What Do The Lines Say?
By Howard Beckerman
Animation is encountering a special revolution. Those precocious electronic twins, video-tape and computer graphics are out of short pants well into their adolescence, and they're strutting around showing off their stuff. It's gratifying to watch these newcomers blossom, but it is disconcerting to observe the growing generation gap between them and the parent mediums, film and animation.
How sad to hear what has now become the traditional lament, "I like film, You can do more with it, video is so cold," or "computers can't animate Mickey Mouse! "What a shame that those of who were schooled in the more mundane mediums, must grumble or make excuses in the light of the new technology's dazzling and sometimes bumbling display. The gap can be narrowed if we just look at the realities of the mediums concerned here.
When I sit down at my desk and scrawl some lines on bond paper, I am repeating an act that has been going on for thousands of years. Cave artists, eons ago, performed the same ritual, only they resorted to scratching with rock against rock. Later groups discovered that you could squeeze pigment out of berries and squiggle some lines on to other surfaces using bits of bone or the end of a feather.
My scratchings are aided by a technology that has managed to combine mechanical and chemical elements to create modifications on the older methods. The cave artist could rely on the ready availability of elk antlers, or later generations could simply pluck a goose quill when a letter had to be written. We just reach into the kitchen drawer and choose a Mongol #2 pencil or a dye marker and write, “Be back in five minutes and hang it on the refrigerator. We take a simple pencil as much for granted as we do the highly complex refrigerator, yet the same technology is responsible for both. In the blink of an eye mankind has gone from tackling antelopes in order to record a line, to the present day where it takes great machinery belching fire and smoke produce a billion #2 pencils.
The point is that the line the cameraman drew is the same line that we draw, only the devices are different, but the intent is the same. Now comes the electronic age affording the making of lines with transistors instead of rock, bone or lead. The cave artists created beautiful works without benefit of any of our advanced technologies. It satisfied their need to communicate and that was all that mattered. Today we are beset upon by such diverse methods of communicating a simple message that we often lose sight of what it is we are trying to say. Henry David Thoreau, when informed that one day Maine would be able to speak over wires to California, answered, "But what would they say to each other?" If you've ever overheard an average phone conversation you could well agree that what is being said could better have been put on a postcard. Everyday chatter is not always worth such technology to deliver such simple platitudes as, "Have a nice day."
Animation for instance is a medium of communication as well as an art form. The application of electronics can enhance this medium, but the results are not necessarily better than what has come before through simpler means.
The race to create the most advanced, computer controlled graphic device is often under the control of persons who are not animators. Their concern is that the production of animation is time consuming and tedious, so they develop systems that attempt to cut costs, save time and alleviate boredom.
Unfortunately, the systems are not always cost effective. Time is relative to what it is you are trying to accomplish (good computer animation takes time, just as good drawn animation does) and as anyone who has operated various consoles that create graphic effects knows, boredom can occur here too. The one factor that developers of these wonderful new systems fail to comprehend is that animators, while they appreciate the short cut aspects of these devices really enjoy making all of those drawings. That is what animation is all about.
The need to draw lines, whether with rock on walls or with pencils or consoles is a human need. My dog sees no benefit in writing a letter or making a painting. Only humans find it necessary to draw lines. how these lines are drawn is not important. The important thing is, as always what do the lines say.
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