Paperman (2012)

Disseminate Presentation

Week 19
6 February - 12 February

Trailer: 

This Disney short won an Oscar for Best Animated Short Film. The idea originated from the mind of John Kahrs as he commuted through Grand Central Station, crossing paths with strangers, making connections and then wondering how fate could bring these strangers together again. 

He always knew that he wanted the aesthetic to be black and white, set in 1940-50s Manhattan because he felt it was a "shining moment for this great American city... bursting with life and um, it just felt like a really magical time". It was a shared opinion between Kahrs and John Lassiter to make it as rich in dimension as possible. Lassiter always wants the audience to believe that the world they've created is out there. 

This is why it was so perfect to match this project with proposal the innovative technique - Kahrs asked why the Paperman pre production had to be left behind and whether CG could help carry them along. In 2008 the Disney studios were working on the hand drawn The Princess and the Frog and a computer animated Tangled. Hand drawn had been left to the side for a while during Michael Eisner's reign. Kristina Reed, producer of the film, commented on the studios that “We sort of had this line going down in our crew, and we had separated our hand-drawn talent from our CG talent…

It was like being in two different businesses and neither business was quite as smooth as we wanted it to be..”

“There was this notion of we’re the only studio in the world that has this breadth of talent; is there something we can do by actually matching them together?”

The executives had been discussing the work environment, questioning that there must be a more cohesive approach as at the time double the amount of content was being made to feed both pipelines. 

Both Kahrs and Reed are well versed in CG animation but were blown away by the artistry of hand drawn artists. Reed says that a great deal of people are involved with setting up the model, rigging and capturing small expressions "but in hand drawn work, it’s a line. And there’s just this beauty to that that neither John nor I have been exposed to.”

At the time Brian Whited was developing the programme Meander, where artists are able to draw over CG sequences. The project took 14 months to complete because the schedule was reliant on finding available artists in between larger Disney features; meaning that often no more than 10 people would be working on it, "There were quite a few people that touched it, but there was really a small crew of us that are the core of the project.” Often they'd receive a phone call that 10 or so animators were free to work so they'd just fit them into the project wherever they could. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZJLtujW6FY  A comprehensive explanation of the CG/2D Hybrid

The steps of the technique can be simplified to this:

- Scenes, character are modeled in CG in the same way as any other CG

- The computer renders the CG animation in a flat "cel shaded” way.

- The lines are drawn by hand onto the key frames. 

- This software “sticks” the drawings to the CG models in the keyframes.

- The software auto-generates the in-betweens the animation.