I watched part of the "Iron Giant" last night. I know, 'half measures avail us nothing' however, it's not so much the plot I was interested in but the effects-how the drawings were made. They look hand drawn, but they're not, entriely. I am sure for an animation savvy individual this would come as no surprise, but for someone like me who is currently caught in between worlds of the creator and the wide-eyed willing audience- the 'hand drawn' look is generally pulled off. I began to wonder about the (for lack of a better word) seamless 'plane changes' in the objects and the robot. In one of the initial scenes, Hogarth rides his red bike past the camera and away. There is a high level of perspective change, in the bike-it was almost flawless in how it turned. But it was the robot that gave it away for me-nearly perfect and fast moving I couldn't conceptualize how that would be achieved by hand. When I wonder about whether or not computers were involved in the production, I always turn my memory to 'The Jungle Book' there is a flatness to a lot of hand worked imagery. It's not stiff, but the characters are not moving in a dymamic and fast paced way.
Brad Bird, the director states in an interview with Animation World Magazine online 'Well, we just tried to remove all the things that separate hand-drawn stuff from CGI. Rather than trying to make the hand-drawn stuff have the look of CGI, we thought we should try to make the CGI look hand-drawn.
"We even created a software program to wobble the lines of the Giant just a little bit. Not enough to make them look like they're badly-drawn, but to make them a little less perfect than they would normally be. It's a very subtle effect. You can't see it a lot. A lot of people don't know that the Giant is computer-animated, and that, to me, says that we did our job. If we did our job, you won't feel that there's any difference."
C'est super-cool. Programs and hands- this is definitly one in a million, watch it.
