From the course: 2D Animation: Tips and Tricks

1980s TV animation techniques

From the course: 2D Animation: Tips and Tricks

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1980s TV animation techniques

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- [Instructor] Now let's take a look at the different frame rates. And again, by looking at the smooth 30 FPS walking dollar bill on the top left of the screen, looking at the 24 now on the top right, if you proceed all the way down to the bottom right, you'll see the difference, hopefully, between the smooth and the not smooth. So here's what 8 FPS looks like. And you can feel that slight shutter between each drawing or frame. And that's the importance of animating on threes or on 8 FPS. If you're on 30 FPS, and you can expose every drawing for three frames, then you'll get something that's very similar to these two lines here on the bottom. If you're animating on 30 FPS, then you can hold each drawing or frame for three frames. And you'll have a 10 FPS, which is very similar to 8 FPS. So you'll be in the ball park. You won't be too far off. So let's take a look at my character design. Now, the fictional character that I was trying to create for this homage or pastiche Saturday morning animation is Santa Claus. He's basically like a superhero version of Santa Claus. And I picked like a deliberately cheesy idea. So the figure on the left shows like an actual design that I would do if I were trying to do something like this for real. But on the right side, we have the 1980 style version. And you can see the difference. They, I much prefer the, the left figure. He's cartoony. He's fun. I don't like Saturday morning cartoons. I think they're very limited. I think they're very stiff. So that's my bias. I have to get away from the drawing I want to do to do the drawing that looks like it's from the time period and the studio system that made these kinds of things. So here he is in turnaround. We have the figure with, again, a lot of detail, lots of pencil mileage, little stitches on these patches, on his, on his trousers. Even here, too. Even little crease lines here on the big tank behind him. Lots of little wrinkle lines around his eyes. Even these little dots here. So there's a lot of drawing to be done with this character. But again, very flat. He's not so dimensional. And also these kind of shades, these like shadow areas, very common in the cartoons of this period. It was an attempt just to make them look a little more interesting. And again, these awful, like icicle antlers, are, again, a nightmare control. I'm sure. But again, I kind of think that would be in these kind of cart designs. So, anyway, that is Santa Claus. And as we proceed through the following movies, you'll see how I go about the process of animating him. So again, here's the fake title screen. Now, again, ones, twos and threes, just to like really stress this. If we have 24 frames in the second, and we hold each drawing for twos, then we have an effective frame of 12. This is common on, say, Warner Brothers cartoons, on, this is very fast. Most Disney scenes, most Don Bluth animation features stuff, if they can do it, they'll do it on twos. That's 12 FPS. Saturday morning animation, they had less money, less time. And so they tended to hold drawings for that one frame longer. And sometimes they would go threes, twos, threes, threes, twos, for they absolutely had to. You'll, you'll see that if you look at those scenes. But certainly, if you stick to threes, then I think your work will be much more authentic. Again, that is 30 FPS. And that is 10. And that is 8. That's the most authentic one. Don't forget aspect ratio. We live in the world of HD. That's great. I love it. But during this period, most of these cartoons were, they were basically outputted for VHS TV. So the aspect ratio is very different. 4:3. So depending on how authentic you want your work to be, you might want your aspect ratio to be in the 4:3 aspect, and not the 16:9 HD format. And again, a much simpler graphic, but just to show you the different feeling. The one on the bottom, that's the kind of shutter frame that you want. And don't forget also that your resolution was very low back then. It was 720 by 486 in the American NTSC VHS standard. So whatever format you're working in, you probably want to get as close to that as you can. And no harm to animate on a much higher resolution. If you're in 1080, fine. But your final output, you might want to render out at 486 or something closer to that low quality VHS for real authenticity. And once again, here is the nemesis of Santa Claus, Money Bags. He's trying to ruin Christmas by making it all about money. And Santa Claus is going to have to stop him somehow. So let's see if Santa Claus can succeed.

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