Just happen to see one of these last night (*Santa Cause is Comin’ to Town *I think, the one with Fred Astaire) and it made me wonder something. Since these were the epitome of classic stop-motion animation it applies to any of it.
In a scene where a character is shown jumping or flying how exactly was this shot? What was used to hold the armature puppet above the set for each frame photographed? Is there a rod directly behind it always hidden from the camera’s POV? Is it held with fishing line that even a still camera won’t pick up? Was it attached to a glass plate? I’m guessing it’s something pretty simple, but I can’t quite picture how it’s done…
WAG: I believe the character is always held up from tabletop by a support post and for taking off, would be photographed against a blank backdrop. Dropping the camera a bit per frame would give the impression of rising into the sky.* Add the (sky, et al) background in later during post-production. Of course, if there are other characters in the shot or the flying character is moving, it’s a bit more complicated/time consuming. Naturally, there are much more sophisticated methods (even back then) available.
*The Enterprise didn’t fly by the camera, the model was something like 20 feet long and kinda delicate, so it was stationary and the camera rolled past it on dolly/tracks.
There are a lot of ways to suspend something in midair for animation. Ray Harryhausen used what was called an “aerial brace”, which is fancy term for ---- thin thread/wire/etc. Really. It really does work. You can light the scene so that it’s not very visible or, if need be, matte it out of the shot.
I recall one student animator writing about how he preferred to used acid to etch the wire he was using to hold something up, rather than paint it to match the b ackground, because etching made it thinner, while painting made it thicker.
These aren’t the only ways, of course. Depending upon how the shot is lined up, you can have something supporting a character that is completely hidden by the character’s body. You could, as you suggest, support it on a transparent background (although I haven’t heard of anyone doing this). You could even animate it against a blue screen/green screen/ whatever and composite the item with the rest of the scene (often used when your flying animated object has to appear over live action). I just recently re-watched Army of Darkness, and this is clearly the method used there. The problem is, in older, pre-CGI movies, that it was extremely difficult to get the object to matte perfectly into the background, and there’s often a “halo” around the object.
With CGI, you can composite your object cleanly into the scene, or completely eliminate any wires. I understand that the scene of Schwartzenegger riding his motorcycle off the edge into the LA storm drains in Terminator 2 were shot with very visible wires bracing him up, which were eliminated with CGI in post production. Of course, if you have CGI, you might not be doing traditional dimensional animation.
My understanding, though, is that most of the time “flying” animation effects really were done with bracing wires, artfully hidden.
Nitpick: That was actually his frequent stunt double Peter Kent. If memory serves Arnold wanted to do the stunt himself, since it was all held up with wires, but the insurance company wouldn’t let him. I only saw T2 once in the theater, but I swear when I first saw that scene there were the tiniest of ‘ripples’ in the top background above him (i.e. the CGI wire erasure wasn’t perfect). I looked for it on video but I’ve never seen it since. Maybe I imagined it, maybe they retouched it.
All the stuff you guys describe are forms of optical printing. I figured this would only be used to composite stop motion with live action, I didn’t think any of the Rankin Bass stuff used it. Given the age and budget of those specials I would have expected any optical effects like that to be less than perfect, IOW pretty obvious. But Rudolph flying around always looked pretty neat & clean in every shot!
Not everything I describe is optical printing – as I have said, aerial bracing is basically suspension by wires, although that’s a pretty crude description that obscures a lot of art. And they generally didn’t print over it to remove the wires.