Comment by wodenokoto
5 years ago
A long time ago I saw a rather good behind the scenes of Aladdin.
I was quite surprised to see that after writing the script they had stand-in actors do the entire script, which they then did animatics (storyboards times to the recorded audio) to, after which they edited the story. Only then did final actors record. Then redo animatics and editing before doing final animation.
Imagine my surprise watching the documentary on Hayao Miyazaki, where he has a 100 animators working on final animation, while he is still storyboarding, undecided on the ending of the movie and hasn’t even casted the voice actors!
Modern Disney filmmaking (Pixar, WDAS) is much closer to the Miyazaki approach you describe than you'd think. It's very, very iterative; each film goes through 5-6 screenings, during which the story structure can and does change dramatically. People are very definitely working on the final product while the story is still being worked out. One pretty common pattern: with 8-9 months left to go until release, the entire third act has to be scrapped and reworked, and often big chunks of the first and second act reworked to match. Voice actors for the main characters are involved throughout, and often come in many times to record new pages of freshly written dialog.
If all this seems chaotic, it is. It leads to untold stress as the release date looms closer and closer and the ending still isn't figured out, which compresses the schedule for each department to deliver a finished product. Very very rarely, the release date is allowed to slip (see "The Good Dinosaur" for example) but that's really the nuclear option, as it involves shuffling the release schedule and incurs a ton of cost. This is a big part of why these movies cost so much: compressing the schedule means hiring tons of people and paying them tons of overtime.
Source: I worked the better part of a decade at WDAS.
There was a great documentary series about the making of Frozen 2 that shows exactly this - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_the_Unknown:_Making_Froze...
I found it fascinating how the team was still developing key plot points (let alone dialog/animation) down to the final few weeks/days before the film needed to be completed!
It's no different to how the video games industry works, either.
It completely kills your employees though: all those crunches to scrap tons of good work and replace it with new ideas; tons of stressful overtime. Ugh.
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I heard they were writing the scenes of Casablanca as they filmed it. seems to work out ok.
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I have a few friends in the industry and their whole process just seems nuts. They earn good money from overtime but I'd just be so annoyed doing so much throwaway work even though a lot of it just seems like it could be avoided with planning, time management and more honest pricing when it comes to sub contracting.
The willingness to throw away work that, no matter how well done, is in service of a less enjoyable movie, is why some movies are great while others are, well, just movies. Producing 90 minutes of animation is a heck of a lot cheaper than producing 90 minutes of animation that hundreds of millions of people will cherish for generations.
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You say chaotic, but it basically sounds like modern agile software development.
It is chaotic compared to conventional film production. Most movies have a complete script before principal photography even starts, or at the very least all of the major story beats and set pieces planned out. Last minute rewrites and reshoots for big budget productions are a last resort if the studio feels the product just isn't shaping up into something that will put asses in seats.
>I was quite surprised to see that after writing the script they had stand-in actors do the entire script, which they then did animatics (storyboards times to the recorded audio) to, after which they edited the story. Only then did final actors record. Then redo animatics and editing before doing final animation
I have no experience in animation, however that process is not unlike the common process in music production: a song is written, a demo is cut by the songwriter, a "scratch track" is cut by the chosen lead vocalist and an instrument or two, then the arrangement is recorded by the band (to the scratch track), then final vocals are cut to the band's backing track, and often after that tweaks to the accompaniment are still made.
Yup. I've recorded several albums, some in small home studios and others in pro environments. It's always been scratch track -> drums (me) -> guitars/bass (bass almost always direct to console) -> vocals.
Its basically like writing code. Aladdin was prototyped, Proof of concept, then put into production. So if anything needed a complete re-write, it wouldn't affect final production.
Hayao seems to doing continuous refactoring, so as long as you don't need to edit too many scenes already drawn you can potentially come out with a good final product while giving production as much time as possible.
I love love love watching animation reference ftg - https://twitter.com/NickTyson/status/1129904441153376256?s=2...
Why even link to the tweet?
https://vimeo.com/336117214
fwiw vimeo requires login to watch that
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It might sound odd, but it is not abnormal for a movie to be rewritten deep into production. Some infamous movies for this include Die Hard and Stripes, the endings for which were not written until after filming had begun. Given the much longer process for animated movies I'm not surprised this happens at Disney too.
Apocalypse Now was written on the way up the river, based upon the documentary.
This goes back to the days of Snow White and Sleeping Beauty! One of the pieces of old footage Disney likes to show off is animators sketching the movements of a girl dancing around the room and then merging that into the final product for Sleeping Beauty where she's in the dress and it's spinning around.
Japanese anime is dubbed, compared to western animated content which isn't
I'm confused, isn't all animated content "dubbed"? It isn't like the animated characters themselves are talking.
Dubbed means the actors say the lines while watching the characters lips move. The Disney way is exactly the opposite. The animators animate while charting and studying the audio.
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I think they mean “western” animation typically records the voices first and then animates to them, where anime records the voices after the animation is complete. But I’m not familiar with either production practice, so this is just a guess.
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Go and watch Frozen II BTS docseries, it has the whole thing explained throughly
Plot twist: 6 months prior to the final release date, they are still rewriting the biggest reveal of the entire movie ...