Animation Directors Compare Notes in Savannah on Stop Motion, Story and Staying Human

Five directors of animated films spent an hour on one stage in Savannah, Georgia, on Oct. 26 and agreed on one thing: every frame starts from nothing. The session was Variety's "Pixels and Pencils" panel at the SCAD Savannah Film Festival, moderated by Clayton Davis, Variety's senior awards editor. Meg Weichman, artistic manager of SCAD's Theatres and Festivals, introduced it. Variety reported the panel, and this year's session was the fifth annual edition, according to SCAD.

The panel brought together the people behind some of the year's most talked-about animated titles. Brad Bird spoke for Netflix's Ray Gunn, a film voiced by Sam Rockwell and Scarlett Johansson. Bird said the project took roughly 30 years to move from first idea to the big screen. Daniel Chong represented Pixar's Hoppers. Joel Crawford and Januel Mercado came from DreamWorks Animation's Forgotten Island. Travis Knight spoke for Laika's Wildwood, and Leah Nelson for Independent Film Company's Tangles.

The talk kept returning to how much work sits behind a single image. Chong said animated films have to build every set, character, piece of cloth, strand of hair and bit of weather from the ground up, with no camera to point at. A live-action crew can walk onto a street and shoot it. An animation team has to invent the street first.

Knight described stop motion in similar terms, but with its own rhythm. The process starts on frame one and moves forward slowly, shot by shot, until a performance appears on screen. Wildwood used 2,800 stop-motion shots. Mercado said the choice between 2D animation, 3D animation, stop motion or Claymation depends on what the story needs, and not on fashion.

The conversation also turned to artificial intelligence, which has been a loud topic across the film industry. Panelists agreed that the human effort behind an animated film is what lets its story reach people in a way AI cannot copy. Bird went further, saying a good story has to come from life, and that filmmakers are in charge of creating the illusion of life. He told artists in the audience to keep learning the ins and outs of animation as the field changes.

For anyone who has wondered how a film with no actors on set comes to life, the answer from Savannah was simple and slow. It happens one frame at a time, with a lot of people, and with a great deal of waiting between the first sketch and the final shot.