Traditional Animation in Stars in the Trash

Valhalla Cats
on
May 16, 2024

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Many of you tell us that the look of Stars in the Trash reminds you of movies from your childhood, that’s because they share the same animation technique. Today I will talk about the animation process in Stars in the Trash.

Traditional animation (or classical animation, or hand-drawn animation) is an animation technique in which each frame is drawn by hand. Animators will begin by drawing sequences of animation on sheets of perforated paper to fit the peg bars in their desks, one picture or “frame” at a time (A peg bar is an animation tool used in traditional animation to keep the drawings in place)

Animation Desk

A key animator or lead animator will draw the key frames or key drawings in a scene, using the character layouts as a guide. The first drawings are called “roughs” or “rough animation” because they are often done in a very loose fashion. The animation is then given detail in a phase called tiedown.

Once the key animation is approved, the lead animator forwards the scene on to the clean-up department, made up of the clean-up artists and the inbetweeners. The clean-up animators take the
drawings and trace them onto a new sheet of paper, making sure to include all of the details present on the original model sheets. The inbetweeners will draw in whatever frames are still missing in-between the other animators’ drawings.

Once the clean-ups and in-between drawings for a sequence are completed, they are prepared for painting. Finally, lighting is added to put the finishing touches.

Animation Process

As you can see it is a very laborious handmade process and one of the reasons why it is taking so long to create Stars in the Trash. We hope the result will be worth it.

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Thank you for your time. I hope you enjoyed the read.

Have a wonderful day,

Jose

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