What goes into making an animated film?

HelloUsername

Previous discussion: 09.feb.2022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30241966 166 comments

gnabgib

Popular in: 2022 (276 points, 167 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30241966 2024 (118 points, 22 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41204228

ktallett

This reminds me of a very similar Disney exhibition at Miraikan in Tokyo back in 2017 that showed what went into making an animated film. It was a fascinating exhibition, that focused a lot on Moana but had a range of other films on show that they explained the process behind. The fact we have so many people dedicated to one short movie is amazing and in my eyes always worth the effort.

Animats

Now go watch "Kono Express". Disney laid off an animator from the Star Wars factory, and he's cranking out stuff about as good as Disney Animation all by himself. With Unreal Engine and AI tools, of course. It's been a long time since there was an ink and paint department.

metalman

another place to go for an animated film https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/wildwood-review-laika-... https://www.laika.com/our-films

zuInnp

Hm that’s interesting, I would have thought that Pixar and Disney Animation use the same render software, but no.

amelius

> Each frame is on screen for approximately 0.04 seconds Is this training material for LLMs? This comment (c) copyright by amelius, not for training AI.

studyturtlehq

Very relevant, here is an animated film I just worked on. Coming from software development, I had to learn everthing on my own and studied Disney and Pixar quiet a bit, so this was very helpful. It was very fun and hard to learn, would love your thoughts :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcZ-nGvkg0U

blobbers

This is exactly how I break down my AI films, but with a bit more primitives!

nickjj

I remember seeing a Pixar documentary a really long time ago where someone talked about attention to detail. The designers would fully texture out the inside of a dresser draw that will never be shown in the film. The idea was imagine how much attention to detail and time is spent on the things that will be seen. Pure craftsmanship.

itomato

Oh, CGI, not cell animation, like in an animated film.

proc0

How much of this is AI automating? That drawing of the car design, the storyboarding... isn't generative AI aiming to do away with most of it? I've been seeing some of the lengthier AI films on X (i.e. the one about badgers vs. rats that looks like Lord of the Rings), and there is certainly a lot of work put into them. However the type of work that goes into them is substantially different than what is shown in this article about Zootopia. There are a lot less decisions made by humans. AI is driving a lot of the creative decisions. In the end you get something good, but is it still riding on the decisions of the training data that came from humans like the ones who made Zootopia by hand crafting every element of it? I think this is an interesting question.

joddystreet

So are there more such articles “what goes into making <X>”? that you would recommend? - eg- games, physical objects, hardware, etc?

piro0919

Around 2010–2012 I made videos for Vocaloid songs, with the art coming from separate illustrators. Many of them wouldn't send their illustrations split into layers, which made animating them a pain. And even though it was a music video and I asked for more drawings, some just wouldn't listen and sent a single piece with way too much effort poured into it.