>>213419488
>there's no real animation being made by the animators themselves
Every professional artist uses references. The better you become at art, more you realize how your memory alone is not enough to capture all the tiny details of the real world. And animators realize a professional actor or a gymnast knows how to do much cooler looking body language than what a beer-bellied animator sitting on his chair could come up with.
Animators use multiple references at once. They have the live reel footage to use as reference for the motion, the way the clothes move, body language and facial expressions. Then they have the character sheet right next to them to make sure the character looks the same at all times even when its originally drawn and stylized by a some other artist. Finally they have their key drawings as constant reference for the drawings in the middle.
So while animator is drawing he's also simultaneously looking at the live reel of an actress dancing around in a dress, the character sheet of the animated character and both the drawing before and after the current one.
