Question: How Do Animations Get From Paper To The TV Screen?
Traditional animation, before the advent of on-screen animation programs and graphics tablets, was hand-drawn on paper, then copied to cels. How did it get from those painted cels onto your TV screen?
Answer: The original method was by camera. A special type of video camera would be positioned to frame the shot over a flat surface, usually with the scene background in place on the flat surface. The individual cels would be placed over the background; the camera would capture them as another frame on a video reel, and then the cel would be manually replaced with another. As the camera captured frame after frame, it made a sequence on the video reel that, when played, became animation.
With more modern tools, another method is to use a scanner. Just place the animation cel on the scanner; some people do it with the background, while others layer the animation onto the background using programs like Flash and Toon Boom Animate. The individual frames are scanned, saved as files, and sequenced together using digital programs.
