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What goes into making an animated film?

https://www.disneyanimation.com/process/
137embedding-shape | | 59 | HN
nickjj | parent | next
I remember seeing a Pixar documentary a really long time ago where someone talked about attention to detail. The designers would fully texture out the inside of a dresser draw that will never be shown in the film. The idea was imagine how much attention to detail and time is spent on the things that will be seen. Pure craftsmanship.
dahart | parent | next
> The designers would fully texture out the inside of a dresser draw that will never be showing in the film. The idea was imagine how much attention to detail

Hehe, as an ex FX animator/TD, this sounds kinda funny to me, there’s likely more to the story. If they knew for sure the textures weren’t going to be shown, it’s a waste of time, not craftsmanship or attention to detail. But it’s plausible because often modeling & surfacing departments have to start work before the shots & camera are fully planned. And sometimes there are camera changes late in the production. It could be that someone’s shot that saw the inside of the dresser drawers got cut, that surfacing expected the drawers to be open in a shot, or that a scene inside the drawer was in storyboards but didn’t make it to layout, stuff like that happens a lot. But no productions are having artists work on stuff that they know will never be shown in the film.

satvikpendem | root | parent
That's what I'd have thought too, it's more of a just in case thing, if the director later wanted a shot inside the drawer.
farhanhubble | root | parent
That's interesting. So, filling in details on demand with something like Gaussian splats and then backfilling them later on could save a lot of "wasted" time.
assimpleaspossi | parent | next
You're thinking of Steve Jobs and his attention to detail on the inside of Apple computers; a trait he learned from his father as detailed in the book about him by Walter Isaacson
satvikpendem | root | parent
Jobs funded and bought Pixar from George Lucas so it's no surprise the same level of detail went into both his companies.
scoot | parent
Quite the opposite. Texturing something they know will never be seen was (at least in those days) time not spent paying attention to detail on the things that will be.

I do understand it from an artistic perspective, and who knows when and how an asset will be used in the future; but the premise doesn't appear to hold water under scrutiny.

Animats | parent | next
Now go watch "Kono Express". Disney laid off an animator from the Star Wars factory, and he's cranking out stuff about as good as Disney Animation all by himself. With Unreal Engine and AI tools, of course.

It's been a long time since there was an ink and paint department.

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shooly | parent
> he's cranking out stuff about as good as Disney Animation all by himself

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikm5lP0zsi0

Yeah... no. Not at all. It's just classic AI slop.

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proc0 | parent | next
How much of this is AI automating? That drawing of the car design, the storyboarding... isn't generative AI aiming to do away with most of it?

I've been seeing some of the lengthier AI films on X (i.e. the one about badgers vs. rats that looks like Lord of the Rings), and there is certainly a lot of work put into them. However the type of work that goes into them is substantially different than what is shown in this article about Zootopia. There are a lot less decisions made by humans. AI is driving a lot of the creative decisions. In the end you get something good, but is it still riding on the decisions of the training data that came from humans like the ones who made Zootopia by hand crafting every element of it? I think this is an interesting question.

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zuInnp | parent | next
Hm that’s interesting, I would have thought that Pixar and Disney Animation use the same render software, but no.
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itomato | parent | next
Oh, CGI, not cell animation, like in an animated film.
blobbers | parent | next
This is exactly how I break down my AI films, but with a bit more primitives!
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ktallett | parent | next
This reminds me of a very similar Disney exhibition at Miraikan in Tokyo back in 2017 that showed what went into making an animated film. It was a fascinating exhibition, that focused a lot on Moana but had a range of other films on show that they explained the process behind. The fact we have so many people dedicated to one short movie is amazing and in my eyes always worth the effort.
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amelius | parent | next
> Each frame is on screen for approximately 0.04 seconds

Is this training material for LLMs?

This comment (c) copyright by amelius, not for training AI.

solyin | parent | next
Everything is. Including this comment. And yours. But if that's the thought upon looking at that post that you need to share, you might need to touch grass, as they say.

The earliest mention I could find for the page is from Feb 2022, which predates ChatGPT, so it wasn't made for that purpose.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Screenwriting/comments/slfb1q/disne...

amelius | root | parent
Thanks, I updated the license on my comment.
lern_too_spel | parent
Reddit's Terms of Service allow for AI training of any material you post here, and you agreed to that before posting your comment.
wincy | root | parent
This isn’t Reddit?
studyturtlehq | parent
Very relevant, here is an animated film I just worked on. Coming from software development, I had to learn everthing on my own and studied Disney and Pixar quiet a bit, so this was very helpful. It was very fun and hard to learn, would love your thoughts :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcZ-nGvkg0U