ANIMATION NERDS! Bill Kroyer (Ferngully, TRON, Rhythm & Hues) wrote an autobiography and it's awesome! Bill started doing 2D for Disney and was a huge CG pioneer, blindly keying in XYZ and rotation coordinates for every object on the screen in every frame in TRON like an absolute madman.🧵
Bill was one of the earliest guys doing 2D+CG hybrid work, rigging an SGI IRIS workstation to a plotter that would draw straight onto animation paper. This book has so many crazy stories it's ridiculous (including going to the Philippines where his ink & paint work was done under armed guards).
Bill wound up being THE "live action talking animal" animator, working on Babe, Cats & Dogs, and a ton of other R&H gigs before escaping the VFX meltdown to academia. Book is a little pricey on Amazon but I dug it.
This book also goes into how everyone got pissed off at Don Bluth (who has an awesome autobiography too!) for leaning too hard into rotoscoping at Disney, but Bluth's book mentions how he constantly could not find enough animators who could realistically draw humans, plus he had no budget lol
Ooh nice find, I’ll check it out! Didn’t know Don Bluth had a memoir either!
That's a heckuva book. I did not realize that Don was Mormon and DEEPLY into his faith to the point where he states the failure of his films is due to his relationship with God not being good enough 😅