Cel Animation Workshop

We had a Cel animation workshop to show us another way of creating an animation. Cel animation, also referred to as hand-drawn animation, is the oldest and historically the most popular form of animation. Traditionally a cartoon is drawn frame by frame by hand.This is the method that people such as Matt Groening use for the cartoon series The Simpsons and Furturama.

The Simpsons is one of the most watched cartoons, created by Matt Groening and produced by James L.Brooks, and is also among my most watched tv programs.. along with...

... Futurama! Also on my list. And also created by Matt Groening. They have teams of animators who draw all the frames, called 'tweens' that go in between all the main frames which are drawn by a main animator. This method is extremely tedious and time consuming. Mike Scully says that it takes 9months from starting to work on a script until the show airs. They have a team of 15-16 writers and they are usually working on 7-8 different 20 minute episodes at one time. That's a long time.

To start our session, we we're told to just start drawing out a few characters:

Then we had to chose one that we liked, and draw it from different angles.. I chose to do my triangle man..

I decided to call him TRI-MAN. I drew him from the front, the back, and left side and the right.

Then we had to join with someone else and put our characters together to create a story in which they both appear. We did a story line, seen above. This is just the idea of the start the middle and the ending of a story. I paired up with Lewis and his OCTO-MAN, and our story is that Octo-man has invaded Tri-man's turf and is selling drugs to his clients. Tri-man is not happy about this at all, so our animations shows him looking for Octo-man, he finds him and then shoots him BANG and Octo-man is dead. The End.