Readers of The American Cinematographer have frequently asked how modern animated cartoons are made. [American Cinematographer feels] particularly fortunate, therefore, in obtaining this series of articles in which Mr. Fallberg will detail the progress of a Walt Disney cartoon from the inception of the story-idea to the completion of the final technicolor print.
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THE preceding installment in this series followed the procedure of animation up through the creation and photographing of the first rough drawings that illustrated the action of the scene. If the first film test of the rough action looks all right to the director, the okay is given to "clean up" the drawings, preparatory to the processes of inking and painting.
This "cleaning up" involves making the final, detailed drawing that will be traced into the cell by the inker. It's usually done by the animator's assistant, who edits the I'ough extremes down to a careful drawing, with true shapes, proportions and sizes. Sometimes, however, a cleaned-up drawing has a "tightness" that many animators bemoan, for they feel their first rough has a freedom and spontaneity that is lost as soon as the drawing is reduced down to a form with a single outline. No doubt this is true, but the necessity for cleaning-up the drawings is one of the practical requirements imposed by the assembly-line system of cartoon production. If every line on the drawing didn't mean something and retain a consistency of placement, the inker, when tracing the drawing onto celluloid with a single, hard pen line, wouldn't know exactly what pencil lines to trace in defining a certain form, and the painter wouldn't know the exact limits of the area on which to apply the paint.
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