History of Animation -- 9/25/2012
WE saw the 1911 film starovitch the camera man’s revenge, so were seeing the very beginnings of personality animation entering animation and film making and in this example we see personality animation in stop motion animation and it’s still remarkable early after it because his animated film was only the third ever made. Movies were first projected in 1895, and in 1911 movies are only 16 years old and frame by frame animation itself is really only about half a dozen years old and we have grown by leaps and bounds in the case of starovitch who in one of his earliest films has done complex stories that have made us laugh with beetles that acted out a drama of adultery with a brand new technique in a new medium with characters that we still 100 years later relate to sow ere seeing the first step of the media of animated film as it matures, hey look bugs are made to cool, isn’t that cool. Isn’t that cool isn’t that cool for very long, so the media has been maturing to make us change the way we think as an audience. The important message early one was that “hey look folks this is really cool an artist draws it and it moves, wow” but that novelty doesn’t last that long, we want to think about these characters and get into them. Starovitches animation isn’t up to the level of today’s standards but we even have Willis O’brian who animated the ape in 1933 king kong that audiences were convinced there was somehow a trained ape or somehow many people dressed in an ape suit, the idea it was animated was a complete surprise. Starovitch was still primitive enough but as we saw in his earlier efforts in 1909, that was convincing enough that the newspaper critics in England thought they were trained beetles by Russian scientists. For the period were talking back, he’s not only a pioneer but he’s very sophisticated in that the audience is losing themselves in the technique and being entertained by this real characters were thinking about having real personalities, the reason most of us wanted to do animation because we wanted to create really good stories with really good stories and we love the characters we grew up with and can relate to. When an animated film works is because we’re losing ourselves in it and thinking of these characters as real. Jumping forward from the 1930’s daffy duck, when something makes us forget that they’re drawn on the computer and only care about the character, that’s when we’re being entertained. So at this point were’ at the baby steps of this process.
We’re in an interesting moment right now by the way we’ve been talking about for a little over a century, and as we speak, our neighborhood Cineplex’s are taking out the old projectors and replacing them with new projectors that are replacing film and putting it onto a digital media. We’re coming full circle from the beginning of film to the end of film within the next few years except for repertory houses ad museums of moving images, but were still going to be talking about film because its more than this strip of film, it’s about telling stories through motion pictures, we’re seeing the animated film predate the invention of the conventional film and we’re seeing the end of it in our time, so that’s an exciting and interesting concept. What we’re doing when we’re telling a story with frame by frame images and characters made frame by frame this is not something stuck to a specific technology, but the end of everyone’s career in this room, we’ll see another way of recording these images and displaying them to an audience. As we watch these films as both audiences and film makers, we’re realizing that the art form were looking and what was going to try to do ourselves, the art form is not a technology, it’s about thinking about making a point with images, what order we put them together, and how we’re going to experience a story, and that is the art of film.
We’re going to meet 2 people from history:
Winsor McCay: So Winsor McCay was born in Canada but raised in Michigan and he was interested from an early age to be an illustrator but his father wanted him to be a business man, but McCay was doing illustrations while he was going through college and he did not have a taste for business, and as you’ll see, his lack of taste for business is something that will make him be artistically remembered today, and he’s made some very accomplished films, and he had the soul of an artist more than he had the soul of a business man, And what we’re going to be seeing now is the business of animation changing from a sort of a artisans form where one guy sits down and does a whole bunch of drawings by himself, and it takes a long time and maybe look beautiful, but by the time comes when you have to make money off it, how can you make it fast enough from the distribution of it. Here’s where we getting an interesting tension and an interesting problem, where the artist wants to create something really good, and the business person in us who wants to make money off it. We’re going to need to know something about being a business person because we can’t lose ourselves the project and fail to deliver on time or do the first scene perfectly but run out of time to work on the rest. Winsor had the soul of a perfectionist and the soul of an artist, and while he made films that were so good that were still impressed by over a hundred years later, McCay did not really win the animation war as an industry because he was surpassed by John Randolph Bray.

