How to animate

Here's the step by step layers of a short scene from Tangled. (Fittingly enough, Brave is released today.)



This is via Mental Floss. I've seen lots of how-to's on animation over the years. First, of course, there was the drawing process, pre-computers. Then the totally computer-generated process. The Pixar DVDs are rich with extras on, say, Monsters, Inc.—animating fur—or Finding Nemo —the illusion of being under water. But this is the first thing I've seen that hints at the tedium behind the overall complexity of CGI.

Speaking of tedium, the most tedious process I've ever seen was in a documentary about the making of The Nightmare Before Christmas. Stop motion makes drawing or CGI look like speed sketching by comparison. 24 frames per second, with the tiniest movement for each frame. Whew...







More than anything else, watching the Nightmare documentary made me think that it was an immense leap of faith. Everything had to be right before they started—the idea, the story, the entire movie—and then they had to commit three years to it, come hell or high water.

Art isn't easy.
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