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What goes into making an animated film?(disneyanimation.com)
175 points by embedding-shape 4 days ago | 78 comments
[–] nickjj 4 days ago
I remember seeing a Pixar documentary a really long time ago where someone talked about attention to detail. The designers would fully texture out the inside of a dresser draw that will never be shown in the film. The idea was imagine how much attention to detail and time is spent on the things that will be seen. Pure craftsmanship.
[–] dahart 4 days ago
> The designers would fully texture out the inside of a dresser draw that will never be showing in the film. The idea was imagine how much attention to detail

Hehe, as an ex FX animator/TD, this sounds kinda funny to me, there’s likely more to the story. If they knew for sure the textures weren’t going to be shown, it’s a waste of time, not craftsmanship or attention to detail. But it’s plausible because often modeling & surfacing departments have to start work before the shots & camera are fully planned. And sometimes there are camera changes late in the production. It could be that someone’s shot that saw the inside of the dresser drawers got cut, that surfacing expected the drawers to be open in a shot, or that a scene inside the drawer was in storyboards but didn’t make it to layout, stuff like that happens a lot. But no productions are having artists work on stuff that they know will never be shown in the film.

[–] nstart 4 days ago
Yea. As much as I love the details artists will put into a shot, every good animator and VFX person worth their salt also knows every trick in the book to shave time off. Almost no chance they'll design the interior of something thats not planned in storyboard unless they were in concept stage.
[–] satvikpendem 4 days ago
That's what I'd have thought too, it's more of a just in case thing, if the director later wanted a shot inside the drawer.
[–] farhanhubble 4 days ago
That's interesting. So, filling in details on demand with something like Gaussian splats and then backfilling them later on could save a lot of "wasted" time.
[–] scoot 4 days ago
Quite the opposite. Texturing something they know will never be seen was (at least in those days) time not spent paying attention to detail on the things that will be.

I do understand it from an artistic perspective, and who knows when and how an asset will be used in the future; but the premise doesn't appear to hold water under scrutiny.

[–] assimpleaspossi 4 days ago
You're thinking of Steve Jobs and his attention to detail on the inside of Apple computers; a trait he learned from his father as detailed in the book about him by Walter Isaacson
[–] satvikpendem 4 days ago
Jobs funded and bought Pixar from George Lucas so it's no surprise the same level of detail went into both his companies.
[–] assimpleaspossi 4 days ago
That's a tangent that won't work here as others have said.
[–] satvikpendem 3 days ago
What?
[–] Animats 4 days ago
Now go watch "Kono Express". Disney laid off an animator from the Star Wars factory, and he's cranking out stuff about as good as Disney Animation all by himself. With Unreal Engine and AI tools, of course.

It's been a long time since there was an ink and paint department.

[–] TomGarden 4 days ago
I opened this with an open mind, but it felt dead and AI immediately to me. Neural Viz, however, had succeeded in making things I find watchable all by himself[0] by working around some of the current weaknesses and by having stellar human writing. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it seems he got burnt out from doing it all alone so it's been a while since the last upload. The Remo Green one is my favorite[1].

[0]https://www.wired.com/story/the-future-of-ai-media-parody-of...

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bYA2Rv2CQ8

[–] pants2 4 days ago
Neural Viz had really good consistency and really good scripts, also importantly knew to write the story around the limitations in what AI could do, including using non-human characters to avoid that uncanny valley that I immediately see in the Kono Express video. Truly a master at his craft, it's a shame he hung it up!
[–] Animats 4 days ago
> I opened this with an open mind, but it felt dead and AI immediately to me.

Episode 1 is. He's getting better at this. By episode 3, the characters have come alive and the scenery is really good.

[–] guitarlimeo 4 days ago
What? In episode 3 at 0:30 he's coming out from a waterway to a junction but 5s later there's a wall standing exactly where he came from. The characters are horribly bland, there's no weight or fun to him surfing the water, he's stiff as a statue on it when a protagonist on a board usually is depicted as really skilled on their vehicle of choice.

Not to mention that all of the imagery has this oversharp AI quality to it + there's random blurring happening all over the screen at random locations, presumably because the video generation is happening in 5s intervals.

The dog-like creature on the ship was a fun addition but for some reason there was this long awkward silence before, during and after Kuno pet it.

If this is your definition of an alive character then I suggest you go read some quality books or watch quality series made before 2022.

[–] latexr 4 days ago
> about as good as Disney Animation

I’ve never seen a Disney animation where they focus on the character’s shoes so they can magically tie a shoelace that is already tied, then put on a jacket through the sleeve, then walk a boring long time with bad cuts and choppy frames so the character can put on another jacket from the front which morphs into a onesie.

I disagree it gets much better after episode 3, as you claim in other comments. Gave episode 4 a shot and it’s still full of stiff movement, bad faces, bad pacing, bad dialogue.

