![]() This particular disc happens to be the first disc I ever purchased: $265.00 direct from the Oxberry company.Ī close-up of the Oxberry disc. The cameraman would translate the animator’s instructions when filming the prepared artwork. The pegbars slide left to right (west to east) and allow for animated pans to be planned/plotted by exposing the increments frame by frame. This is an aluminum disc with brass panning pegbars with painted increments. Most animation was produced at a 12-field size, however.Īn example of a 12-field Oxberry disc. The larger field was necessary for larger artwork. Straight-ahead view of the lightbox with a 12-field Chromacolour plexiglas discĪnimation artist Don Poynter at work on one of the JJSP maple wedges and Chromacolour discs, circa 1993ĭrawing station utilizing a 16-field Chromacolour disc. A simple fluorescent light supplies illumination from underneath Luxor “Luxo” goosenecks supply overhead light. They’re made of maple-veneered plywood with solid maple trim. These lightbox “wedges” were built for the studio when we did the launch season of MTV’s “Beavis and Butt-head” in 1992-93. ![]() One of the typical animation desk setups used in our studio for 20 years. So-here are some vintage and current examples of a mainstay of the animation production industry that will soon be obsolete. Lutz’s “Animated Cartoons” (1920 – Charles Scribner’s Sons). Two pages from the first book published to exclusively address the craft of cartoon animation, Edwin G. Hopefully, this successful exhibit will find a home at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens, in the near future! And not all the material and items have been sitting in the dark the past few years-some of the pieces are on display in the studio here and were also a part of the Westchester Arts Council exhibit I curated with Howard Beckerman in 2009 on the history of New York Animation, titled “It All Started Here”. It seemed like a natural subject for a piece here-especially since many of the pieces of equipment have interesting backstories to them. I happened to be in our storeroom recently and saw all the old discs and lightbox wedges unused and stacked in the corner. With the advent of CGI and digital drawing tablets like Wacom’s Cintiq, actually drawing the sequential images on paper and either filming or scanning the drawings is becoming a rarity. It’s only been within the past decade that this conventional process and this sort of equipment has proven to be on its way out. ![]() ![]() This allowed for less stress/damage on the holes and thus better registration. California/Hollywood seemed to hover in the world of Acme, but Disney (which switched over to Acme 20 years ago) had paper that was also punched with two sets of holes-one for the animator and one for the Ink and Paint Department. In New York there were pegs by Acme (a small round hole with two thin slots on either side), Oxberry (a small center hole with wider slots on either side), Signal Corps (close to Oxberry but closer to three round holes) and Fleischer/Famous/Terrytoons (three round holes). For almost a century, folks working in animation production have used paper, pencils, various designs of lightboxes, and pegged drawing discs to do their craft, and within this world of registration there were several standards. It was John Randolph Bray who established and patented the peg system of registration in 1915. If the images that are animated don’t have a shared foundation with each other, the movement that’s created by the animator has no common relationship with the background or the viewer’s point of view-it just doesn’t work. The Disney drawing desk has been the starting point for some of our greatest stories, worlds and characters.The drawing/image registration process is a fundamental aspect of film animation. Walt Disney Animation Studios Desk model sheetįrom pencils to pixels, and digits to digital, we celebrate our pioneers, artists, and storytellers, and look ahead to a rich slate of exciting new projects covering a wide spectrum of styles and subjects. Sure, it might be made of cardstock, but it’s the perfect item to assemble and use as inspiration while you work hard and try to achieve your dream job. While it’s not a usable version, you may want to check out this piece of swag sent to Web Watch from the fine folks at Walt Disney Animation Studios. If you’ve ever wanted to work in the animation industry, whether it be for Disney or other cartoon-oriented companies, getting your own animation desk is almost always the first thing on an aspiring artist’s wish list.
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