The Banner Saga Post-funding Update #36: Animation Process

The team at Stoic Studio has treated us to an in-depth look at their animation process (in collaboration with Powerhouse Animation Studios) in the thirty-sixth update to their Kickstarter campaign for The Banner Saga. Going for “the old Disney Sleeping Beauty effect”, and hopefully pulling it off:

Traditional animation
The principle behind it is simple: just like film, animation is made up of a series of still images that play back so fast they appear to be moving. Somebody got the crazy idea that instead of just recording real people, they’d hand-draw 24 pictures for every second of footage they needed. This is doing it the Hard Way ™. Though the number of frames per second can vary depending on the action, this is what we decided to do. Traditional animation can come in two flavors: completely hand-drawn and rotoscoping. Hand-drawn means there was no video reference involved. It’s just an animator and a pen.

Rotoscoping Rotoscoping is the process of doing traditional animation, using film footage as a guide. Many people thinks you’re just tracing frames. This is absolutely incorrect. Tracing frames of animation straight-up will look like you traced frames of animation. (For the record, this is one of my favorite bits of animation ever).

You can’t just copy the raw footage, and that’s where the skill comes in. A good animator can take a piece of video footage and make it somehow more believable and dynamic than real life. If the animators are good you’ll often see both hand-drawn and rotoscoping in the same movie and not know it. It’s a guide, the same way a character artist may use an anatomical model as reference.

Did you know that most of Disney’s human characters were rotoscoped, including Briar Rose from Sleeping Beauty, for example? Compare this video. You can see that each frame of the animation has been drawn from scratch, by hand. There’s some imperfection between them, and some of the linework fluctuates. It also isn’t as smooth as modern animation, which have the luxury of computational blending between key frames and a higher frame rate. But to me there’s something pretty amazing about this traditional style.

So, that’s the challenge we gave Powerhouse Studios, who happen to based right here with us in Austin. Traditional animation!