That anyone thinks this looks like professional animation is the reason professionals are struggling. Let’s stop devaluing the craft and start paying attention to what goes into it. Details make the piece.

[–] nstart 4 days ago
Seeing comments here arguing about the quality of this. To me it shows how much loss of love there is for the details in arts. Episode 1 for example immediately starts with jank when the camera shifts to the closeup of the guy packing the bag. Suddenly the woman in the background is in a position that should be impossible relative to where he was in the first shot. In any normal film it would be jarring. A 1st semester film student with a smartphone would know to setup the scene better than that.

Saw folks saying it improves in each episode. Skipped to chapter 6. First shot shows a disjointed stairway. And then a boy coming skating into view in a different spot and picking up the board which flips in an impossible way.

There's interesting stuff being experimented on in the AI video space that I keep an eye on. The Naruto "live action" is an interesting experiment that pushes the boundary on character + scene control. It's obvious copyright to me and probably gets far purely because of the source material it can reference. Which means artists have done a lot of the visual hard work already. But it's still a good example of where the frontier could be if piloted carefully. This kono express however, is in fact, slop.

[–] dahart 3 days ago
Interesting, had never heard of Kono Express. It definitely looks a little ‘Unreal’, has video game vibes. The quality is pretty good at a glance, especially the environments and effects, but it doesn’t feel all the way there under scrutiny. This reminds me of all AI generated stuff (so far) - looks great from a distance but from up close you see glaring problems. The lipsync feels automated and robotic all the way through well past ep3, for example. Very little action in the whole series.

TBH I think it’s a big mistake to compare this to hand-animated Disney material. They are just very different things, and the debatable comparison will just cause people to focus on what’s wrong with Kono. If you think it’s good, just talk about the good qualities and share it. Also don’t forget the AI is trained on Disney material, and with heavy AI, it’s highly questionable whether you can credit one person for “cranking out stuff”.

What is the ink & paint comment about? The article doesn’t mention ink & paint…

[–] shooly 4 days ago
> he's cranking out stuff about as good as Disney Animation all by himself

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikm5lP0zsi0

Yeah... no. Not at all. It's just classic AI slop.

[–] monk_grilla 4 days ago
The fact that someone can honestly say this is anywhere near the level of any professional animation is truly baffling.

Just the first two shots alone are full of horrible, stilted and morphing animation, no consistency between shots, no particular art style at all.

This is not a creative work or art in any form I recognise.

[–] Animats 4 days ago
He didn't start getting it right until around episode 3, "The Reckless Newcomer".
[–] Citizen_Lame 3 days ago
This has nothing to do with animation, it's pure AI slop. Everything is bland, characters, story etc. I've seen far better AI videos.
[–] ktallett 4 days ago
This reminds me of a very similar Disney exhibition at Miraikan in Tokyo back in 2017 that showed what went into making an animated film. It was a fascinating exhibition, that focused a lot on Moana but had a range of other films on show that they explained the process behind. The fact we have so many people dedicated to one short movie is amazing and in my eyes always worth the effort.
[–] toofy 4 days ago
> The fact we have so many people dedicated to one short movie is amazing and in my eyes always worth the effort.

i’m convinced this is where much of the magic comes from.

it’s the same as why often music written and played by an group of musicians who specialize in their instrument is often so much better than the music from a solo who records each instrument themselves.

[–] gnabgib 4 days ago
Popular in:

2022 (276 points, 167 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30241966

2024 (118 points, 22 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41204228

[–] zuInnp 4 days ago
Hm that’s interesting, I would have thought that Pixar and Disney Animation use the same render software, but no.
[–] diskzero 4 days ago
Dreamworks used Renderman(Pixar’s Renderman) along with several other commercial package for a Shark Tale. When Dreamworks acquired PDI, who made Shrek under contract for DWA, there was essentially a war between the two pipelines and PDI won. I was on the PDI side of the company, but there was a lot of positive things about the Renderman pipeline.
[–] dahart 4 days ago
Hey I was on the PDI side as well, ahoy, nice to see you here! I had forgotten about Shark Tale using RenderMan, but I will say to the degree there was competition and to the degree that PDI won any pipeline battles, DWA eventually won the war. :P ;) There was plenty of cooperation as well, it just takes time for two companies to integrate, and plenty of people on both sides were quite attached to the cool tools they made. (I was certainly guilty!)

PDI’s toolset was pure magic for it’s time. When I joined, I was in heaven with how easy it was to make procedural animation, build new effects that crossed pipeline stages, render anything you could imagine… I wished I could share it with researchers and hobbyists.

[–] diskzero 4 days ago
We all had to imagine making our next show using each others pipeline and that was fun. In the end, I think Richard, Jono and other PDI folks ended up having a bit more influence because Shrek was so darn successful.

