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Comment by wodenokoto | Hacker News Reader

A long time ago I saw a rather good behind the scenes of Aladdin.

I was quite surprised to see that after writing the script they had stand-in actors do the entire script, which they then did animatics (storyboards times to the recorded audio) to, after which they edited the story. Only then did final actors record. Then redo animatics and editing before doing final animation.

Imagine my surprise watching the documentary on Hayao Miyazaki, where he has a 100 animators working on final animation, while he is still storyboarding, undecided on the ending of the movie and hasn’t even casted the voice actors!

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Modern Disney filmmaking (Pixar, WDAS) is much closer to the Miyazaki approach you describe than you'd think. It's very, very iterative; each film goes through 5-6 screenings, during which the story structure can and does change dramatically. People are very definitely working on the final product while the story is still being worked out. One pretty common pattern: with 8-9 months left to go until release, the entire third act has to be scrapped and reworked, and often big chunks of the first and second act reworked to match. Voice actors for the main characters are involved throughout, and often come in many times to record new pages of freshly written dialog.

If all this seems chaotic, it is. It leads to untold stress as the release date looms closer and closer and the ending still isn't figured out, which compresses the schedule for each department to deliver a finished product. Very very rarely, the release date is allowed to slip (see "The Good Dinosaur" for example) but that's really the nuclear option, as it involves shuffling the release schedule and incurs a ton of cost. This is a big part of why these movies cost so much: compressing the schedule means hiring tons of people and paying them tons of overtime.

Source: I worked the better part of a decade at WDAS.

I have a few friends in the industry and their whole process just seems nuts. They earn good money from overtime but I'd just be so annoyed doing so much throwaway work even though a lot of it just seems like it could be avoided with planning, time management and more honest pricing when it comes to sub contracting.

The willingness to throw away work that, no matter how well done, is in service of a less enjoyable movie, is why some movies are great while others are, well, just movies. Producing 90 minutes of animation is a heck of a lot cheaper than producing 90 minutes of animation that hundreds of millions of people will cherish for generations.

Yeah. That amazing scene in terminator 2 with Sarah Connor's actor's twin sister is a great example. Just wasn't necessary to tell the story, movie was better without it.

There was a great documentary series about the making of Frozen 2 that shows exactly this - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_the_Unknown:_Making_Froze...

I found it fascinating how the team was still developing key plot points (let alone dialog/animation) down to the final few weeks/days before the film needed to be completed!

I heard they were writing the scenes of Casablanca as they filmed it. seems to work out ok.

They hadn't written the ending of Die Hard when they started filming - the Movies that Made us episode about it is pretty wild & illuminating.

The Lord of the rings movies too. So much extra footage shot.

Animation differs from live action in that it's edited, then shot instead of shot, then edited.

It's no different to how the video games industry works, either.

It completely kills your employees though: all those crunches to scrap tons of good work and replace it with new ideas; tons of stressful overtime. Ugh.

No different in software either.

Working on the new service, everything is involving independently while product is figuring out what they want to sell in reality. This out-of-order execution seems like a feature of modern production, while consistency is left behind and only synchronize when they absolutely has to.

I have no opinion on this however, can't think of a better way myself.

You say chaotic, but it basically sounds like modern agile software development.

It is chaotic compared to conventional film production. Most movies have a complete script before principal photography even starts, or at the very least all of the major story beats and set pieces planned out. Last minute rewrites and reshoots for big budget productions are a last resort if the studio feels the product just isn't shaping up into something that will put asses in seats.

>I was quite surprised to see that after writing the script they had stand-in actors do the entire script, which they then did animatics (storyboards times to the recorded audio) to, after which they edited the story. Only then did final actors record. Then redo animatics and editing before doing final animation

I have no experience in animation, however that process is not unlike the common process in music production: a song is written, a demo is cut by the songwriter, a "scratch track" is cut by the chosen lead vocalist and an instrument or two, then the arrangement is recorded by the band (to the scratch track), then final vocals are cut to the band's backing track, and often after that tweaks to the accompaniment are still made.