J.R. Bray: The development of the early history of animation is almost symbolized by the approach of these two men. He was the kind of guy that’ sat down and wanted to do the films that he wanted to do. Bray was the one who was the one who more than anyone in this period figured out how to take this very time consuming art form and turn it into a business that was going to make money, and a business that was going to be able to deliver a lot of product in a short period of time so he could make contracts with distributors to have regularized exhibitions of his films.  What bray did was change the way we’re producing animation.

So were going to start with McCay who was essentially self-taught who dropped out of school at 21 and worked for the national printing company in Chicago and did illustrations there than 2 years later he went to Cincinnati making a living off doing advertising posters and honing his craft, becoming increasingly successful and married in 1891, and had children following. The pressures of having a family pushed McCay to think about how to earn a better living in order to support everybody, so he took a new job as a combination cartoonist and reporter, and it was there he really found out what it was like to deliver work on a daily basis. He was taking on additional free-lance work for other magazines in the Cincinnati area, and in 1903 he began doing his own comic strips called “Tale of the jungle imps” by  the end of 1903 his work was accomplished enough that the new York Harold noticed and hired him to do illustrations for them, so he left and came to new York and he began to develop original comic strip ideas for the Harold, one of them from 1904 was called little Sammy sneeze which was followed by “dream the rare bit theme”.  We get an idea from his sense of humor and adventure from the idea of this comic strip, because what the idea was that the main character of the comic strip would have all these crazy dreams and hallucinations from eating food before bed right before he went to sleep. WE see something about his sense of humor, sense of entertainment, and sense of fantasy through this strip and he would continue to go about this fantasy feel with stylistic but well drawn figures about these amazing flights of fantasy and hes’ best noted for his comic strip called “little nemo” which was such a lasting idea that many decades after McCay’s death, that idea was continued. It was a long comic strip that took a full page of newsparers and it was typically chosen to be the front comic strip, and it was an update of his older work. IT was this main character who was dreaming fantastic adventures where something might happen where the legs of the iron bed would grow tremendously long and you’ll see it go for a walk downtown through the city and he’ll be seeing amazing things happening, and they’ll typical end with little nemo waking up in his own bed safe and sound in his bed back home. Little nemo would turn to be mccay’s first real success, he would place little nemo in a lot of newspapers and his name recognition was such that he could begin to experiment with other kinds of entertainment, we talked a little bit about blackton who made his living as a lightning sketch artists with an easel drawing fun funny stuff while they’re talking, so McCay was a natural to go into this sort of audience, so we see McCay having two different career s at the same time, he’s still working as an illustrator but he’s also working as a lightening sketch artists and doing several cartoons on the side, this work for the new York Harold was successful enough for him that after 8 years of the Harold he was able to leave and work for a huge organization in new York and was well known enough, when hurst succeeded in winning McCay, McCay in the newspaper world was already something of a super star, now it was while working at the hurst company that McCay started o some experiments with trying to make his drawings move. And the obvious first subject matter for him to tackle was his very successful comic strip little nemo. So were now at the year 1911 and Winsor McCay Is such a good craftsmen, his first time at bat, sitting down to animate, we see not only him translating his beautiful craftsmanship from the printed page to film, we see something else happening, we see a natural understanding of animation and even personality animation and remember in 1911 this is the same year as Camera Man’s Revenge so for McCay from 1911 to his first time trying to draw animation to accomplish not only technically decent animation to appreciate now, he’s’ now got animation that entertains us and makes us think again about the characters and not just the novelty and how it’s done, so we’re going to watch a short documentary made in the 1970’s but still an excellent documentary by animation historian.  McCay was the subject of this historian’s book which is about as good an example as you could want a history about winsor mccay which is something you should look into as well.  