Gertie The Dinosaur - Production

Production

Gertie the Dinosaur was produced before the introduction of later time-saving techniques such as cel animation. To create the film, McCay himself drew thousands of frames of Gertie on individual 6.5 x 8.5 inch sheets of rice paper. He hired neighbor and art student John A. Fitzsimmons to draw the backgrounds. Fitzsimmons carefully re-traced the rocks, lake and tree from a master drawing onto each sheet of rice paper.

In creating the film, McCay came up with a number of techniques that would later become standard in the animation industry. He used registration marks to keep the background aligned from frame to frame, so that it did not appear to "swim", as often happened in early cartoons. He avoided some repetitious work by re-using drawings, in what would later be called cycling. He devised what he called the "McCay Split System", the first occurrence of keyframe animation. Rather than draw each frame in sequence, he would start by drawing Gertie's key poses, and then go back and fill in the frames between. McCay was also very concerned with accurate timing and motion; he timed his own breathing to determine how to animate Gertie's breathing, and included subtle details such as the ground sagging beneath Gertie's great weight.

McCay was very open about the techniques that he developed. During production of Gertie, he showed all the details to a visitor who claimed to be writing an article about animation. The visitor turned out to be John Randolph Bray, who later patented many of McCay's methods and tried to sue him. McCay prevailed, however, and received royalties from Bray for several years thereafter.