Dan Scanlon Quotes

Computers don't create computer animation any more than a pencil creates pencil animation. What creates computer animation is the artist.

ILM was the first company that I had worked at that had a computer-graphics division.

In terms of animation, animators are actors as well. They are fantastic actors. They have to draw from how they feel emotionally about the beat of a scene that they're working on. They work collaboratively.

The thing with computer-generated imagery is that it's an incredibly powerful tool for making better visual effects. But I believe in an absolute difference between animation and photography.

Animators have to live life 24 times as long as we do - every 24 frames of a second.

When you do animation - well, straightforward animation, although it's not straightforward - the voice for a character or something, they're always singular experiences, really.

I'm interested in animation. I actually feel like I've learned so much about the process how to make an animated movie.

I've always been thinking in three dimensions, ever since I started working with computer animation in the early '80s.

To take full advantage of computer animation, you have to pay as much attention to the believable as you do the unbelievable.

Animation has always been about technology. You can't have animation without technology.

I love motion capture. I think it's the best thing, ever. It's wonderful. It gives you an incredible freedom to just play things out.

Yes, actually. Animation's a very easy thing to watch on tour.

Animation is very singular. Like, even the 'Toy Story' movies. People will go, 'Oh, gosh, you're so lucky, getting to play opposite Tom Hanks!' And it's, like, 'It may have appeared to be that, but we were never in the room together.'

I quickly realized that this medium had a lot to offer someone like me. To do Disney-quality hand-drawn cartoons, you have to be a master of two art forms. Seriously, you have to be able to draw like a Leonardo da Vinci or a Michelangelo. But also you have to know movement and timing and control that through 24 frames a second.

Clearly, if we'd had the kind of computer graphics capability then that we have now, the Star Gate sequence would be much more complex than flat planes of light and color.

Throughout my career, when I was finished with the drawing for one film I would go up to the story department and help develop sequences. Sometimes these were for scenes that I would animate later on.

I miss animation very passionately. Not continuously, but every once in a while I would die to do another film.

Like, every couple of months you read, they rewrite, you come back in, they've animated more stuff - they usually videotape you while you're reading it - so they'll incorporate some gestures and some facial expressions into it.

To direct a genuinely animated film, you're really having meetings and discussing what you want with animators who then go off and produce one shot at a time that you look at and comment on.

If you take a regular animated film, that's being done by animators on computers, so the filmmaking is a fairly technical process.

'Ice Age' felt like stage acting. You'd write a sequence, and sometimes you'd submit pages, but other times, I would actually perform it for the directors and producer in my office.

I've always loved animation and animated films.

Special effects are characters. Special effects are essential elements. Just because you can't see them doesn't mean they aren't there.

Obviously, with a CGI character, you're building a character in much the same way as a real creature is built. You build the bones, the skeletons, the muscles. You put layers of fat on. You put a layer of skin on which has to have a translucency, depending on what the character is.

My particular aesthetic of light and color and design wouldn't change as a result of working with computer graphics rather than with slit scan or miniatures.