One of the production steps in classical animation used to be the inking and painting of acetate cels. The characters in the animation drawings would be traced from the pencil paper version to an inked version on cels, which were then painted on the reverse side and then filmed from the front atop each scene's background.
There was a lot of paint around, hundreds of different colors that would be bought directly or mixed by us for specific colors we wanted to see onscreen. There were also gradations of colors too- as cel levels were switched in the filming process or new cels added to a scene, compensation colors had to be mixed so that the colors of characters would remain the same throughout the scene and not get lighter or darker as cels were added or taken off. All of this amounted to a lot of paint being used, and a lot of jars of water with paint in them as the painters would rinse off their brushes and otherwise created many jars of painty water.
About a year after opening our studio, we contacted the main ecological groups in the city to ask for their advice on what to do with this leftover water. Only certain paints would adhere to the cels and they were not good for the environment when all the animation studios would pour that water down drains. What we came up with was a simple but effective answer. The worst thing was for the water to enter the environment as a liquid, we were told, so we set up an “evaporation room.”
The painters were told to use as little water as necessary and when a jar could no longer be used, not to pour the water down the drain, but to send the jar to the evaporation room where it would sit, opened, with hundreds of others until the water eventually evaporated and the paint became a solid mass in the jar. Better to have the paint as such in landfill than in liquid form in the river system, the experts said.
Another thing we did was to cut down on the number of jars and amount of water by better organizing our painting schedules. For example, in the BIBITE films the little green character appeared in most scenes, along with other characters who would only be in one or two. For the first half of the painting time on that film all the painters painted Bibite and only Bibite cels. His main color, green, was seen on every desk, but by doing all those green colors at the same time, rather than paint scene by scene, returning to green every so often there were fewer jars of green paint to evaporate.
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