CAP System

This whole Amazon ai thing reminds me of this independent animator I saw over on YouTube a few years back. He was struggling with getting an indie pilot episode made because he was working full time and didn't have a lot of energy to focus on his project. So he turned to Ai.

His plan was to use ai to do all of the inbetween drawings. The results were... mixed at best.

Almost 80% of what the ai was generating was unusable. It was either inconsistent, glitchy, blurry, didn't have the right movements, or added stuff that he didn't ask for. He would have to reiterate the same scene over and over again until he managed to generate a handful of good frames.

He ended up spending more time cleaning up the few good frames the ai generated than he did drawing the actual key frames. And of course this resulted in thousands upon thousands of generated images and used a LOT of computing power.

And the whole time he was steadfast in doing this I was thinking, "wouldn't it just be easier if you drew the inbetween frames yourself?"

Like, you don't have to be outputting Disney quality animation for a pilot cartoon. And it doesn't have to look like limited animation either.

There are tried and true industry ways to save on frames and animation while still maintaining quality and smoothness. Both Toon Boom and Adobe Animate have ways to do inbetweening without needing Ai. This tech has existed for decades.

And ultimately what it came down to was he didn't want to put the effort into it. He wanted the notoriety of having an animated pilot, but didn't want to do any of the work of actually making the animated pilot.

Some old personal work for a series pitch I decided to stop pursuing.

My compositor and I stayed up late one night developing this line treatment as an experiment.

While we never ended up making this, we did end up using the treatment on the Hyper Light Breaker trailer.

🚨 A new wave of animation is coming to Dropout!

Get ready for Toonout Shorts—original animated shorts made by indie artists.

Tune in starting March 24th, only on Dropout.

➡️ Go to Dropout.tv to watch previously released animated shorts now!

A little Gameoverse fanart!

Congratulations to the whole Glitch team!

Hey everyone! Just a quick update: I started a new playlist on my YouTube channel for developing your own animation content. If you are thinking of creating social media shorts or a pilot, this playist will have some information on getting started.

I have a couple more playlists in the works (like storyboarding and behind the scenes of animated shows and films). Til then, I hope this new playlist will help you in creating your vision.

Whether you have completed a pilot, an animated music video, or starting your journey as an indie creator, wishing you a Happy Indie Animation Day!

The cancelled Thai animated movie project from Matt Braly and Rebecca Sugar has one of the most beautiful character designs I've seen in a long time, and I'm so sad she won't be animated. Please just look at her and be sad with me.

A THAI STUDIO IS TRYING TO SAVE IT!

Monk Studios - who worked on Ne Zha 2 and Wish Dragon - are trying to save this movie, now called Afterworld: กลับบ้าน. It's still very early and nothing is greenlit or in production, but public outcry has created a lot of buzz around it, and they'll be trying to find investors at Annecy.

I'm really happy to see it (maybe!!) get a second chance.

In the early days of 2D animation, one of the coolest inventions was that of the multiplane camera.

This was a TOWERING structure with multiple panes of glass that could be raised or lowered and had a camera at the top pointed downwards. Each pane of glass could be painted on, and 2D animation cels could be added as well. By using cranks, the glass and animation frames could be moved frame by frame individually at different speeds to give a sense of depth and parallax scrolling.

While cruder versions of this system existed since the beginning of animation, Disney perfected the multiplane camera in 1937 in preparation for Snow White. The system was tested on the Silly Symphony short film The Old Mill, which actually won an academy award!

If you ever needed a camera to fly through a scene with depth or pass through a cluster of trees in a forest, this was the analogy way to do it. Physical sheets of painted glass moving towards or away from the camera!

But, like how the Xerox Machine would make the process of inking individual cells obsolete, so too would computers make the multiplane camera obsolete. But the road there was a bumpy one…

Now, Digital ink and paint for 2D animation had existed since the late 1970’s. In 1978, a short educational film about the metric system called “measure for measure” was produced and featured the first use of digital scanning and painting of 2D animation cels.

It wouldn’t be until a decade later that PIXAR and Disney would create the Computer Animation Production System (or CAPS for short). This was a proprietary piece of software that was designed specifically to streamline the 2D animation process. Animation frames could be scanned into the computer and digitally inked, painted, and composited!

CAPS was a game changer! While the final output was a 2k resolution of 2048 x 1234 at a 1.66:1 aspect ratio, artwork could be scanned in much higher resolution so that it never lost quality as it was scaled. Lineart that was closed allowed for instant filling of colors. Lineart itself could be colored (something that had been lost with the introduction of the xerox process and not seen in an animated film since Sleeping Beauty). There could be a seemingly infinite number of layers with zero cel fogging issues. Transparency and other soft effects could be added (such as bell’s rosy cheeks in Beauty and the Beast). And because the system was already digital, 3D animation could be imported directly into the program allowing for more seamless integration of 3D and 2D elements. To say this software was revolutionary would be an understatement!

The first feature film to use this technology was “The Little Mermaid.” The final shot of the film is the first use of CAPS, and it’s understandable why. CAPS allowed the large cast of characters and slow scaling of the boat sailing away to bled together seamlessly. It was a shot that would’ve been extremely challenging to accomplish with traditional analogue techniques.

Impressed by the success of the new software, it was immediately put into use on the upcoming “Rescuers Down Under,” which would become the first digitally produced feature film.

Unfortunately this eagerness to use the technology was seen as reckless by the people working on the film. The technology wasn’t quite there yet and it hadn’t even been tested on a short film. Nevertheless Disney executive Peter Schneider’s attitude was “(we) just paid all this money for it, so it had better be ready.”

And it was evident immediately that CAPS wasn’t ready at all. The program itself was buggy, the scanning process inconsistent, it was slow and laggy, and colors could be wildly different depending on the computer you were using. They had artists and technicians sleeping at the studio and working around the clock to fix the bugs and get the software to a usable state.

Still, despite the hurdles, the film (barely) made it to screen on time and produced some of the most amazing animated sequences ever seen in theaters. The opening title zoom had over 400 layers, and the flying sequence with the giant golden eagle highlighted the extreme flexibility of what CAPS could do! The CAP System had proven itself.

Unfortunately there was still one more wrinkle. While the Disney executives liked how it made their films look, they were extremely apprehensive about what the general public would think about watching “a digital film.” Maybe it was out of caution because Disney’s previous flirtations with digital technology had backfired so bad with their poorly reviewed movie TRON, or maybe it was because they wanted to “preserve the magic of animation.” But whatever the reason was, Disney actively suppressed information about CAPS.

Dylan Kohler of the CAPS team said: “Everyone involved with the project had to sign a nondisclosure agreement. I didn’t even tell my family about CAPS. We developed this great thing, we got through the hell of getting Rescuers Down Under out, and then we were still under these very strict NDA’s so we couldn’t even celebrate what we had done with other people.” Disney even barely gave PIXAR any credit in the film. It wouldn’t be until 1992 after “Beauty and the Beast” won a technical Oscar would Disney start touting their fancy new software.

Disney would use CAPS for everything 2D animated all the way up until Treasure Planet and Home on the Range. But after a series of box office bombs (and some in-house fighting with PIXAR), the 2D animation department was shut down and CAPS was reduce to just a couple work stations (Presumably this was done so they could still access movies made with CAPS for re-releasing on DVD and for other digital preservation reasons).

When the 2D department was briefly re-opened for The Princess and the Frog, Disney used off the shelf software like Toon Boom Harmony rather than try to get an outdated CAPS to work again.