I love animation history and one of the things that always baffled me was how did animators draw the cars in 101 Dalmatians before the advent of computer graphics?
Any rigid solid object is extremely challenging for 2D artists to animate because if one stray line isn’t kept perfectly in check, the object will seem to wobble and shift unnaturally.
Even as early as the mid 80’s Disney was using a technique where they would animate a 3D object and then apply a 2D filter to it. This practice could be applied to any solid object a character interacts with: from lanterns a character is holding, to a book (like in Atlantis), or in the most extreme cases Cybernetic parts (like in Treasure Planet).
But 101 Dalmatians was made WAY before the advent of this technology. So how did they do the Cruella car chase sequence at the end of the film?
The answer is so simple I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me sooner:
They just BUILT the models and painted them white with black outlines 🤣
That was the trick. They’re not actually 2D animated, they’re stop motion. They were physical models painted white and filmed on a white background. The black outlines become the lineart lines and they just xeroxed the frame onto an animation cel and painted it like any other 2D animated frame.
That’s how they did it! Isn’t that amazing? It’s such a simple low tech solution but it looks so cool in the final product.
i wish i could picture higher-dimensional spaces so bad. for the pure math alone sure but also because so many things should be modeled in more than 3 dimensions and i really want to see. imagine being able to actually picture how a statistical model with 20 dimensions is clustering data. i yearn for it
I’m so fascinated by people who seem to believe that analyzing media is somehow taking the joy out of it. Like. Do you not enjoy thinking? Does taking stuff apart and figuring out how it works not give you a hit of dopamine? And you get mad when you see people having fun in this way? What a sad, miserable way to engage with the world.
You know, one of the most shameful consequences of scifi/game authors not knowing shit is cyberpsychosis, or Essence, or whatever in-universe asspull for a mechanical limiter on how much cyberware you can cram into a character sheet.
There is an easy excuse in real life! You may not be able to get both a pacemaker and a DBS device because they’re both pieces of sensitive equipment that could theoretically interfere with each other, and nobody engineered them not to. Trivially you can extrapolate this to all cybernetics. If your various augs weren’t Specifically designed not to mess with each other (and of course the various megacorps might take things a step further, making their shit actively hostile to mix-and-matching), you might have problems; and obviously, the more pieces of hardware you’ve patchworked yourself with, the worse things get. You’d have to be one real crazy motherfucker to tell a back-alley doctor to load you up with whatever they’ve got.
It’s more grounded and more realistic and less shitty and it actively enhances the atmosphere of cyberpunk in a way that “losing your humanity” does not. we are missing out on much because none of these writers know anything about how medtech works