Yup. I've recorded several albums, some in small home studios and others in pro environments. It's always been scratch track -> drums (me) -> guitars/bass (bass almost always direct to console) -> vocals.

Its basically like writing code. Aladdin was prototyped, Proof of concept, then put into production. So if anything needed a complete re-write, it wouldn't affect final production.

Hayao seems to doing continuous refactoring, so as long as you don't need to edit too many scenes already drawn you can potentially come out with a good final product while giving production as much time as possible.

I love love love watching animation reference ftg - https://twitter.com/NickTyson/status/1129904441153376256?s=2...

Why even link to the tweet?

https://vimeo.com/336117214

fwiw vimeo requires login to watch that

I didn't need to login using safari on desktop.

It might sound odd, but it is not abnormal for a movie to be rewritten deep into production. Some infamous movies for this include Die Hard and Stripes, the endings for which were not written until after filming had begun. Given the much longer process for animated movies I'm not surprised this happens at Disney too.

Apocalypse Now was written on the way up the river, based upon the documentary.

This goes back to the days of Snow White and Sleeping Beauty! One of the pieces of old footage Disney likes to show off is animators sketching the movements of a girl dancing around the room and then merging that into the final product for Sleeping Beauty where she's in the dress and it's spinning around.

Japanese anime is dubbed, compared to western animated content which isn't

I'm confused, isn't all animated content "dubbed"? It isn't like the animated characters themselves are talking.

I think they mean “western” animation typically records the voices first and then animates to them, where anime records the voices after the animation is complete. But I’m not familiar with either production practice, so this is just a guess.

I think this article about the wildly different scripts to the English and Japanese version of Batman Ninja goes a long way towards explaining:

https://www.gamespot.com/articles/why-batman-ninja-in-englis...

>"My first exposure to the anime process was working with [Hayao] Miyazaki on Spirited Away," Chu said. "It was just very interesting watching him do the story. Like, he kind of thinks up the story, and then you don't really write it, you start sort of thumb-nailing out like, what key visual moments might be, and then you start storyboarding and then you start animating.

>"And I was like, 'OK, but what are you animated to?' He's like, 'Oh, we just make the mouths move.' And then I was like, 'But is there dialogue?" And he's like, 'No, no. We add the dialogue at the end.' And you're like, 'Oh, that's really weird.' And people always complain about, 'Oh, I'm going to watch the original Japanese version with English sub, not the English dub version,' but the truth is the Japanese version is dubbed as well."

> 'Oh, I'm going to watch the original Japanese version with English sub, not the English dub version,' but the truth is the Japanese version is dubbed as well."

At least personally, the voice acting seems just so different. My preference is not related to the differences there may be between dubbed or not.

Dubbed means the actors say the lines while watching the characters lips move. The Disney way is exactly the opposite. The animators animate while charting and studying the audio.

I wonder what kind of challenges this introduces to the production - like what are the pros and cons of each method?

I also wonder if 3d animation changes anything about this approach. I enjoy watching Japanese anime but 3d productions can be hard to watch with an English dub because it's very apparent that mouth movements don't match, whereas with more traditional 2d-style animation the mouth flaps match more easily in the mind. Video games made by Japanese studios for Japanese audiences can be particularly hard to watch with an English dub.

That's just how Japanese people talk. Look at Attack of the Killer Tomatoes.

At least at the time, the situation you find so weird was common enough to be satirized, based on dubs of live-action movies.

The Japanese way is faster and cheaper, which is important when you're on a tight schedule. Simple mouth animations are easier to draw. They also have the benefit of looking less jarring when dubbed multiple languages, which is important as a lot of Anime is just as popular outside Japan as within.

There is a middle ground, seen in 2D western animation made on a lower budget than your typical Disney fare. Artists will create a mouth chart which includes drawings for a wide range of English phonemes. They are then used as a guide for drawing. There are software tools that assist in this process, making it a lot easier to do in a short amount of time. This is probably how South Park manages to do real accurate lip syncing while working on a 6 day production cycle.

Go and watch Frozen II BTS docseries, it has the whole thing explained throughly

Plot twist: 6 months prior to the final release date, they are still rewriting the biggest reveal of the entire movie ...

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