Sunday, August 8, 2021

Howard Beckerman - INSIDE OF SOCIETY OF ANIMATORS/NY - Back Stage New York Vol. 20, Iss. 36, (Sep 7, 1979):

 INSIDE OF

SOCIETY OF ANIMATORS/NY

By HOWARD BECKERMAN

There's a new organization in town: The Society of Animators/NY formed to bring animators together to discuss their common problems and anxieties and to tell the world of their existence. There are animator unions and aesthetic groups, but this may be the first time that animators have banded together into a society.

Membership at the present time consists of about 35 of the city's master animators. Ages range from those that once animated Popeye and Betty Boop back in the thirties to those that animated your favorite commercials over the last 30 years, and even to a new crop of young men and women who received their indoctrination in the animation courses at enlightened colleges and universities.

One concern of the group is that animators have more or less done their work in complete anonymity. Although there are no screen credits for animators or anyone on TV commercials, it generally occurs that animators' names are never mentioned when credit or honors are extended.

ANIMATOR/DECISION-MAKER

 Animation is a bit like kite-making. The animator may not have designed the kite, nor picked its color, but it's up to the animator to make the kite and to get it to fly. If it flies, everyone else takes it for granted, if it doesn't then it's back to the drawing board for the animator.

Film is an illusion that depends on all kinds of crafts. Animated film is totally dependent on the skills of a few people who must function as director, set designer, actor and writer. Usually many of these talents are contained in one person, the animator.

Every drawing that an animator makes is a decision. When an advertiser | asks to have a character perform a specified action, the animator must bring all of his or her knowledge to bear to make it work. It is not enough that a character mounting a horse looks like a man preparing to go for a ride, it must be convincing and believable in its action. This depends on the animator's memory bank of images, of his own personal style that can add to the grace of the drawing, and to a sense of timing akin to a musician's. In short if an action works, it is expected and there is little recognition for the amount of skill that is needed to bring the whole thing off.

NEED FOR ANIMATION

 With the growing use of machines to do everyday jobs and the use of electronics to create some of the illusions in the film field, it is wrong to think that all this mechanism can exist without the aid of artists who understand the way things move. The role of the animator is probably growing how simply because these new devices are creating new demands and new effects and the old techniques will be needed as embellishments right along with the new ones. Future films will use an even greater percentage of mixed footage, live, animated, optical and computerized techniques, to enhance the basic property of film-illusions.

It is the hope of the Society of Animators/NY that their group will grow in size and that they will be able to develop areas of communication between themselves and the world, which looks to them for drawings that amuse, tantalize, enlighten, inform and sell.

 







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