Welcome to Rusty’s Ramblings – a quick peek through the eyes of Emmy Award-Winning Animator Rusty Mills, producer and director on Pinky & The Brain and Animaniacs.

This week from Rusty…

Can classic cartoons be created using today’s technology? That is a question I often hear, so
recently, I completed a 30 second clip which was done to replicate classic cartoons, yet created entirely in a digital environment. I utilized several different software packages to help me achieve this look. The fact that animation was still done on paper and colored on cells with painted backgrounds when I started in this industry, gave me the advantage of knowing how the classic look was originally achieved. For example, there are no shadows on the character in my animated clip, even though shadows were sometimes used in classic animation. Creating shadows was much more time consuming and used in limited places. If you watch closely there is only one scene in which the fox does have a shadow.

To begin, I used ToonBoom Storyboard Pro to create the storyboard. Having a solid storyboard helped in planning out the animation. I also created an animatic with this program which helped plan the camera moves and the timing of the scenes. I was able to take the storyboard directly into ToonBoom Digital Pro where I was going to do the animation.

At the same time I was able to take layered images into a digital bitmap animation program where I could create pencil-like layouts of the backgrounds. I chose this program because it allowed me to achieve a look very much like real world tools. This could also be done in programs like Photoshop or Painter.

Once these were completed, I brought them into Digital Pro to animate the scenes in order. I worked with the extremes and in-betweens before I moved on to the next scene.

When I finished all the scenes I used an editing program to put all of the rough scenes together to be sure it all flowed well. I used colors on the characters to help make them stand out from the backgrounds. You will also notice that there were a few changes I made from the animatic for better clarity, such as the first scene of the bird sweeping. In this area, I lengthened the scene slightly to allow more time for the audience to see what was happening.

I then worked on the clean-up and coloring of the characters and painted the backgrounds. To help with the classic look I kept the lines clean and solid, much like an ink line. I also gave the characters colored lines which helped give it a look of old classic cartoons.

When it came to painting the backgrounds I studied some backgrounds from old short cartoons to see how they handled the color and what techniques they used. The nice part about doing the entire clip myself is that I had total control over all aspects of the project. I was also able to jump back and forth during the production, from layout to animating, and especially in the final two steps: clean-up and background painting.

All together I feel it was a successful piece and perfectly illustrates the point that classic-looking cartoons can be made using digital technology. This whole project took me a few hours in the evenings; six weeks from beginning to end.

Want to put these words into practice? Watch Rusty’s animation here to jump start your inspiration! Rusty also invites MyTooners to check out his animatic and the pencil test of this piece on his profile page.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 4th, 2008 at 7:20 am and is filed under Rusty's Ramblings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.