Korea Notes 4

Here's the last of my notes to overseas service studios. I hope they were helpful to someone out there!

On my last Korean show, the animators took our layouts and merely inbetweened them. The effect was that everyone floated from pose to pose. Nothing was favored. It was like the characters were underwater. It cost a fortune in retakes. We oughta just bring animation back to the country. Some of the budgets I've seen on modern flat shows could easily afford real animation. I see the shows and can't figure out where the money went.
Sometimes when people clean up animators' drawings, the characters end up fatter. That's because the clean up artist is drawing his lines on the outside of the animator's lines, rather than right on top.

Thanks to all these folks who donated. Did I miss anyone?

David Mackenzie

How to keep organized when doing storyboards...(for TV)


COMING UP...

A genius animator on early Betty Boops, unfettered by Disney rules.

1942 - the height of creative and skilled animation.

Toy Construction 2 - a Knickerbocker Jinks - drawn in flash layer by layer using wiggly flash tools

Korea Notes 3

THE IMPORTANCE OF EMPHASIS!

In many productions I've worked on-even when we have strong expressive dynamic layouts, the animation will come back soft and mushy and all the pose artists are dumbfounded.

Here are the two main reasons that happens:

These notes could just as easily apply to many American shows today. That second set of blanded Boo Boos is still more lively than many prime time cartoons I've seen!

Many service studios, once you have convinced them to actually use your drawings, will not add any breakdowns and will merely inbetween your poses-and use even timing. This makes the characters float from pose to pose and you don't feel any of the poses.
Please excuse the million exclamation points. I was in quite a frustrated state the day I scribbled these notes out!

Korea notes 2 - combining curves and angles to look stylish and natural

My Notes To Korean Animation Studios 1 - Please use what we send you

At one point I got so frustrated with overseas studios throwing out all the work we would do stateside, that one gloomy day in a frustrated frenzy I scribbled out a pile of notes to explain what I think of as simple basic concepts. Notes that to me are like explaining to a grown up that "You have to put your shoes on on top of your socks."



I say scribble, because they really were scribbles. I just wanted to make the point as fast as possible and had no time to have someone clean up all my drawing to make them pretty. So excuse the roughness of the drawings.

Here's a sample:




wanna see more?


I don't blame the overseas studios for not following the instructions and drawings you send them. It's the fault of the American system in the 80s and the Americans who trained them in the first place.

But I got stuck with having to retrain so many studios to just do things logically that after awhile I lost it because of so much time and money wasted on retakes. Needless retakes that could be avoided if only service studios would literally use the drawings and instructions you send them-and follow the timing on the ex sheets.

Even though I had changed the creative production system in Spumco, we still had to have service studios not undo all the work we did here.

I eventually had to help start one from scratch that hadn't already been trained by the Hanna Barbera factory system. Then they became the most successful overseas studio of all and everybody uses them now.

It's not enough to have talent and funny ideas. You have to have a sensible production system that exploits the talent.


This post was inspired by Jaime Weinman's comment about "Don't Touch That Dial".

Jaime J. Weinman said...

"Back in Style" went to a subpar overseas studio and endured almost a full year of retakes, just to get it as good as it looks.

Didn't "Toby Danger" also go to that studio (Akom) and have to go through a lot of retakes? Or am I misremembering?

Yes, "Don't Touch That Dial," made for a lot less money, actually looks better -- it seems (from the outside) that there was a lot of money being spent inefficiently on studio cartoons in the '90s.

Tom said... jaime,

Putting that Scooby parody in "Back in Style" was something I was told to do. I felt it was redundant to do almost exactly what I had a part in doing a decade earlier but was overruled, being just a writer on that show. That picture also should have ended with the Filmation bit, imo. "Back in Style" went to a subpar overseas studio and endured almost a full year of retakes, just to get it as good as it looks. "Don't Touch That Dial", made ten years earlier, probably cost about one-fifth of the Warners short. Retakes were minimal at Bakshi's because we had to get it right the first time. There was no corporate parent company to foot one cent of overage.