And before anyone complains: YES, that was the original cover created by the studio for the in-house manual. And if you think that was an outrage against decency, hope you never see a copy of ‘The Fourth Floor Funnies’.
I’ve been going through some old material that I stowed away many years ago, and dug up an ancient technical document from the Don Bluth Dublin studio from 1986 called ‘EXPOSING FIEVEL’. It’s a very technical guide for the camera department on how to shoot the animation on the massive multiplane CINETRON cameras. The information here will be alchemical to most people, but I’m sure someone may find it useful, especially those with an interest in the history of animation / multiplanes.
Here’s the document in pdf form, as well as a couple of sample pages for PDF-refusniks.
This page covers some of the multiplane magic:
And this one deals with FX exposures.
I mumble lot about how tech has taken away a lot of the hand-craft skills of the older age, but I’m also very glad that I didn’t have to wrestle with this level of complexity, often for very simple effects. I’ll write more about this in future posts, lots more to say.
For more pain, old school Bluth style, check out another in-house tech manual ‘The Perfect Pan’.
For more of my courses there’s a masterlist of classes, covering traditional principles as well as how to animate in Photoshop, Flash-AnimateCC, Harmony and After Effects. For new movies dealing with the free design/animation app KRITA, subscribe to my youtube channel and check out my patreon!