Filcher, Filchers, Filching

When asked to name a Florida animation company, many might respond Walt Disney, given that Disneyworld is in Florida. Yet Disney is headed far from Florida, in Burbank, CA. What’s more, animation for entertainment comprises a tiny fraction of all the animation done and displayed in media within the United States. So while someone responding that Disney is a Florida animation company is somewhat correct, the real truth is that the best animator is a company that’s doing animation for commercials, infomercials, corporate media, and on a freelance basis for certain specific entertainment applications.

In these days of Pixar and Dreamworks, hand drawn animation is next to unheard of. But many of those same hand animators of the Lion King and Alladin era weren’t computer savvy and they needed jobs, so hand animation is still provided by some of the better video production companies. Yet computer animation is by and large the standard these days, as any Ratatouille can tell you, and its advantages are many.

First, computer animation is much cheaper than hand animation, with few exceptions. (Those exceptions are those that implement expensive graphics platforms that aren’t necessary for most normal applications.) A pair of animators can accomplish in one day what it would have taken a team of animators to accomplish a week to accomplish twenty years ago. Then there’s precision. Computer graphics platforms allow animators to animate objects in three dimensions – like architects – on three axes. The result is a virtual ‘object’ that can manipulated and rendered with realistic three dimensional detail without suffering from the imprecision of a hand animator’s special perception. Third, animation by computer is also preferable because it is able to “simulate” objects that we cannot normally display with clarity. For this reason, commercials for toothpaste will often employ an animation for teeth and abrasive elements in the toothpaste because it would be difficult to photograph in a mouth and the effect of the abrasive components would be hard to depict, never mind that mouths are not exactly the most beautiful things to look at.

In short, while animation for entertainment is what we’re most used to seeing, animation has applications far beyond the big screen. Commercials and also instructional videos both employ animation on a broad basis, and require far more animation than the big movie houses produce. For this reason, many animation companies have sprouted up to handle the needs of media buyers – even in Disneyworld’s Florida.