He has  really good sense of spacing and timing which si the most important part of animation which makes animation the medium that it is, timing and how to use the space between one frame and the frame that comes after. Jumping ahead, quoting someone from much later, the brilliant normal mclaren who was the founding animator in the national film boar din Canada dwho won the Oscar for his 1954 film who used live actors as if they were puppets and he expiremented with all these different techniques, so Mclaren who was very interested in how stuff looked even if they were figures we wouldn’t recognize, he had a very good definition of animation which is the best I’ve ever heard, what he said was “Animation is not the art of drawings and  making them move, but the art of movements that are drawn” What he was saying and was Winsor McCay already understood was that this is about not how beautiful how one drawing looks, its about one drawings relationship to the one that comes next. The believability has to do with a very fine observation of how movements themselves look, how to analyze the movement and break them down into believable movements so we understand whats happening so its not distracting us from what were supposed to be thinking about and it’s an expressive movement so when we see gertie the dinosaur and we see this character gertie, we see a character that’s mischevious. The character has her own mind which is created from pen on paper and were ale to look at this drawing and give her a personality and theres nothing there but drawings on paper and McCa for this reason is often considered the most important pioneer artist of personality animation, character animation, and getting us to that world where were thinking about thse characters, the mood we get from this animation is that its kind of a comedy, but then we have the sinking of the lusitenania which is no comedy. McCay is not only tackling a realistic documentary subject, he’s capturing something that is deeply tragic and very upsetting and has large important historical ramifications. Could he do this and have it succeed if we didn’t believe in his drawings? If they didn’t have some sort of expressiveness in their realism? The animation in their waves are astonishing and you can feel the weight of the water as they collide which makes it a very masterful piece of animation. He manages to both make us laugh and feel heart broken because he has such good control over this media he can imitate the nature of movement in a way that – your first test in animation when your first sat down and tried a few things and showed it to your friends and family, you probably got some laughs where you weren’t supposed to get some laughs because you were just starting out, if you try when you don’t yet know what youre doing very well, like doing something very serious like  the sinking of the ship and your craftsmanship si too clunk and youre doing this tragedy but audiences laugh because it looks dumb, then you failed – winsor mccay who only has 5 years of experience, he teaches himself so well how to do comedy, documentary and tragedy all from one guys pen, which is some really astonishing stuff. So McCay as we saw in the documentary die din 1932, he would continue on to produce films and did them slowly and all but single handedly, he was still one guy sitting down and predominantly doing the stuff himself until he was satisfied, we saw thte sinking of the lusetenia had 12,000 elaborate drawings and that’s a labor of love, and that’s something that hopefully no matter what most of us end up doing, if we conitnue with animation as a profession and do the work we do to earn our pay check, there’s some par tof us that’s absolutely an artist like Winsor McCay who was able to be the illstuarotor, comic strip artist, animator and father of 2 kids all at the same time while producing this masterful body of work. Hopefully, we’ll leave a little bit of space to stay an artist.
Sow ere eplxoring the firs tsteps of the animated cartoons as a full fledged industry. We’re seeing this near the middle period of Emile coles period of when he spent some time in aemerica at the studio on Fortley New Jersey. Emile Cole was contracted to do his own comic strips for the Eclaire company and he worked there from about 1911 to about 1914 and then retunred to paris just weeks bnefore the outbreak of  blahblahblah. And as we start, we dont have a good sense of what Emile Cole’s American work looked like because of the fire that destroyed virtually everything from 1914, so we can only guess what those films looked like, but what we do remember is that Emile Cole has not yet himself created an industrialized projects. He tried to take shortcuts, and using cutouts, which was seen has cutouts rather its own art form that it is now. Cole would expirement with them just to meet deadlines and turn on a lot of footage quickly and we saw the pressure of the deadlines on him, we haven’t yet seen though a erevolutionary change in the technique. WE haven’t yet seen a way to change or adapt the way animation is organized in order ot turn it around more quickly and to do a lot morefootage quickly and to make a profitable enterprise out of it. We are going to see the beginnings of what was going to be really the business model for the American animation studio as logn as we had the technique of drawn animation as the predominant hollyuwood and American technique as we also see Hollywood and California did not have a meaninginful palce in animation until the 190, American animation and caroton animation was born pretty much here in new York city and aceross the river in new jersey. We saw some new York studios that remained her and survived here and some that returned here, the most important new York studio just to have a sense of it were the flischer studio which was an outgrowrth of the grey studio which went ddown and strated their own, tehw you dl come back to new York again after a stay in flroida and theyw oudl return to new York as famous stuidos and paramount studios an then there was paul harrys studio and they were best known for the mighty mouse character. So we did have these surviving new York versoins of studios that would do theatrical cartoons that would be released alla round the country. But these after the 1930’s would bet eh exception and most of cartoon animation for the