Make Em Move

With another historical note, here is a film documenting the creative process that I found on Cartoon Brew (who found it on Asifa-Hollywood’s Animation Archive ). This could very well be the first ever animation making of documentary, and it follows a scene through the studio from writing to camera at the Terrytoons Studio in 1939.

The film makes a special point of showing how the creative people (especially the writers, directors and animator) are constantly getting up and acting out the scene in order to analise the action.

While the 1930's attitude towards women has become outdated (see the previous post), the practice of acting out a scene is still highly relevant. Its one of the hardest things to get students to do, but I bet all of these guys, myself and hundreds of animators in between would guarantee you that doing it will improve your animation.