Explosions are art!
It sounded pretty impressive when you shouted it.
But actually drawing them was still such a hassle.
For effects like these, 3D was actually much faster. Hand-drawing them was every bit as difficult as drawing intense action scenes.
Explosions, like scenes with multiple characters in the same frame, needed to be layered.
For example, if you drew people vaporized by an explosion's shock wave together with the vehicles in the same frame, then if something went wrong and you needed to make revisions, you'd have to redraw both. Who could put up with that?
And with an explosion like this, if you didn't separate the layers, you'd have smoke, flames, debris, and all sorts of other things drawn together. The compositing team wouldn't be able to tell what was in front of what, and you might end up with smoke obscuring a vehicle being flung through the air, or debris disappearing without a trace.
Layers were essential. The best approach was to draw different characters or objects in the same frame on separate layers.
So yes, animation was made at twenty-four frames per second, but that didn't mean you could only have twenty-four key drawings per second at most.
Take the explosion Gu Xue was drawing now, for example.
Vehicles, pedestrians, smoke, flames, and more—after she drew all those layers and composited them together, the scene might only last a second onscreen, but the number of key drawings Gu Xue had done across all the layers was nowhere near twenty. It was almost a hundred.
And that was without any in-betweening. If in-betweening was needed, there'd be even more drawings for that one second.
It was exhausting.
Gu Xue only managed to draw a little that night before she couldn't go on and obediently headed home.
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