cinema in this country would end up being made on the west coast in any case. We now have the brith of an industry happening right here in the city where were seeing more and more the beginning ofs the cmopetiton to deliver the acartoons quickl and properly and so they can be released on a predictbale and fast enough schedule that they can be exploited and advertised to American audiences. So as we saw the perfectionist method was not going ot be the way to do that even though the industry owes a great debt to mccay and its very had to imagine how personality animation would have come to be if it weren’t for him. He inspired our next industrialist John Randolph who started out as an artist and developed how he approached the art and started trying to figure out how you can do this more quickly and begin to make important deals and important money. So Bray also was born in Michigan in the town of Addison a small farming town and he was born to a minister.  Like winsor Mcccay he started but did not finish college, eh left at the age of 20. J.R. Bray dropped out of colelgea t the age of 20 and joine the Detroit evening moves doing a lolw level reporting job, his job was that he was sent ot the morgue to look at caadavers who have been in terrible accidnets so eh could look at the cadavers and figure out what ight have happene din the crime and write about it, so he didn’t like that that much, so he left Detroit and came here ot enw York city and started working for the new York papers and he was hired by the new York brookyln daily eagle. And it was there he got a staff position and soon after that got married to Margaret Till who became another important business partner. We’re still in the era where most successful business people are going ot be men, that’s just how we divided up the bread earner in the family at that point. Industry and businesses where built on the cultural expectation that any one who was to advance to any serious job was going to be a man, and the idea that a woman could do that was quite unusual at this stage of history. We saw a couple of remarkable women come up into animation not as artists but as business women. We’re going to meet around the time we see the young Walt Disney studio and their early shorts before they came a big studio. Margaret winkler was their producer and distributor and she was a very handy business person who did extremely well. More behind the scenes was JR Bray’s wife who became his close business associate, and she did a lot of the dirty work. We’re going to see that one of the ways he became so successful was not only from producing films but making several patents related to animation production and protecting those patents very vigorously and if someone was violating them, the person who would shake them down for money would be Margaret Bray, and they have a special and collaborative relationship. Bray right away wanted to try his hand as a freelancer and as we know that’s a pretty tough existence to.  You’re taking a huge risk and you’re hoping you’ll stay afloat by taking enough freelance jobs to pay the bills every month and it’s a gamble because you have to go after clients yourself. Margaret Till made a remarkable understanding between him even though it was a risky thing to do. They were able to discover great success as independt free lance commercial artists and also as a graphic humorist. In 1906 his first big break came when the magazine judge began publishing on a regular basis his one panel cartoons which were animal jokes, this led to in 1907 a regular full page comic strip by him called the teddy bears, Brey was a big fan of tehodore oosevelt, and teddy bears are called teddy bears because they were named after Teddy Rosevelt. This comic stipr became very popular with readers and it enabled him to start saving money in a major way, and in result of the success he was able to leave new York city and buy himself a farm upstate, and that farm will come in ahndy when bray a few years later would start an aniamton studio and he had to expand beyond the rented office face, he expanded to include workers coming up to his farm up state nad performing work up there. In any case , Bray took less nad less free lance assignments as the ted debars became popular, because he didn’t have to do, and his imagination was turning in a different direction. He was interested in making his drawings move and he ackonowledged that he saw the first couple of films of McCay, and its around this period that he himself was looking at his successful comic strip and was wondering If there was some way to bring his comics to life. He sent out a press release saying he was going to create films, and then he failed because there were too many problems. He tried to go out and watch bears and how they move, and had this notion he could do it all single handedly like Winsor McCay, however, it just didn’t happen, and he really didn’t mention it after that because he fell o his face but he didn’t lose interest expirementing with animation and he performed his first expirements around 1910 to around 1912 and it was during that period did he realize that the teddy bears doing with 7 characters he had, he was going to have to for the series he proposed there would be around 100,000 different figures of teddy beras to pul it off and that was not gonna happens oe xpiremented with a much simpler project amnd a film dated back ffrom 1910-1911 called the artists dream which he drew himself, he did a short piece about a douchshound and there sap lte of hot sausages on this plate, and this dog is smelling these sausages and he wants to figure out how to get these sausages, and the dog found out if he pulled