People who entered the animation business in the recent past have lived totally within a digital world. But before computers, animation had its own set of very specific hardware, developed from the 1910s onward to facilitate the creation of cartoons.
There were studios with their own peg standards as well as Acme pegs (which dominated the California business) and Oxberry pegs (which dominated in New York). There was even another standard, not mentioned in the article, that came from the U.S. Signal Corps from World War II and made it into the animation industry as war surplus.
The picture above is a Fleischer set-up. Note the goose-neck lamp for top lighting. Fleischer used top pegs, where Disney used bottom pegs. There's a wire coil at the top right to hold pencils and brushes and the holder on the left for ink and paint. The disk rotates on rubber rollers (pictured in the article). As the Fleischers were inventors and very mechanically minded, they put a lot of effort into creating equipment that would make production efficient.
The article shows a great many disks and set-ups. It's a walk down memory lane for many of us and a history lesson for those who grew up more likely to be manipulating a mouse than a pencil.
Interesting article. I want to have my own desk one day. All I've worked with so far is the mouse, unfortunately.
ReplyDeleteOn a side note, I wonder why frankandollie.com has top-peg animation paper for its background, considering they were such advocates for bottom-peg. Just something I noticed the other day :)
If I'm not mistaken, Disney switched to Acme pegs on Basil of Baker Street/Great Mouse Detective as part of a cost cutting/standardization plan. The smaller paper size (standard 12 Field) didn't help subtlety on the cleanup line when blown up to the big screen, and the dark Xerox line had less finesse than either Fox and the Hound or even the Black Cauldron. Thank goodness the story was more entertaining than either of those. Great little movie.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the post, Mark - with regard to top and bottom pegs, Jonah - if the character animators were working on bottom pegs, for example, it made sense to put the BG (and/or OL) artwork on top pegs so that the corresponding/sliding top peg bar on the compound table of the rostrum camera could be moved Right to Left (for example) without the lower peg bar (holding the cels) having to move at all. This all depended on how the individual scene required the multi-cel character (or effects) elements to "drift" sideways, relative to the non-animating scenic elements, for instance in a walk cycle where the character appears at the center of every cel and the scenery has to move laterally behind it. These days, when each individual hand-rendered element is scanned into the digital realm and manipulated separately (so to speak) it can be difficult to get your head around the fact that, back in the day, the camera operator actually had to sandwich ALL these different physical elements beneath the lens of the camera, capturing everything "live", one frame at a time by following the increments and instructions listed in the CAMERA column of the Exposure Sheet.
ReplyDeleteI want to have one of those desks someday.
ReplyDeleteHopefully there will still be use for them in independent animations.
That paper lifter thing is genius. I ripped so much paper lifting layers off.
ReplyDeleteMy wife has to pick out a house based on whether or not there's an office room big enough for the Disney desk I bought at auction. Just how it is...part of the deal...
Fascinating article, Mark. Over the years I've acquired quite a number of old (and odd) animation discs. The Ink & Paint discs (covered in splotches of paint) make great display frames for animation art.
ReplyDeleteWhile I'd kill for that Fleischer Wedge/Disc setup, my Disney desk made a nice transition into a funky writing/office desk.
Not sure about their exact set ups, but I noticed when travelling there that the Japanese and Korean animation studios all seem to use top pegs.
ReplyDeleteJapanese studios used top-pegs.
ReplyDeleteAs for Koreans, the cels I've seen for US cartoons outsourced to Korea had bottom pegs. Maybe their original shows were top?
Someday I hope to have one of these in my house. Great blog, a fun read for a young animator.
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