There is a great article written by Bill Warren entitled “The Technical Background to Space Jam,” that does a great job in describing how live action and animation have been combined in history before the creation of Space Jam, and how Space Jam uses more advanced techniques than the previous combination animations to save time in their animation.

Space Jam was produced by Ivan Reitman and directed by Joe Pytka.  In his article, Warren mentions that cartoon characters have been combined with live performance since the initiation of cartoons, and an example is given of  a cartoon clip we saw in class that was made in 1906 by J. Stuart Black called Humorous Phases of Funny Faces where a live human is seen drawing characters on a blackboard with chalk that start moving on their own.  After this comes another example from our class in 1909 with Gertie the Dinosaur where Gertie interacts with the live Winsor McKay and carries him off in her mouth at the end.

Other examples of combinations of cartoons and live action are seen in 1949 with Disney’s Song of the South, Warner Brother’s My Dream is Yours, 1945′s Anchors Aweigh, followed by Dangerous When Wet in 1953, and in 1964 Disney’s Mary Poppins where Mary Poppins sings with cartoon penguins.

In 1988, live action and animated cartoon characters were combined for a full length feature film with Disney and Amblin’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

Space Jam‘s technology was more advanced than Who Framed Roger Rabbit? because it was made much later, and Ed Jones, who was involved in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? was brought together with other animation people to work on Space Jam.

Some differences in Space Jam compared to Roger Rabbit are that Roger Rabbit was shot to film, and then the different film pieces were combined together.  On Space Jam, however, all the animation is colored in on the computer, the live action shots are also scanned to the computer.  This way, the cartoon characters can easily be changed in accordance with the scene and look more like 3D characters that can blend in with the live action of Michael’s world.

To make this type of animation and live action combination, Warner Bros. Feature Animation was used in Sherman Oaks, and Warner Bros. London studio was also used, along with other international animation studios.

First, the animators made their drawings, and the backgrounds were also painted.  These images were then scanned onto the computer using the Animo software program.  With Animo, colors can be changed, and many other modifications can be made to the characters and their surroundings.  This process saves time compared to the old animation process where drawings were drawn with ink and Xeroxed on cels and then painted.  This results in taking 20-30 minutes to finish one cel.  With the Animo software, it took 4 minutes for the process.  After the coloring was done, the work was sent to Cinesite, which is a visual effects company dealing with post production.  Cinesite furthers the meshing of cartoon characters with the real live action by using the Cineon system by Kodak.

*I commented on Mike Kush’s blog (#25) and Rebecca Townsend’s blog (#46)