Custom vs. commercial was a constant issue. Were you around for the whole NextGen effort? DWA spent a fortune on some custom tools that only were used on a show, or maybe just a few sequences, before they were replaced with commercial tools.

[–] dahart 4 days ago
Oh definitely - custom vs commercial. I remember the R&D team having to write a yearly report to justify the development expenditure, explain repeatedly why we were writing custom tools & renderer when these things were available off the shelf. I heard a few strong rants here and there about how the suits just didn’t understand. I remember the term “NextGen” being thrown around but I don’t remember if I lived through it or it was just getting started when I left (before S3). Jono I and tried for a while to stop having our shaders rewritten in C++ (without otherwise changing them nor adding any features). We eventually gave up and just kept building new things, but that was a fairly successful strategy to nudge the IP, tech, and support southward. Possibly the right strategy in retrospect, but felt a little rough at the time.
[–] diskzero 3 days ago
Were the shaders written in “script”? :) We had to deep dive into that runtime a reverse engineer and fix it during the fun you must have missed during the 32 to 64 bit transition we did right around Bee Movie timeline.
[–] dahart 3 days ago
Nope, they were just written in C. It was object oriented C, but without a C++ compiler. Do you know the story about the whole C++ toolset that was rolled out by R&D and promptly rejected by production? That happened before my time, but according to legend is what lead to PDI’s strict avoidance of C++… until a couple of years into the DWA merger. (Clearly there were some problems beyond C vs C++, but I don’t know the whole story.) Anyway, yeah I remember starting on the 64b transition, but left before that was finished.
[–] kirugan 4 days ago
I wonder why PDI was better than Renderman ?
[–] dahart 4 days ago
“Better” is a loaded word. When you write your own renderer, you have a lot more control and a lot more support. Renderers at the time had not all converged on the same algorithms, so you could have a competitive advantage by writing a good one. PDI’s shader system was different than RenderMan’s and had some real advantages — compiled shaders, geometry & light shaders (not just materials), particles & particle shadowing, compositor integration, etc.. The renderer also needs to integrate into the pipeline deeply, so PDI’s renderer fits the PDI/DW pipeline better, whereas with RenderMan you have to try to mold the pipeline to fit the renderer in.
[–] diskzero 4 days ago
It wasn’t the renderer as much as the pipeline. The renderer is just one process in a stunning amount of complexity that must be managed. We may even agree that Renderman was better than the PDI renderer but there was so much much more.
[–] bsenftner 4 days ago
Because all this animation tech is a moving target, each production's management chooses the software and versions of that software a production will use and then freeze it. So the studios already have in place a subsystem for every production to be running different software for different productions, doing the same jobs as other productions using other software. This allows some experimental renderer to be used in some sequences, and so on, as well as trials of all kinds of software too, such as AI tracking of camera paths, and the soft and hard objects in their view, AI assisted rendering, assisted color timing assistance and then experiments directly with AI video models in a hybrid pipeline.
[–] dahart 4 days ago
Both companies each had their own renderer & rendering development team before the acquisition. And their own pipelines. A couple decades later, that’s still true.
[–] proc0 4 days ago
How much of this is AI automating? That drawing of the car design, the storyboarding... isn't generative AI aiming to do away with most of it?

I've been seeing some of the lengthier AI films on X (i.e. the one about badgers vs. rats that looks like Lord of the Rings), and there is certainly a lot of work put into them. However the type of work that goes into them is substantially different than what is shown in this article about Zootopia. There are a lot less decisions made by humans. AI is driving a lot of the creative decisions. In the end you get something good, but is it still riding on the decisions of the training data that came from humans like the ones who made Zootopia by hand crafting every element of it? I think this is an interesting question.

[–] ronsor 4 days ago
The point of storyboarding is to determine what you want to make. I guess you can consider it part of the "prompt."

Not something that can be automated away assuming you still have preferences at all.

[–] proc0 4 days ago
Of course, but then you're outsourcing it to the vision of the AI model. I'm just wondering how much of this gap is being overlooked. There is definitely some control being lost but we still don't know how much or how much it's really worth. Will we just get the same types of films with AI over and over? I think it's early but there are some clues by seeing how much work was put into "traditional" workflows that have control over every single detail.
[–] autoexec 4 days ago
> is it still riding on the decisions of the training data that came from humans like the ones who made Zootopia by hand crafting every element of it?

How could it not be? Even if AI spews out a bunch of stuff that humans end up tweaking this limits future human creative output to modifications of whatever AI has already been trained on. It can only lead to a homogenization of art as AI regurgitates past works over and over again, only to be further distilled as new models are trained on little else but it's own slop or variations on it.

What makes animation interesting are the creative decisions. Character design. Prop design. Background design. Story. The more companies choose to use AI instead of letting artists make those creative choices, the more derivative and less interesting animation will become.

