Which technique was NOT used as a shortcut to meet early animation deadlines?

• A. Outsourcing most of the work to cheaper foreign labor sources in Mexico and Korea
• B. Reusing existing animation frames to save time
• C. Working under extremely tight deadlines
• D. Hiring more staff to speed up production

Answer: (A)

The idea here is how studios cut time when animation deadlines loom. Reusing existing animation frames, also known as limited animation, is a classic shortcut because it lowers the amount of new drawing needed while still delivering motion. Hiring more staff speeds things up by increasing the amount of work that can be done in parallel, which was a straightforward way to push through a tight schedule. Working under extremely tight deadlines is a real production pressure that drives teams to adopt time-saving methods, even if it isn’t a technique in itself.

Outsourcing large portions of work to cheaper foreign labor sources in Mexico and Korea isn’t a typical early practice used to meet deadlines. In the earliest animation workflows, most work stayed in-house, and the common time-savers were methods like reusing frames and expanding the team to accelerate production. Outsourcing became more common later in various industries, but it was not a standard shortcut used in the early animation era.