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Better Filmmaking Through Animation

Written by John Rozewicki

Sunday, 16 July 2006

Luxurious Fakery

Filmmaking is hard work, because it's fake; all of it. Every single thing needs to be crafted, controlled, and timed. Performances need fine-tuning, sets designed, and even stupid things like where all the actors are going to stand need to be determined. There is, however, one luxury. Cameras will put to film anything put in front of them.

Draw the New York Sky Line from Scratch?

Animated filmmakers don't have this luxury at all. As many things as have to be controlled in a live-action shoot, even more things have to be controlled when producing an animated film. It's the difference between taking a snapshot of the New York sky line, and being forced to produce it from scratch on a piece of paper.

Animators = Better Filmmakers

It's not quite as clear-cut as I have painted it here. There are positives and negatives to each style. Even so, I believe when everything is weighed, that people trained in producing animated films are better at making films than those people trained solely in live-action filmmaking.

Planning

A person has to design, implement, and animate every element of animated production. With the number of hours of work it takes to create even a simple scene it is very important that there be a plan for a workable film before it goes into production.

Better Planning Through Necessity

Live-action filmmaking simply does not require as much depth in the planning. For example, the verbal script in an animated film must be more solid than a live-action one. A few minutes of extra audio here and there in a live-action movie costs relatively little money. The camera shoots what's in front of it, and the actors do the rest. In an animated film, every extra line of audio means more work lip-syncing. Brevity is key.

Better Planning Means Better Stories and Films

What all this planning trains filmmakers to do is use their resources more wisely. Those well versed in how much work it takes to produce an animated feature become very used to putting extra time into visualizing and working their vision into the most perfect script possible. Mistakes at the beginning of production mean lots of wasted time later. This attention to planning leads to better paced and executed stories.

Visuals

As I said before, there is a luxury that is quite often taken for granted in live-action filmmaking. The camera will put to film anything in front of it. Animators definitely do not have this luxury.

As Lazy as Feasible

Live-action filmmaking can be as lazy as you want it to be. You could put together every single shot on a fake set specifically built for your shoot on a sound stage. Or, you could shoot on-location and just leave everything as-is. No matter what, animators still have to create every piece of visual information from scratch.

Important Details

Since everything is created from scratch, animators tend to know what key details are most important for getting their point across visually. Not every detail in a scene is important. The fact that we can watch cartoons proves this. Cartoons boil down visual imagery into more simple components. The hands of cartoon characters frequently have only four fingers. We still recognize them as hands, and most people probably don't even notice. Cartoon artists know that a simplified hand drawn with five fingers ends up looking too crowded and distracting more often than not. The fifth finger is an unimportant detail that can be left behind because the audience doesn't need it to understand they're seeing a hand. It's a side effect of how the human brain works. We never see raw imagery. We see an interpreted and idealized picture of the world around us. We categorize, split, and prioritize details as we're looking at things exactly as animators categorize, split, and prioritize details in order to get their point across.

Visual Robustness on the Cheap

Animators are trained to know exactly which details are important to the look and feel of a film. They can make their budget stretch further by making sure not to waste any time creating visual elements that are unimportant to the audience.

Unintended Consequences

All of these benefits do come with a few negatives. In short, animators tend to be control freaks. There's a funny little anecdote from the making of Amélie where Jean Pierre Jeunet talks about a day on the set where they waited for hours for this single car to move from the street so that they could shoot the rest of the scene. Jeunet felt that it was simply not his vision for that car to be there. Animators can get very used to controlling every piece of production explicitly.

Conclusion

These are just a few examples of how being trained in animation leads to better live-action filmmaking. I guarantee there are more, but I feel I've gotten my point across. I wrote this article because I tend to find the live-action films of former animators more interesting than other films, and I wanted to explore why that might be. Films from former animators just tend to have a thicker and more developed visual style. It can definitely be seen in films such as Amélie and 12 Monkeys. They're movies that didn't have huge over-the-top budgets yet still manage to pull their looks off better than the more recent Star Wars movies. I can only imagine the kind of films a person like Terry Gilliam could produce if given substantially larger budgets.

Notable Animators/Directors:

Terry Gilliam: Brazil, 12 Monkeys, The Brothers Grimm Jean Pierre Jeunet: The City of Lost Children, Amélie, A Very Long Engagement

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