Artist-animator

Phase artist - the profession of an artist in the field of animation, associated with the creation of intermediate phases of the cartoon character's movement between layouts. When creating phases, the artist-phase designer must take into account the character of movement set by the multiplier artist in key frames (layouts). Phazovka divided into rough and clean.

Character artist (animation) - an artist who creates a unique image of a cartoon character, carrying out its subsequent development and support in the production of an animated film . This includes the steps:

• search ("finding") of the image of the hero - directorial (preparatory) period;
• character development (preparatory period);
• maintenance on production (production period).

The character artist must be able to draw, use three-dimensional graphics, and puppet animation. This profession is quite painstaking, so the artist must have a lot of patience to complete the image of the character.

The art director is the main artist in the production of the animated film . Together with the director, the art director defines the visual style of the future work, and manages and controls the production.

Production Moments

• At the pre-production stage (director's period), the production designer creates concepts ( concept ) of characters and background drawings ( background ). Together with the director, he selects assistant artists : a character artist, a background artist, and if necessary, an artist to create key frames based on a storyboard director.
• During the preparatory period of production, the production designer organizes and controls the work on creating backgrounds for the initial scenes of the film, developing characters , and preparing initial layouts for the artist-animator .
• During the production period, the production designer organizes and controls production processes from drawing to filling. At the same time, the multiplication and roughing workshop is subordinated exclusively to the production director.

Depending on the amount of work on a particular animated film, the production designer can be directly involved in creating backgrounds, clean director layouts, and character development.

The drawing artist creates clean layouts (key frames) based on the images created by the artist-animator . The task of the drawing artist is to, without disturbing the animation, give the cartoon character maximum similarity with the image developed by the character artist .

The name of the profession - “multiplier” - is derived from the type of cinema, to which the artist belongs. Animation (from the Latin. Multiplicatio - multiplication) is based on the production ("multiplication") of a large number of frames, characterized by small displacement of elements, the movement of which must be depicted, in their rapid sequential display.

In English-speaking countries, and for some time in Russia, a multiplier artist is called an animator (from Lat. Animatio - animation ), but these words are not complete synonyms . The animators do not include artists who paint the background, create images of the characters or are involved in the storyboard, although they are involved in the creation of the cartoon and are animators.

According to the famous multiplier Fedor Khitruk , the use of the terms “multiplication” and “multiplier” in the USSR is associated with the technology used before the introduction of the classic hand-drawn animation — the creation of images using character elements applied to a sheet, which is akin to appliqué ( silhouette animation ). In consonance with this word, new art was called animation ^[1] .

The first steps in the animation were made long before the advent of cinema . Attempts to capture the movement in the figure began in the primitive era, continued in ancient times and led to the emergence of primitive multiplication in the first half of the XIX century. The further development of this technology in combination with photography led to the invention of the camera ^[2] .

In the first years after the appearance of the movie, the animation faded into the background, until it was revived again by James Stewart Blackton , who released the cartoon Humorous Phases of Funny Faces (1906), and Alexander Shiryaev, who made a puppet film about ballet (1906). The creators of the first cartoons have not yet been called animators, although in fact they were.

In 1914, Winsor McKay created the first-ever cartoon character endowed with bright personality traits — Gertie's dinosaur . At the same time, a huge number of drawings made for the film demanded to invent a new production technology, leading for the first time to the division of labor between the artist-animator and the background artist. While McKay traced the phases of the dinosaur's movement, the student hired by him copied from the sample on each sheet the contours of the mountains, the lake and the tree (the celluloid film was not yet used) ^[3] .

Specializations of artists-animators are primarily determined by the technology of animation. At the same time, some specializations may exist in any method of producing cartoons, while others may be unique for a specific and not met in other cases. Also, the division into specializations is associated with the scale of production: in small groups, one artist can perform several technological operations. It should be noted that as animation developed, the specialization of animators became increasingly narrow.

Cartoon Animation

• A character artist is an artist who creates a visual image of a cartoon character, carrying out his subsequent development and support in the production of an animated film ^[4] .
• The contouring artist is an artist whose task is to transfer the design from paper to celluloid film ^[2] .
• The artist-animator of the cartoon film (the artist-animator ) is the artist who creates the drawings of the key phases of the movement of the animated hero (layout drawings) and defines the intermediate phases on the exhibition list ^[2] .
• The art director is the main artist of the animation film. Together with the director, the art director determines the visual style of the future work, provides guidance and control over the production ^[2] .
• A drawing artist is an artist who creates clean layout drawings (key frames) based on images created by an artist-animator. The task of the drawing artist is to, without disturbing the animation, give the cartoon character maximum similarity with the image developed by the character artist ^[2] .
• A phase designer is an artist who creates the intermediate phases of the movement of a cartoon hero between layout drawings ^[2] .
• A background artist (decorator) is an artist who creates background pictures and panoramas on which animated characters act ^[2] .

• 3D graphics multiplier - creates animation snippets using computer simulation

When working on large projects, multipliers are divided by objects of animation. There are:

• multipliers of characters working on the movements of living beings, dialogues, actions.
• Special effects multipliers dealing with unusual effects and natural phenomena, such as rain, snow, water flow.
• Background multipliers , controlling side effects, background pictures, and the surroundings - cars, machinery, and other non-static details.

• Stories in Pictures

• Vano I. Painted film. - Goskinoizdat, 1950. - 84 p.
• Khitruk F. Profession - animator. - M .: Gayatri, 2008. - T. 1.
• Encyclopedia of domestic animation / Comp. Sergey Kapkov . - M .: Algorithm, 2006. - 816 p. - 3 000 copies - ISBN 5-9265-0319-4 .