out the drawers he could make a little staircase for himself, He climbs up these drawers and eats these sausages, and the finale is that he explodes. But that was his first film which wasn’t released until about 1913, but it makes it a little unclear when he was working on that. Bray in the film with the douchshound introduces live action in the typical lightning sketch style, wher eh introduces himself as the sketch artist, and we definitely see the persistence of this idea of whether or not the animation was an extension of himself. In any case, thanks to the success of the artists dream, Bray, took a very adventurous next step and signed a contract with the film distributor Charles Pathe with a very ambitious delivery schedule of animated films and of course once again he failed. He bit off more than he could true and was unable to keep to the deadlines he committed and this was a hueg problem and this led to Bray thinking hard on what he could do to save his skin, and what he could do to recover from his completely miscalculating, and that enabled him to honor his contract. He thought then about the technique of how thse many drawings were made, now what we saw in the documentary was that McCay had a background artist helping him out. Even though when we’re watching the fimlm and we substantioually saw the film and we go thte interaction of the dinosaur responding to the off screen comments and all that stuff, the background was never really moving, and yet all of those drawings, that background was drawn again and again and again and again,w e can look backwards from our techonology, if we want to manipulate what happens on one layer and not the ones below it we would just leave those layers alone, we do that background once, render it once and then were done. Why on earth would it occur to somebody in the nineteen teens who thinks of a drawing as something that’s on layers, because that’s such a strange concept. A drawing is done on paper and that’s what we know how to understand, and again just as we saw with our earlier tehcnolgoical development, mybritch was just trying to find a way to capture a horse on camera. The secret of success in capitalism isn’t always to be the guy who creates something but the person who controls the stuff that somebody created, and that guy is Earl Hurd. For now, just know that Earl Hurd is the one who was responsible for the process of cell animation which dominates for the rest of the 20th century and even provides the model of doing things on layers today. Different tehcnolgoy but a very special way of thinking, we’llg et back to him in a moment, what we thinkof as a drawing is a drawin in pen or pencil on paper and you draw everything,one reason its so laborious is because you’d have to draw everything on every single frame, and youre also introducing mechanical weakness, or opportunity for expression. But were introducing a mechanical idiosyncrasy. The tracing will never be perfect no matter how carefully the artist is working, and this look gives an almost vibration feel to it. This look has become an almost new wave look from a technical imperfection that comes from the early nineteenth century. Bray was looking for ways to not have to keep redrawing the whole drawing and the cell process though ultimately invented by Earl Hurd, was something of a mix of discoveries that Earl Hurd did. Bray analyzed that if a lot fo the background just doesn’t move from frame to frame, then maybe is there some way to nto have to draw it every time. So bray by himself came a lot of the way to figuring out how to do that. He arrived to a system that was similar to the cell system but used slightly different techniques. What he thought off was okay. We print with the printing press using lithography to make only one line of the backgourdn the way we want it to do and then print it on a bunch of pieces of paper and then we only have to draw the parts of it that we removing on top of that background .The limitiation is that y9ou had to make sure your character will never pass in front of the background because you’d see the abckgroudn trhough it and trying to white it out and make it match the color of the paper would be a next to impossible thing to do. Were not double xposing any more at this point, were drawing on top of another drawing, but we have another problem to figure out how were going to deal with. Now we need to leave a clear window anywhere around where the character is going to walk around and what ever we want of the backvround detail to be in that window nad were still going ot have to draw it by habnd, we’re still going to have a little ways to go before we develop a tehccnique more recognize than cell animation when it comes to cartoon style animation, and its represented and important step forward that’s going to revolutionize animation. So he wanted do figure eout a system to hire more people to help reakd own the work, the need for personnel quickly filled and overfilled the stuidio and luckily for him he hdad the farm upstate and he was able to send those men upstate to do the work in his farm and there waws interesting little development because it was a bit of a hike for these artists to do this work and fi they were hittin the sauce a little over the weekend and they were feeling sleepy or hung over on Monday morning, they might lose some artists on Monday. It was well known that if youre buying a car built ofn the assembly line yuou want to find out if that car was a Monday car or a Friday car. If you get a Monday car, people are not showing up for work or showing up hungover, and on a Friday car you have sloppy work and less people working on it. J.R. Bray had the same problem with