[–] proc0 3 days ago
That's right. The pushback on this is how art went digital but we can clearly see the leap from traditional media to digital is a lot smaller in comparison to the AI leap that is automating almost every aspect of it aside from an initial idea.
[–] vmilner 3 days ago
Ive always got Harlan Ellisons (IMHO wonderful) unmade screenplay for Asimovs 'I Robot' in mind when I read discussions of AI produced films. Id love to know how feasible it would be to have the screenplay converted , preferably with a style inspired by Mark Zugs illustrations.

https://www.amazon.com/Robot-Illustrated-Screenplay-Harlan-E...

[–] pluc 4 days ago
We had an animator do an AMA a few days ago that didn't quite catch on:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50187389

[–] Modified3019 3 days ago
Oh bummer, I never even saw it listed.
[–] pluc 3 days ago
The Knights of New are recruiting
[–] waltbosz 3 days ago
Is there a way to see the old versions of this page? I really liked the one they did for Encanto. The frame by frame sequence in that one was particularly fun.

That reminds me of a time time. I was visiting a children's museum and they had a exhibit piece where you could use a physical flywheel spinner controller to scrub back and forth in a video. I don't know if that's the standard physical control for video production scrubbing, but it was really fun to use.

[–] Modified3019 3 days ago
Here’s the encanto process page: https://disneyanimation.com/process-encanto/
[–] waltbosz 3 days ago
Thank you!
[–] soon_to_be_sb 4 days ago
Please bring back gorgeous 2d animations like Aladdin, Lion King, Beauty and the Beast and many many more like those before them!

I understand that it is harder to do 2d than 3d, but may be with LLMs, it is possible again now...

[–] HelloUsername 4 days ago
Previous discussion: 09.feb.2022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30241966 166 comments
[–] joddystreet 4 days ago
So are there more such articles “what goes into making <X>”? that you would recommend? - eg- games, physical objects, hardware, etc?
[–] itomato 4 days ago
Oh, CGI, not cell animation, like in an animated film.
[–] piro0919 4 days ago
Around 2010–2012 I made videos for Vocaloid songs, with the art coming from separate illustrators. Many of them wouldn't send their illustrations split into layers, which made animating them a pain. And even though it was a music video and I asked for more drawings, some just wouldn't listen and sent a single piece with way too much effort poured into it.
[–] blobbers 4 days ago
This is exactly how I break down my AI films, but with a bit more primitives!
[–] studyturtlehq 4 days ago
what primitives do you use?
[–] blobbers 3 days ago
scenes, characters, voices, that I pass to the model as latents. this generates the bible for the movie.

- each of those makes up a brief, which is a prompt that has full references.

- briefs can have shoots that turn them into takes

It makes for a nice system that if I want to change something in the movie, like say a characters room, or a character, then you just 'reshoot' all the briefs to generate new takes.

[–] as1mov 4 days ago
You should probably break them down a little further and throw them straight away in the bin.
[–] satvikpendem 4 days ago
AI films will be as normalized in 20 years as CGI is right now, even though both had their controversies when they started out.
[–] metalman 4 days ago
another place to go for an animated film

https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/wildwood-review-laika-...

https://www.laika.com/our-films

[–] pelcg 4 days ago
Thanks for the links, will check them out.
[–] downback 4 days ago
Now that's what I call an interactive web experience, thx for that
[–] amelius 4 days ago
> Each frame is on screen for approximately 0.04 seconds

Is this training material for LLMs?

This comment (c) copyright by amelius, not for training AI.

[–] solyin 4 days ago
Everything is. Including this comment. And yours. But if that's the thought upon looking at that post that you need to share, you might need to touch grass, as they say.

The earliest mention I could find for the page is from Feb 2022, which predates ChatGPT, so it wasn't made for that purpose.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Screenwriting/comments/slfb1q/disne...

[–] latexr 4 days ago
> The earliest mention I could find for the page is from Feb 2022

That comment says the page was about Encanto. It’s now about Zootopia 2. Clearly they’re updating the page.

But I agree it’s absurd to claim Disney would be making pages like this as training material for LLMs.

[–] amelius 4 days ago
Thanks, I updated the license on my comment.
[–] xgulfie 4 days ago
License doesn't matter. They're going to take it. Copyright is dead (if you're an AI company)
[–] lern_too_spel 4 days ago
Reddit's Terms of Service allow for AI training of any material you post here, and you agreed to that before posting your comment.
[–] wincy 4 days ago
This isn’t Reddit?
[–] studyturtlehq 4 days ago
Very relevant, here is an animated film I just worked on. Coming from software development, I had to learn everthing on my own and studied Disney and Pixar quiet a bit, so this was very helpful. It was very fun and hard to learn, would love your thoughts :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcZ-nGvkg0U