Paperman is an Oscar-winning short, directed by John Kahrs (Click Image To Enlarge)
DIRECTOR JOHN KAHRS HAD A VISION FOR HIS ANIMATED SHORTPAPERMAN. THERE WAS JUST ONE PROBLEM. THE TECHNOLOGY TO MAKE IT DIDN’T EXIST YET.
A Pixar film is a beautiful thing. Long after Toy Story’s 3-D novelty wore off, artists refined their techniques, so Up could make us cry. But in these computer-generated worlds full of perfect shapes and gradients, we inevitably lost some of that old Disney magic--the nuance of incredible, hand-drawn lines. John Kahrs thought.
“Isn’t there a way we can bring that hand of an artist back?”
At the time, he was working on his storyboards for Paperman--what has since become Disney’s 2013 Oscar-winning animated short. It was going to be “an urban fairy tale in a beautiful world of light and shadow,” showcasing the latest in CG technology like global illumination and radiocity (light-based physics). But another thought had been haunting him. Working on Tangled alongside legendary 2-D animator Glen Keane (The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast), Kahrs watched Keane sketch on top of the CG animations during the production process. Software allowed Keane to reshape 3-D figures with his pen strokes, but ultimately, his beautiful lines were lost in the process. It seemed like such a waste.
It tells the story of any two people who share a moment on a train platform, only to never see one another again (Click Image To Enlarge)
Late in the storyboarding process, Keane’s vision for Paperman was born anew. What if it could be a hybrid of the old and new schools of animation? What if it could be 2-D and 3-D at the same time?
But, without spoiling anything, I have a feeling that things may go different, thanks to a healthy dose of Disneyfication (Click Image To Enlarge)
Kahrs began investigating that possibility in the only place he could, Disney’s R&D department. He lucked out when he met software engineer Brian Whited, who had already been working on a new piece of animation software called Meander that specialized in 2-D interpolation (using software to reason out gaps in sketched animations). With modification and refinement, it just might work.
Watch the nuance of each frame. With 117 shots in the film, Kahrs’s team focused on the composition of each shot (Click Image To Enlarge)
Keane says.
“You hear people talking a lot about innovation--innovation comes out of necessity. The necessity in this case was we had to figure out how to have a CG underlayer that dragged these drawn lines on top of it.”
Eventually, Meander proved capable of stunning feats. Today, an animator can draw a frown on a protagonist’s hand in one frame, then, several frames later, draw a smile. Meander can both track the position of that hand in 3-D space, and it can fill in the gaps, turning that frown into a smile, naturally. But much of Keane’s emphasis was tweaking the feel. In classic Disney animation, the character outlines do something called boiling, as the imperfections in cel after cel stack up--and they’re important, subconscious cues to the experience of animation feeling authentic.
Also, aside from the narrative plays on light and shadow, each frame has hints of hand-drawn animation (Click Image To Enlarge)
Keane says.
“It’s part of the human hand. Those were the sort of small details that we were big on pushing one way or another.”
Following months of preliminary testing, the team had developed two test shots that they thought were compelling. The last step would be to take a meeting with John Lasseter and the rest of Disney studio leadership and sell them on the aesthetic.
What you see is actually built on an entirely new 2-D and 3-D animation system called Meander, which layers drawings on top of 3-D figures (Click Image To Enlarge)
Keane recounts.
“I think John was a little bit skeptical. He’s a smart guy. He’s seen all these painterly effects. His concern was, does it get in the way of the storytelling, or is it a way of immersing you in this world and telling the story of the characters? Once he saw these tests, they all sat up and noticed that this wasn’t just some cheap trick.”
When your brain tries to dissect each frame, reasoning how someone can possibly draw on 3-D in 2-D, you’re bound for a mental meltdown (Click Image To Enlarge)
Indeed, Paperman is amongst the most stunning animations we’ve ever seen. It combines new aesthetics with standing traditions, marrying the tangibility of CG with the human grit of a pen on paper. And in a poetic turn of technology, it was actually the 2-D animators who got to put the finishing touches on each frame of Paperman. All of those beautiful lines that started the animation process would end it, too.
But ultimately, if you just soak in each frame for the visual paradox that it is, you’ll really enjoy the film (Click Image To Enlarge)
Check out all of this year’s Oscar-nominated short films at Co.Create.
COMMENTARY: The "Paperman" is one sweet short animation film. No wonder it won an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film. Disney and Director John Kahrs were able to marry 2D and 3D animation into the same film, and the result is just beautiful.
Disney Director John Kahrs (centere) accepts the Academy Award for Best Short Animation Film for "Paperman" (Click Image To Enlarge)
Courtesy of an article dated February 22, 2013 appearing in Fast Company Design
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