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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