cartoons so his solution to that problem was that he made Monday pay day, so if you wanted to get your check you were going to be at your desk. So we get another clue about the kind of pragmatic and forceful capitalistic nature of J.R. Brays approach to this brand new industry. He came up with a recurring character of his own called Kernal Heeza Liar, and it was a series of comedies he was producing for the Charles Pathe company wit this main recurring character with this hapless kernel who would get in allt hes eadventures and sometimes hd go off on voyages and safaris and into other types of scrapes aorudn the world and a 1917 film we’ll see him in a base ball feature, and we have a substantional amount of artists at the bray studio now and its leslie Elton who ends up leading the animation of this film. The main difference is that it was Hurd who saw the clear difference between using cells that would solve a couple of different problems, he also helped create a new look tha tllowed not just for that black and white or colored in pen and ink look but a full range of tones which would help make cartoons as we understand them today. We see a full tone of greys, and backgrounds reproduced flawlessly without having to draw them from frame to frame, and not an artist the he hired around 1930 with Earl Hurd. All we’re seeing from this period is cell animation. Earl Hurd’s sepctatular contribution was to figure out “okay heres a problem”, we have a background that’s not supposed to change and allll this stuff that’s not supposed to be moving, that we have to keep redrawing because of the process that was being used. And he didn’t’ want them to be stuck with black lines and white paper look as hard as it is to redraw and color everything in over and over again. So what Earl Hurd figured out was that instead of drawing the final drawings, instead of drawing a drawing on paper that is done with paint, because were thinking of that paradigm, that old fashioned way of thinking of a drawing as one line made on paper with pen and ink. He had the astounding idea of inventing layers and layers using transparency. So long before the alpha channel, we had that seam material that was going to provide us for the basis of flexible and transparent motion fpictures film. For by using cellulite instead of plastic, which would later be replaced due ot its flammability. And the technique that Earl Hurd invented wasw to use celluloite for the parts fo the drawings that were going to move so what we have, jst lok photohoshop, if we have a background that doesn’t change, you know maybe its the inside of the room and there’s the daughter and the other wall and a nice little picture frame for us and maybe a little end table here. So we have osmethign tha tdoens thcange and then we have ac hraacter walkigna round in this rooma dn we want them to move through  space but we don’t want to keep dredrawing the background. So what hurtd figured out is that instead fo drawing on paper, if we trace thath character onto a clear sheet of celluloite, the parts of the drawing wher eth characters isn’t completely clear, you can paint that character in and by doing so, the paint hwen you laithe it htrough the clear sheet of Patrick, because the bank is opaque and you can see thorugh it, you can paint a white opaque shirt on this guy if you want because he completely covers the background just as real objects do in real life
 And this was the astonishing contribution of earl hurd and the possibilities for layierng multiple layers within the praticeal limit, we don’t have as mny lavels, celluloite is clear but its not obsolutely clear, and if you hold them upt oteh light each sheet would drarken whats up behind it. The further things get from the background, the thickness of these scell. We see it spelled two different ways, cell and cel. The thickniess fo the cells stacking up on top of each other and the normal size is that its thick enough if you keep stacking up and then put it under the lights, the light starts to cash a shadow. IWE also have a problem darkening things a little. We have specialists in the animation studio at this point. In order too prevent the same color form looking the same ways on different layers,  you ahd to compensate fo rteh thickness and darknss of the cell for a slightly darker shad eon the top ones to look like it’s brother’s ones. So even though this is a rermarkable time sake, comapreed to the ease we can work together digitally, it’s uncomparable. Compared ot 1914 to how 19 drugs were performed, you enver khave to draw this background again. Suddenly we have accomplsuihedh aw ay to greatly simplify the work while also making it look much richer at the time. By having the forsight or the selfishness or however youw atn to do it, by treating Earl Hurd his loyal employee as just another member of the organization we find JR Bray absorbing Earl Hurd’s invention and claiming a copywrite under his company and then making a ton of money by liscensing this techinique to toehr animators of animated cartoons. I’d love to get one of those fronesic accoutnants to find the account books of the bray company to find out how much money they made from their cartoons and from the liscensivng fee of their inveitno. The henchmen that would put the fear of JR Bray into them with out pay him would be his own wife, and they would be feared figures to any one who wanted to use his techniques.  Earl Hurd made a seris of comedies with a certain amount of charge with the unfortunate boy, and youre starting to see the dawn of studio technique and fixed assible line production. We’re going ot have a look at Earl Hurds films made for the rbave company coming up now.

