Writing software is risky business. It’s easy to play god and think of all the cool things technology can be made to do. In 3-D animation, technology can be made to simulate reality; it can enhance reality with special effects; or, as was our Holy Grail when we were working to build Blue Sky Studio’s renderer and production system, it can create images that are better than reality. Now, 15 years later, photorealism in 3-D animation is de rigeur.
But while I was recently building a tool for 2-D animation, different goals emerged. It’s not easy to improve upon the long and rich tradition of cel animation. Its rubbery rules for creating fantasy and illusion are aesthetically sound and time tested. The skewed perspective, the exaggerated scale, the impossible physics and the precisely zany timing create a world that is compelling, and other-worldly. Rather than begging a comparison to reality, hand-drawn animation creates a dreamlike universe with its own rules, its own plausibility and its own logic.
So this time around, I wanted to build a tool—not to create a new form of animation, but to enhance the craft of animation. I needed a tool that could solve problems and shift the focus away from the effort of animation production to the art of creating it, especially when the current economic climate’s production exigencies are forcing all kinds of compromise.
To do this, I had to answer a fundamental question about what makes cel animation challenging to produce: A. It takes too long to go from idea to realization.
The result of these development efforts is Kabuki, animation software that allows animators to create cel animation in real time. Kabuki takes animation cels or CGI assets, and assembles characters into a performable database—essentially a digital actor which is then puppeteered in real time. Moreover, it allows the scene elements (backgrounds, props, cameras and costumes) to be changed and manipulated in real time. In essence it’s a way of turning animation into live theatre.
What this means to animators is that they can focus their attention on the art of animation as they are thinking through their decisions—the gestures, the timing, the comedy, the character interaction, the linework, the gags. The more tedious, repetitive aspects of animation have been automated. With careful planning, the character’s moves and the animated world are designed once, rigged and put into play so that animation directors work like live-action directors to produce their final material. From a production standpoint, it collapses the pre-production and postproduction process into one, so that after a performance you end up with your final take. This saves both time and money on production, and these savings can be folded back into the creative development of the project.
Given the enormous talents in most cartoons, directing them live provides an interesting opportunity. I like to imagine Chuck Jones directing Bugs Bunny live, as Carl Reiner once famously directed Steve Martin: "That was great, but let’s take that line again, and this time funny it up."
