From there to here: milestones in animation

WALT DISNEY PRODUCTIONS The multiplane camera made its feature-film debut with Disney's 1937 classic "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs."

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Multiplane camera: Invented by Walt Disney and patented in 1940, the multiplane camera made its feature-film debut with the 1937 classic "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs." With an adjustable camera lens pointing straight down through separated layers of glass, Disney brought simulated depth and perspective to animation art. It's still gloriously effective, as seen in the film's layered forests and mountain scenery.

Rotoscoping: Animation based on frame-by-frame tracing of a filmed live-action performance. While testing the technique on the 1934 short "The Goddess of Spring" and 1937's "Snow White," Disney animators learned the ironic lesson that caricature (as used with the Dwarfs) resulted in more "human" expressiveness, while human characters like Snow White were bland by comparison. The most notorious use of rotoscoping occurred in Ralph Bakshi's disastrous 1978 animated version of "The Lord of the Rings," where rotoscoped Orcs and Ring-Wraiths, derived from live-action footage, aesthetically clashed with 2-D cartoon hobbits.

Xerography: The tedium of hand-drawn cel animation (a traditional technique of applying artwork directly to transparent sheets of celluloid or, nowadays, acetate) was alleviated when copying technology allowed the replication of animation cels without having to draw and paint each one separately. Disney first employed full-scale xerography, with mixed results, on "101 Dalmatians." (Computers allowing easily duplicated artwork have since rendered cel animation virtually obsolete. Even the 2-D simplicity of "South Park" is now totally digital.)

Computer animation: The stained-glass knight in 1985's "Young Sherlock Holmes" marked the feature-film debut of a computer-generated character; Pixar announced its arrival with the Oscar-winning 1986 short "Luxo Jr." (featuring the bouncing-lamp character now familiar as the company's logo mascot); and "Jurassic Park" heralded a new age of photo-realistic animation in 1993.

	PIERRE VINET Actor Andy Serkis was digitally transformed into Gollum in the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy using motion-capture technology.

Motion capture: From the strolling deckhands on "Titanic" to the acrobatics of "Spider-Man," motion capture allowed the digital duplication of human movements recorded by sensors placed on live-action performers. The technique reached a peak when actor Andy Serkis was digitally transformed into Gollum in the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, and it has since been improved and redefined as ...

Performance capture: Essentially, motion capture on steroids. More sensors, more data input, and simultaneous real-time rendering of body and facial movements allow actors to preserve the unique essence of their performance when it's transposed to a potentially infinite variety of digitally rendered characters. Despite still-apparent shortcomings in the technology, "The Polar Express" will be recognized as a "perf-cap" milestone.

Subsurface scattering: For "The Incredibles," this extraordinary new software tool was invented to digitally re-create the subtle interaction of light and human skin, to avoid the plastic or masklike appearance that has plagued digitally-rendered humans up to now. Pixar wizard Rick Sayre describes subsurface scattering as the unique way in which light is simultaneously absorbed and reflected by skin — also illustrated by the subtle visual difference between a glass of milk (which absorbs and scatters light) and a glass of white paint (which reflects it).

Jeff Shannon: j.sh@verizon.net

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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