T w e n t y S i d e d
In 1939, even animation studios looked like factories. The job must have been hard on the back.
That poor guy, hammering away for hours to make a couple of seconds of wobbly video. Imagine if you could sit him down in front of a PC and show him Flash. A week of work in twenty minutes.
Trusting the System
How do you know the rules of the game are what the game claims? More importantly, how do the DEVELOPERS know?
Charging More for a Worse Product
No, game prices don't "need" to go up. That's not how supply and demand works. Instead, the publishers need to be smarter about where they spend their money.
The Plot-Driven Door
You know how videogames sometimes do that thing where it's preposterously hard to go through a simple door? This one is really bad.
Autoblography
The story of me. If you're looking for a picture of what it was like growing up in the seventies, then this is for you.
Steam Summer Blues
This mess of dross, confusion, and terrible UI design is the storefront the big publishers couldn't beat? Amazing.
Ah, the Good Old Days. I consider myself fortunate indeed to be a filmmaker in the Digital Age – our biggest problem is how to make digital content “look like film”! Thank goodness for Final Cut’s filter selections, I say.
The really sad thing is that the studios can’t produce anything close to those old animated films, in spite of having huge budgets and racks of advanced electronics. Just proves that regardless of the process, creativity is still the most important ingredient in entertainment (whether film, television, or even video games!).
Oh, and “Frost Pist!”, by the way.
your post reminds me of some documentary i saw in which they interviewed the dude who invented visicalc (the first spreadsheet program if you’re too young to remember) and how, when he first demonstrated it (maybe at the west coast computer faire?) there were some accountants whose hands were literally shaking with excitement as they wrote a check to buy a copy. . .
1939? I’m pretty sure at that time there was no color cinematography. Right? Maybe your year is wrong? Entertaining and enlightening as always, though, Shamus.
Ben
1939?
The year of Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz?
Yeah, pretty sure they had colour then. ;)
(Though admittedly it’s a surprise to see it used for a little in-house documentary thingy.)
All that for a cartoon of a Russian man giving birth to a rubber chicken.
color in animation film came long before color in live action film.
Oh, I thought Gone Withe the Wind and Wizard of Oz were considerably later. Shows me wrong. Apologies.
Ben
Max Fleischer, Tex Avery, Chuck Jones.
Three greatests cartoonists that ever lived.
And while Disney had art, his characters had no character.
For example, can you name me one catch phrase from Mickey Mouse?
your post reminds me of some documentary i saw in which they interviewed the dude who invented visicalc (the first spreadsheet program if you're too young to remember) and how, when he first demonstrated it (maybe at the west coast computer faire?) there were some accountants whose hands were literally shaking with excitement as they wrote a check to buy a copy. . .
hehe.. just imagine the money that could be made if you were able to take a modern PC with a full set of software and go back in time a bunch of decades
Not to be the Luddite here, but one of the good things about the old, difficult process of making animation; it filtered out the mediocre and worse ideas. Now that it’s easy for the common person to make animation, there’s an overload of common and worse animation. Now it’s almost impossible to find the peanut in the huge steaming piles of…
Well, you get the idea.
James: You’re not wrong. The Cartoon Network is churning out huge piles of eye-damaging uglyness that will cause future generations to lampoon us.
“For example, can you name me one catch phrase from Mickey Mouse?”
That “Hoo hoo hoo!” noise he makes?
He makes a “Hoo hoo hoo!” noise?
Anyway, James Bong is right. There’s far less quality control these days. Mickey Mouse being the exception that proves the rule :-)
My wife did her graduate work in genetics. There were some laboratory procedures she would do several times per week which, in the “old days” when they were first done (about 30 years ago) took two years.
I cannot imagine what it would be like to have spent two years on something that, a few decades later, people routinely finish in a few hours. On one hand, that new level of science would not exist if it were not for people that used to do it the old way. On the other hand, two years of your work life reduced to hours!