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Justice League: Bruce Timm Talks Color By Jim Harvey 01-31-2002 One of the big debates behind the animated Justice League series has been the new use of digital coloring for the series. Digital coloring was used in a Batman-themed show even before Justice League, mostly in Batman Beyond. Below is what Bruce Timm had to say about the ups and downs of the new way to color an animated series: "Digital coloring....hmmmm...well, I'm of two minds about it...when I go back and watch some of our older shows, I'm often struck by the richness of that old shot-on-film look. There's just something about it, it's hard to explain...yes, i do miss it...maybe someday, we'll have the technology to more accurately replicate it. In the meantime, there ARE advantages to digital ink-and-paint/compositing that offset the minuses: a MUCH broader range of fx, everything from self-color lines (the richard powers-esque invaders from "Secret Origins" would have been a wiggly/twitchy nightmare with the old trace-by-hand ink and paint system), to greater control over elaborate camera moves (bi-packs, multi-planes, etc), to completely digital fx programs for smoke, fire, water, force fields, texture-mapping,etc." "Our color palette now is practically limitless (oh, how i wish we'd had decent dark greens for Robin and Ra's Al Ghul back in the day...!) also, it gives us a LOT more editing options, for greater control in the editing room. Saves us a fortune in re-takes, but it also takes about twice as long to edit a show now, because my editor, Joe Gall, and I love to experiment with our new toys. Quite often we completely change the timing of a scene in the editing room, adding dramatic pauses here, speeding-up or slowing down an action there. Literally, every single show will have a number of scenes that don't quite work (those that COMPLETELY don't work end up in the trash)...at which point we'll try manipulating the image digitally, any number of ways. We never say "that'll never work" anymore, we always say "it probably won't work, but it's worth a shot!" "Just last week, Joe and I were agonizing over a scene in "Fury" part one, a dialogue scene between two characters that just wasn't working dramatically because the lines were all butted up against each other, it really needed some dramatic pauses in a few places. Problem was, there were candles flickering in the background, so we couldn't just freeze the image. To make a long story short, we ended up using every trick we knew to make the scene work and even invented some new tricks: part of the scene is actually played BACKWARDS...! This kind of stuff would have been impossible in the old "film" days." Still, like I said, I do miss certain things about the old cel-painted days...like the CELS! I don't know how many times i've watched a scene and said, "oh man, I'd love to have THAT cel...waitaminnit, there AREN'T any cels!" In any case, no use crying over spilt milk, digital ink-and-paint is here to stay..." Originally posted on Toon Zone News. [ Back to Backstage ] |