An example of what happens, when we’re able to turn the animated cartoon from something that’s the technique of an artisan working in a small workshop to something that is a bit more like an assembly line approach. We can now divide up the artists that do the original animation drawings and the artists that can trace those drawings onto the cels and the artist that paints the colors onto the drawings. Even the animation itself can now begin to be subdivided by different artists who jus tlike Henry Ford had an assembly line, he shaped the way he ran this business making these cartoons to even subdivide how the animation itself was done. To do the important drawings that analyze the key moments fo the action, what today we still talk about key framing. The idea of key frames evolved as a way of making an assembly line. He said we’ll have our important animators who will dot he key frames, and then we’ll have our artists we will pay less and not as experienced who don’t have to do the thinking the key animators does doing those  drawings that describe the action, and we’re going to have those artists drawings the inbetween positions. Just as we’re working with out animation software, we have a character and on the first frame of the action with his arms down, and maybe about 12 frames later he lifts his arm up to wave hello to his friend. So the key artist would do darwing number 1 and 12, which were the tough drawings to do, and the cheaper artists would go in and draw int the cheaper drawings which is more of a mechanical decision but not entirely which is something well get more into later on. We would have to have those things told to the assistant animators and inbetweeners with explicit instructions form the animator and hwo to do those things by making little spacing charts so if we wanted to have from drawing one to 12 and to have an ease in and ease out, they’d have to label it and space the drawings out on the side to represent the charactertistics of the motion for the assistant aniamtors and inbetweeners to interpret.On the absis of this assembly line production, he completely revolutionized how the industry manufactures cartoons. No one really remembers bray being a genius. WE don’t remember him as creating fantastic entertainement but for revolutionizing the industry. Thanks to the way he divided up labor to make it look more like an assembly line facvctory and less like an artists studio, he completely changed the face of how cartoons can be done, how efficiently it can be done, and studios are making ambitious deadlines and know they can hire artists who report to other artists who report to other artists. We’re going to see one more film from the JR Bray company, but from another artist that bray was lucky for a time to have working for him ebfore he branchd off on his own. Before the Fleischers had their own studio, and the main ones were Max the producer and Dave the director and their brother Lou doing the music. They had both met when they were owrkign at the Brooklyn eagle, and Bray remembered having met Fleischer and brought him in to work for him as part of the Bray studio, and Max came with his patent for process he got to keep which is known as the Rotoscope. The artist would trace live action frames one by one and be able to duplicate live action in a way no other artist would be able o do by themselves. Fleischer would continue to do this on his own after branching off when they wanted to have a particularly life like or challenging action, they would use the rotoscope, one of the recurring characters was coco the clown so that he could be drawn but given realistic proportions so for the parts they wanted to rotoscope, they would just have Dave Fleischer act out the motions, film it, and send it to be traced which got them a certain realistic look to their animations, and Bray was lucky to have access to the talent of thse at the time they were working for him.