Emile Cohl created the very first 2D animation using a series of black and white frames of stick figures played at the traditional speed of 24 frames per second in 1908. Approximately 700 hand drawn images were needed to create the 70-second long animation. Since then, various other styles and techniques have evolved which have made 2D animation quicker and easier.
A lot of work goes into animating through these techniques. The backgrounds and characters are created through various processes, depending upon the technique. It would be nearly impossible to incorporate all this information into a single article. So in order to stay faithful to the animators and their work, three more articles shall follow in this multi-part series to provide a detailed insight into the different styles of 2D animation.
In this article, we shall talk about the traditional method of animation, the Cel technique.
The Cel
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Invented by American animators, Earl Hurd and John Bray, in 1915, the Cel technique involved drawing or painting objects on a transparent sheet known as the cel. Until the mid-20th century, cels were made of celluloid which is a compound made of camphor and nitrocellulose. Due to its high flammability, it was later replaced by cellulose acetate, an ester of cellulose. This replacement helped cut down costs as cellulose acetate was cheaper than celluloid.
The Technique
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The idea behind this technique was to save time in repainting every object from a single scene while creating different frames. In order to achieve this, animators would paint different objects from a single scene on different cel sheets and layer them on top of each other while taking shots for the frames. For the next frame, animators would only repaint the object that was to be shown moving. For instance, consider a character talking, in this case, there is no change in the background; it’s just the character that is to be repainted. The animators would paint the background on one cel sheet and use the same sheet for the rest of the scene.
Limited Animation
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TV cartoons were generally low-budget animations. Production houses, like Hanna-Barbera, had a limited budget to work with. Hence, they came up with new techniques in cel animation, like limited animation. Consider the previous example of a character talking, if the scene were to be created with a limited budget, the animators would not repaint the character talking but instead just the mouth. The character’s body, along with the background would only be painted once for the scene.
Benefits of Cel Animation
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- Time: One of the most basic benefits of cel animation was less consumption of time. Not having to recreate the entire frames helped animators work more efficiently.
- Consistency: Traditional animation, where the entire frame had to be repainted, suffered a lot of inconsistencies in its images. Where the backgrounds had to be created at 24 frames per second, it was difficult to create every frame the same.
- Archive: Many-a-times the production houses would archive cels which they thought could be reused in multiple animations.
- Reuse: After a frame was shot, animators would wash the cel sheets and repaint on them again, hence, reusing a single cel sheet multiple times.
Famous Animations Created Through Cel Technique
All movie and television posters were sourced from IMDB.
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This article was written by Sienna Thibault. If you want to contact her for feedback, send her an email.