I was listening to the commentary on a Family Guy DVD and someone mentioned that so and so “directed this episode”. So how does a director direct a cartoon? Does he say ‘OK, for this scene we need a closeup shot from behind this character that pans out to reveal the room’, and then the animators draw just that shot? Or are the animators directed to draw several different versions and angles of the scene and then the director chooses them as the scenes are shot? Some other method?
Animators are like actors that use an avatar to act; the director tells the animators how to act.
Usually the first step is to draw a storyboard, looks like a comic strip showing the key frames of the scene, character poses, camera angles, etc… ; in the case of traditional 2d animation you have to redraw the whole thing if something is wrong; so first the action is defined on the storyboard.
Don’t forget an important part of directing a cartoon: Directing the actors who give the vocal performances.
Directors also co-ordinate between every department (animation, actors, sound, script, etc.) and have a major input on the look of the characters, the way the actors do the voices, the “environment” (costumes, “locations”, “props”).
This is about film, so I’ll move this thread to Cafe Society.
bibliophage
moderator GQ
From listening to the commentaries on the Simpsons DVD, I get the impression that the animation director decides how the characters will look, how they’ll move, what the backgrounds will look like, what the camera angles will be, etc. First the director and his team do a storyboard, which they send back to the writers and producers to make notes. Then the voices are recorded (and the direction of the voice actors seems to be done by the executive or supervising producers, not by the animation director). The voice recordings are sent to the animation studio, which then produces an animatic–a rough “first draft” animated version. This is sent back to the producers, who make more notes and record additional dialogue if necessary. Then the animators start work on the final version, and when that’s done it’s sent to the overseas studio in S. Korea that does all the fill-in work. I think sound effects and music cues (and additional dialogue) are added at the end by the producers. The animation process is evidently pretty expensive, so they try to do it with as little waste as possible.
I get the impression that an animation director has quite a bit less clout than a live-action director. It seems to be the producers that manage the coordination between departments and the voice actors.
Although maybe the Simpsons does it differently than other shows.
I’ve got more: also in the Simpsons, beginning animation directors are kept under tight control and told not to add anything that’s not in the script. Apparently the scripts are extremely detailed. Veteran directors are allowed to add things, but the producers reserve the right to remove it if they don’t like it.
There’s a story on one of the commentary tracks about sending the very first episode of the show out to be animated. When it came back, the director had completely redesigned the characters: he had removed the overbites, made the eyes smaller, etc. Fox had to pay for a complete reanimation. It was that, plus the overall sketchiness of the first season animation, that inspired the producers to get tighter control over the animators. I’d guess that the Simpsons was the pioneer in this area and other animated shows have followed suit (given that a lot of them have been produced by former Simpsons writers and producers).
Directors often start out as animators, which means they can show the animators exactly what they want by drawing out character poses and keyframes.
Chuck Jones would draw keyframes in many of the cartoons he directed to control the style of the characters and the flow of the animation. In several cartoons he directed, every 12th or 24th drawing in the cartoon was one of Chucks.
Also, very few cartoons are shown live these days. It tends to be very hard on the animators.
“‘Hey, Joe, how does a cartoon director direct? Does he say ‘Okay Bugs, let’s take it from the top?’ Ha Ha Ha.’
I try to talk to such people as little as possible.”
--Joe Adamson, **Tex Avery: King of Cartoons** (I'm quoting from memory, so I might have flubbed it a bit). Adamson explains some of it in his book, which is a classic, and available again after a long hiatus, and a classic to boot.Interestingly enough, in a lot of Japanese animation, the animation is completed before the voiceovers are recorded (in a process similar to language localization for other films, in which the voice actors watch the action as they speak, in order to match voice to mouth movements). I’m not entirely sure why it is done this way… seems to me that recording the voiceovers first would be easier for everyone concerned, and result in better voice-to-facial-animation matching and quality of voice acting to boot (for example, Finding Nemo would not have been nearly as funny as it was if Ellen Degeneres hadn’t been allowed to adlib a lot of her dialogue).
I don’t think that’s right. Cite?
Not your usual cite, but if you can find/rent a copy of Dual! Parallel Trouble Adventure, DVD#4, one of the extras is four minutes of footage of the voice actors. They watch the finished animation on a large monitor as they record their roles.
Also, from here: