Storyboards

After the script is finalized, it's given to the storyboard artist or artists to be made into storyboards. These are basically the entire script in the form of comic-like panels, with camera directions and dialogue written underneath. Here's a selection of storyboards from three different shows, done by various artists.

The Dangermouse board is a little different to the others, because the show relied so heavily on re-used animation. The storyboard itself is also mostly made up of re-used images - very few pictures were freshly drawn, unlike the Duckula and Victor & Hugo boards which were done entirely from scratch.

Layouts and backgrounds

After the storyboards come the layout drawings, which establish exactly where the characters are positioned in each scene. These are based on the images in the storyboards, but scaled up to standard animation field sizes (i.e., made bigger). Background artists will create background images based on the layouts. These used to always be hand painted, but now they're often done digitally. However, Disney and other companies still used painted backgrounds for a long time even after they had switched to CG animation for the actual characters. Below, you can see some Duckula backgrounds rendered in pen and ink. Often, the same backgrounds can be used in more than one episode, to help keep down costs.

Animation

By now, a motley band of voice actors will have been assembled into a small room and, in a fug of coffee fumes and cigarette smoke, recorded the dialogue for each episode. (You can find out more about some of Cosgrove Hall's voice acting alumni on the Voices page.) These recordings are given to the animators, who translate them into a series of twenty million billion minutely different drawings via an extended process of slow and exquisite torture and sensory deprivation. Well, that's the impression I get from all the animators I've encountered. It can't be a coincidence that they're all pale, hollow-eyed spectres with backache. Anyway, here's what rough and tidied up animators' drawings look like.

After the drawings have been cleaned up so they have nice crisp outlines, they get transferred onto cels. In studios with a lot of money, this is done by hand, with a team of trained mandrills carefully hand-tracing the outline of the drawing on to individual transparent sheets. In more sensible studios, it's done with a bloody great photocopier. In fact, these days it's rarely done at all, because everything's gone digital. However, there's nothing quite like a hand-painted cel (except the next one in the sequence I suppose). Look! Here's some! You are impressed, no?

Filming

When all the cels have been prepared, they are placed on top of the backgrounds and filmed in sequence beneath a huge apparatus called a rostrum camera. Most limited-budget animation of the type Cosgrove Hall typified is shot on twos, which means each cel is visible on screen for one 12th of a second instead of the more Disney-esque one 24th. As these figures suggest, filming animation is a very laborious process, which is why these days not many companies still work in this way. Computer-based animation cuts this tiresome step out entirely, which can only be a good thing...

Editing

Finally, the soundtrack is matched up to the filmed cartoon, and music and sound effects are added. Almost all cartoons use a mix of original and stock music for the soundtrack. Sound effects are obviously created and added as each episode's story requires. The running time of a normal TV cartoon is in the region of 22 minutes, so editing will take place to get it down to this length. And there you have it! Another cartoon is unleashed upon the unsuspecting world. The end.

Well, of course, that's NOT the end at all. This was merely a not-very-serious but still slightly informative glimpse of how drawn animation used to be done in the old days. It's by no means exhaustive - it doesn't even touch on model animation, and what the hell was that bit about the mandrills?? No, my friends, the Animation Universe continues to grow and expand and change, with new techniques being developed all the time. There's way too much exciting stuff happening to cover on this ickle site, so why not search the 'net and learn a little more about the future of cartoons, in which they'll be beamed directly into our brains from outer space? Wow, I can't wait!

(Links will be provided as such as I find some good ones...)

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