Site created 12/15/97.		page created: 9/23/99 The Prince of Egypt and the Changing Art of Animation When one thinks of the animation process, the classic image that usually comes to mind, is that of a roomful of dedicated artists, toiling away for countless long hours in a studio, lovingly hand-drawing our favorite characters and scenes with pencil and sketch pad. Thousands of such drawings are completed, which are then transferred to sheets of transparent acetate called "cells", each of which is hand-painted and photographed, one at a time, by a special movie camera. This is how the film animation process was first developed, by such pioneers as Winsor McCay and Walt Disney, and the process was largely unchanged for most of this century, with the likes of Tex Avery, Chuck Jones, Walter Lantz, Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera all using the same basic techniques. This is how virtually all of the classic animated films we know and love were produced: Snow White, Fantasia, the Bugs Bunny shorts, and the list goes on and on. In fact, many films are still made this way today, for both theatrical and television release. You don't usually think of computers as being a big part of this process - animation is supposed to be a hand-crafted medium. But in the last twenty years or so, computers have become a much larger part of film animation. These days, the individual drawings of the animators are often scanned into a computer, where they are digitally cleaned and painted using special software. And the process of "in-betweening" (or producing all of the drawings that come in between the key frames drawn by the lead animators), which used to be done by hand, is often handled by computers, which mathematically "estimate" what the images in between the key frames should look like. Only after all of the thousands of final images are finished, are they scanned onto film, to be shown in theaters. In many cases, these modern, "digital" changes to the traditional animation process have resulted in greater productivity, or at least have given the animators more flexibility in their work. In some cases, they also result in more visually dynamic images. The first "traditionally animated" film to really push the use of computers, was Disney's Beauty and the Beast (1991), in which the backgrounds for certain scenes were rendered digitally. And more recent films, like The Lion King, have used computers to animate complex, large-scale motions, such as herds of stampeding animals. Certainly, there have been several feature-length animated films, that were created entirely in the digital realm, such as Toy Story, ANTZ and A Bug's Life. But few recent "traditionally" animated films have pushed the technological and artistic boundaries of computers in animation, as much as DreamWorks' The Prince of Egypt. The Prince of Egypt was the fledgling studios' first feature-length animated film. The idea was born in a 1994 conversation between studio founders Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and David Geffen. The idea was to take the epic, larger-than-life story of the book of Exodus from The Bible, and bring it to the big screen in the kind of powerful, stylized and timeless way, that is only really possible in animation. Once the script was finalized, it was shown to numerous religious leaders, theologians and historians, to ensure its faithfulness to the story. Then, a multinational team of artists, designers and computer technicians was assembled to bring the story to life. And a state-of-the-art animation and digital effects studio was built from the ground up to get the job done. The Prince of Egypt uses computers in all of the previously-developed ways, and goes several steps further as well. For example, how many of you would think that an animated film would involve the same kinds of CGI special effects usually seen in live-action movies? The Prince of Egypt actually involves far more digital effects than most such films - even more than James Cameron's Titanic. The difference is that since nothing you see in an animated film is real, it becomes harder to tell what is traditionally-created, and what is CGI. In fact, digital effects touched EVERY frame of The Prince of Egypt in its final form. There are several ways in which computer-generated imagery (CGI) was integrated with traditional animation to help tell the story: 2D effects plus CGI (2D/CGI), 3D effects plus CGI (3D/CGI), and a variety of combined techniques. The technique of 2D/CGI, or using computer generated imagery to enhance a two-dimensional image, was employed to create dust storms, and rays of light in certain scenes. It was also used to create special back-lighting effects and shadows. In these cases, the actual dust clouds, rays of light, "glowing" effects and shadows, were all generated by computer, and were then digitally superimposed over the traditionally-created 2D artwork. Above and below: Dust storm effects, created using CGI to enhance a 2D image (2D/CGI). The character of Moses, and the desertscape are all traditionally animated, while the dust cloud itself is computer generated. One of the ways in which work on The Prince of Egypt resulted in a technical breakthrough, was in the use of 3D/CGI techniques, where three-dimensional "models" were created in a computer, and then manipulated in a three-dimensional, computer generated environment to create the final image. A special software package was created, in conjunction with Silicon Graphics, Inc., called the Exposure Tool, which allowed the animators to create a 3D "virtual" space in the computer, and then place traditional, hand-drawn 2D artwork into that space. The "camera" (or point-of-view) could then be moved anywhere in and around that set, to create the desired movement or angle. And the software "warps" the 2D artwork in the 3D space, to maintain the proper perspective. The chariot race sequence in the film is just one of many such scenes created using this process. Use of the Exposure Tool gave the animators great creative flexibility when building scenes, and saved a tremendous amount of time, compared to traditional techniques. Above: The chariot race was created using 3D/CGI techniques, and a custom software package called the Exposure Tool. In this case, the actual chariots were modeled as three-dimensional objects, as was the roadway. The horses, people and background were traditionally drawn 2D artwork, inserted into the 3D space. Above and below: Once the chariots were created as virtual "objects" in a virtual environment, they could be "moved" though that environment (this hilltop, for example), creating a sense of dynamic movement through space, while the software maintained the proper perspective. Another example of the use of innovative 3D/CGI techniques, is the creation and animation of computer generated "extras", in scenes that required hundreds or even thousands of background characters. The Exodus sequence is a perfect example of this. Each individual character was built in a software package called Alias, and animated in another called Soft Image. In order to simulate large crowds, special software was custom designed in-house, specifically for The Prince of Egypt, that then combined these characters into large groups. Note the numerous background characters in the shot above. A variety of off-the-shelf and custom software was used to create sequences such as this, where hundreds and even thousands of 3D "extras" were required. The same technique was used to animate the background laborers in the shot below. On to page 2
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