Stock footage

My knee hurts SO MUCH.

Stock footage refers to a sequence in film or television that can be frequently re-used, occasionally in multiple different productions. It is commonly used in animation to save the time and expense of having to re-draw sequences that are more or less assured to take place in every single episode.

Japanese series

In the context of Transformers, it applies to most of Japanese-made anime series: The Headmasters, Super-God Masterforce, Victory, Beast Wars II, Beast Wars Neo, Robots in Disguise, and the Unicron Trilogy shows. All of those series would almost ritualistically showcase the same clips of characters transforming, combining, or deploying unique weapons. These sequences often seemingly transport the characters to a setting different from the actual events of that part of the episode, as the entire standard background fades away and is replaced by streaking speedlines and flashes of color, so they can be used no matter where the characters actually are in the script.

Blue streaks!

Stock footage sequences typically have more detail, higher frame rates, and more exaggerated, prolonged posturing movements than the standard storytelling animation surrounding them. Supposedly, this is the method in which Japanese marketing has decided a toy's gimmicks are best "highlighted" in these advertoons.

The dub for Transformers Cybertron often poked fun at the practice, having characters narrate their filler stock-footage in ways that implied boredom or curiosity ("Why do we always go this way?"), or simply filled excessively-long sequences with snappy patter among the characters involved. Of course, Cybertron was particularly egregious in its dependence on using stock footage to fill time like the visual equivalent of styrofoam peanuts.

American series

Your transforming posture is highly awesome.

This practice is different from the stock animations used in the CGI-animated Beast Wars show, which often used "standard" sets of model movements for the characters' transformations from beast to robot mode to save the animators' time. However, these animations were not stock footage; each sequence had to be rendered out normally as any other each time they occurred, using different camera angles with the characters in the same scenery as they were before and after they transformed.

In the Animated series, most characters do have stock footage versions of their transformation sequences, but their usage has been the exception rather than the rule. For instance, the series' opening credits shows a great deal of stock footage that has rarely, or never, appeared in the actual cartoon. In this context, "Human Error, Part I" stands out for its egregious use of stock footage to pad the episode out - including full stock footage transformations for the hallucinatory Starscream and Megatron, as well as retooled versions of previous sequences which were used to depict the Autobots reverting back to their robot forms - yeah, that's right, for an event that only happens once.

Stomach in, chest out, look wistfully into the distance. Prime tries out to be an Abercrombie model.

The original Generation 1 cartoon was not immune from the use of stock footage; however, its use was more limited and was generally used in a similar manner to Beast Wars, with pre-canned transformations employed over different backgrounds depending on the situation, without any cutscenes. Not surprisingly, the most notable of these is a transformation sequence for Optimus Prime which was used in both directions (truck to robot, and robot to truck); however, others can be found, primarily throughout season 1, due to the smaller cast.

The same stock footage sequence is frequently used in the Rescue Bots cartoon. It consists of all of the main cast going from robot to vehicle mode with a colored anime action line streak background.

Notes

Foreign names

• Japanese: Bank system (バンクシステム Banku Sisutemu), Bank (バンク Banku)

External links

• Stock footage on Wikipedia