lives on a wall in the director's office, tracking the journey of every scene from storyboard to finished shot.

jedberg 5y ago

If this kind of stuff interests you, there is a good documentary on Disney+ about the making of Frozen 2. They filmed the documentary from the beginning of the process to the end with the intention of making a deeply detailed doc. The directors had a lot of access. It's really interesting and I recommend it (but also make sure you watch Frozen 2 before you watch it if you aren't already familiar because it's more interesting if you can recall the scenes they are talking about). https://www.disneyplus.com/series/into-the-unknown-making-frozen-2/6PWutGrMQzCI https://www.disneyplus.com/series/into-the-unknown-making-fr...

pomian 5y ago

This was really interesting to see, and update our knowledge on production techniques. But, Why? The big heads?

barbs 5y ago

On a similar note, I highly recommend the documentary "The Sweatbox", which is a behind-the-scenes look at the process behind the creation of "The Emperor's New Groove". It was originally meant to be a very different, more serious film, but despite all the effort into creating the storyboards, characters, music etc the producers rejected it and they had to change direction. The documentary was never supposed to be released, but it eventually was leaked. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sweatbox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sweatbox https://archive.org/details/SweatboxDocumentaryUneditedVersion https://archive.org/details/SweatboxDocumentaryUneditedVersi...

echelon 5y ago

Film is ridiculously expensive and time consuming, and at the end of a film you throw everything away just to do it all again later. (I painfully know this as I've made films.) With the GPU and ML revolution, this entire industry is ripe for automation and disruption. Everything from scripting, camera work, location scouting, set dec, editing, and effects. 2D animation, 3D animation, and live action. In the future, kids will be making their own Star Wars films in their basement over the weekend. This will put a big dent into IP as well. (I'm working on this.)