Traditional vs Digital ink-and-paint

[Donomator]

Hi. This time I want to ask you all what you think is better, traditional or digital ink-and-paint. One would think that the digital ink-and-paint systems, like Toon Boom and FlipBook, are far better because you only have to paint the area to be painted once, the paint never strays from the lines, and you're never limited by what colors of paint you have or how much of that paint color you have in your inventory. Also, you do not have to meticulously photograph each cel one at a time, or incrementally move the BG if there is a pan if you are using a tradigital animation software. However, if you use traditional methods of ink-and-paint and photography, you can photograph using 35mm film, which when used natively, according to film purists, has much better resolution and clarity than a high resolution digital image.

So what do you think? What is your opinion?

[DNethery]

Hi. This time I want to ask you all what you think is better, traditional or digital ink-and-paint. One would think that the digital ink-and-paint systems, like Toon Boom and FlipBook, are far better because you only have to paint the area to be painted once, the paint never strays from the lines, and you're never limited by what colors of paint you have or how much of that paint color you have in your inventory. Also, you do not have to meticulously photograph each cel one at a time, or incrementally move the BG if there is a pan if you are using a tradigital animation software.

However, if you use traditional methods of ink-and-paint and photography, you can photograph using 35mm film, which when used natively, according to film purists, has much better resolution and clarity than a high resolution digital image.


Well, for feature films they do still use 35mm film. The digitally inked & painted image is photographed directly on to 35mm negative. This really isn't different than photographing cels (except minus the dust, smudges, cel shadows, color pops, etc. that can occur when using cels) .

The hard work of inking and painting (and photographing) cels really is hard work (drudgery). Anyone who says otherwise has never done it (I have). So this is one area I really think the advent of computers has helped traditional hand-drawn animation. Another example would be that now we are not limited to only 5 cel levels.

To me it's not about 35mm film vs. digital . The reasons I would give for preferring cels would be:

1.) a tangible collectible piece of the film. Something you can hold in your hands and hang on your wall , something you can stare at with your own eyes which is not mediated by a computer screen processing data made up of 1's and 0's to form a pattern which your brain recognizes as "a princess kissing a frog" or whatever ...

2.) There is something about a good hand-inked cel that is never quite duplicated by a scanned pencil line, even when that line has been colored to simulate an inked line. Even more importantly is how it affected the actual process of assisting and cleaning-up animation. Some people will disagree with this , but this is how I see it: If you look at the best of the older , pre-digital era, clean-up drawings you will tend to see a much looser, more organic approach used on the clean-up drawings. The line is beautiful on a good old-school clean up drawing, but it's not over done, too tight, not "too clean" . (i.e. sterile , boring clean) The best old-school clean up had a liveliness to the line work that was largely lost when the requirements of digital ink & paint dictated that the clean-up artists draw a much tighter, cleaner, razor-sharp line to accommodate the "touch and fill color" function of computer painting.

Previously the Assistant Animator's job was to be more concerned with making a good drawing than with making a clean line. (there is a difference). When an assistant can concentrate fully on the process of assisting the animation , not so much on obsessing about producing a precise, mechanical clean line to service the computer's requirements then I think it makes for better drawing.

What happened with the advent of digital scanning/inking/painting is that the burden which used to be part of the inker's job fell on to the assistant animators, so the job of clean-up and inking were combined. Except now we did our "inking" on paper by making very precise, tight lines.
The more wide-spread occurrence of carpal tunnel syndrome among clean-up artists is one result of that, in my opinion. Meticulously tracing tight, mechanical pencil lines is not the same as drawing with a free, natural line.

Of course, all this can totally fall apart if the inking is not done well. Bad inking can kill a scene pretty fast (as can bad assistant/inbetweening work) . But at it's best the freer approach to clean-up drawing combined with the final sheen being put on the scene by a skilled inker made better looking films overall , in my opinion.