Job Description

Philadelphia Eagles Head Coach is notorious for his tight lipped press conferences. When asked why a drive failed, or why the team couldn't make up a 10 point deficit he offers the same stock answer: "I've got to do a better job of putting guys in the position to make plays."

That's what running a production is all about. Putting artists in a position to execute their job to the best of their ability.

An animation producer, a commercial animation producer -at least -has several concerns, but they fall into two broad categories: liaising between the production and the "outside world" and to organize and oversee the production itself.

Both are factors of one overarching notion: protect the film.

CATEGORY ONE
• understand the creative needs of the client and articulate them in animation terms to the production staff

• understand the technical needs of the client and make sure they are properly executed

• provide a buffer between client and the artist. This doesn't mean stop them from talking to one another -very much the opposite. It's the producer's job to "handle" the demands of the client, the temperment of the artist

• when something's wrong, and it's the artist's fault, the producer has to step up and take the blame. Even if was 100% not the producer's fault, in the eyes of the client it should NEVER be the artist's fault. Think it like this: if you've messed up, that's one mistake. If you've hired the "wrong" person and allowed for a mess up, that's two mistakes. Not only will you be protecting your crew, you will ultimately look better

• that goes hand in hand with unduly crediting the artists for positive work. Even when the producer is responsible, pass along the credit. It makes the producer look better (inverse of the previous point), it puts the artist in a better position to make plays.

CATEGORY TWO
• provide a good working environment. Animation artists all want to work at home these days. They can sit in their underwear and eat Cheetos with their goldfish. Unfortunately, working at home is a drag on most productions. It can work, especially if the project has lower standards of animation or art direction. Assuming the producer is trying to make something of a certain quality, that means constructing an atmosphere which is conducive to good work.

There are simple, inexpensive ways to do this. The producer should open up conversation, buy everyone coffee one in a while, bring in candy, get little gifts on occasion -maybe an old book or something from a gumball machine.

• make people feel appreciated. Artists do better work when they understand that good work has impact.

• understand and maintain the highest possible quality of tools, It doesn't necessitate have the newest and fastest of everything, more often is means assuaging artist's idiosyncracies -like getting them a corkboard or a brush to wipe away eraser detrius.

• make individual artists understand their role, and if need be, its place in the whole film.

• set workloads for artists. Make sure they have something to do.

• keep artists engaged in their work

• cast the right artist in the right position. Odds are a character designer will not make a good animator. That's putting him in a position to fail. If you've got the luxury of experimenting with off-type casting, make sure there's a support structure for the artist to fall into.


Like all bad producers, I'm forgetting a few dozen things. These seem like a pretty good starting point.

Cryogenics

Rumors of his passing were true, his frozen remains -urban legend.



But would Disney truly be caught dead in Brooklyn?

Starting Point

Sometimes you think a guy gets too much credit.

Many like laud Hayao Miyazaki as the "Greatest Animator [sic] Alive". Trusting that they mean "animation director", and giving a further leap to assume they mean "making features for children" there's strong merit to that claim -especially since all of the pretenders (Brad Bird, foremost) would place the same laurels themselves.

Even though I hate to see one person get so much credit, Miyazaki's recently published "Starting Point: 1979-1996" is unquestionably the best book on animation written.

This is the volume which "Animation" has been missing. It is as profound, thoughtful, agitating and revolutionary as "Brecht on Theater". Like Brecht's collection of essays, Miyazaki's collection is at times obvious, at times maddeningly disagreeable but continuously a singular voice from a brilliant man who has spent a lot of time thinking about his artform.


On first perusal, "Starting Point" doesn't contain that one stand out singular essay like Brecht's "The Modern Theater is the Epic Theater" but each piece in itself opens arguments and lines of inquiry which have not been addressed in any other tome on animation.

On running:

I was dumbstruck by a fragment of the film "Chikemuri Takadanobaba (Duel at Takadanobaba)"... [Bantsuma] runs to Takadanobaba -and his run is terrific. He pulls back the left side of his body, where he holds his sword, and he sticks out his right arm as far as he can as he runs along the embankment. He pushes people aside as he runs past them. I am sure that the scene was helped by the way the film was edited, but he also just ran magnificently. It was definitely not the way someone runs a track race. His running style was close to that of kabuki, yet it wasn't stylized or rigid. It was much more vigorous than mere running. In this long shot, Yasubei's run conveys all the anxious desperation he feels. I was amazed at the power of Bantsuma's acting.

If we made an animated film of "Duel at Takadanobaba", what kind of movement could we put into this scene? Most likely, Yasubei's facial expression would be the only place where we could show his desperation. I can see how this would turn out. His running would have to be a repeating series, a set pattern of motion. Unless we were careful, we might let the hand holding his sword move back and forth as well.

In Richard Williams' book he spends 30 pages on how to make a character run and never fully addresses this problem. "The Animator's Survival Kit", of course, is a how-to book and probably the best one written, but there are many more things to be learned that can't be found in technical manuals.

Miyazaki is full of corkboard-worthy one liners: "To create a good cartoon movie animators have to lie and audiences expect us to lie well".

"Those who make cartoon films and those who love them tend to have a certain immaturity to them, and they tend to go easy on each other."

In addition to a deep understanding of the technical aspects of the process of animation, he shows a remarkable critical bent. In his "Thoughts on 'Fantastic Planet'", Miyazaki articulates in one or two sentences (particularly: "I felt the creators started with Roland Topor's world and then looked around for an original story that would allow them to develop his world") what I have been unable pinpoint after several years and several screenings. His piece on "The Who Planted Trees" is personal yet analytic -in many way a gushing review, but never fawning.

Pay Your Dues

Included amongst the papers Ed Smith entrusted to me was a stack of "The Animator" -the West Coast union newsletter -from the mid 1940s.

They're in rough condition, very brittle. So brittle, they break apart when touched, like a teenager's lonesome heart.

I'm planning on photocopying them as an inexpensive means of preservation (of the information, at least).

click to enlarge

This issue is from January 1945. The war was winding down (Victory would be declared in Europe on May 8 and, of course, we all know what happened on August 6 of that year), many arists and animators were still on active duty overseas (in the future I'll reprint some of their letters).

Most of the front page of this one sheet is dedicated to updates on the negotiations at each studio for a new contract. Since the War was still being waged, negotiations were under the oversight of the War Labor Board. Only the big studios were organized- Disney, Warners', MGM, Screen Gems, Walter Lantz and "PALS" (which I assume was George Pal).

The Disney strike was four years earlier but the tension was still evident in the newsletter.

The Disney update alludes to a Union grievance regarding the classification of an artist in the Story Department. It uses the feminine pronoun. I wonder if it was Mary Blair. How many other women would have been anywhere near story at that time?

She was re-classified as "Story Specialist".

Also note: members would be fined $5 if they did not attend at least one general meeting every three months.

back side: click to enlarge

A few interesting bits on the back page.

"Service Ribbin" [sic]. Apologies are given for the "magazine" not being finished. Sounds like a collection of gag comics by animation union members -possibly as a War ("ribbin" -get it) benefit. I would be interesting to see the final product.

From "Inbetweens": "LANTZ BOWLING TEAM now leading Universal Studio League". Also a bunch of birth and wedding and sundry announcements from Union members including soldiers on furlough and sadly news of artists such as Major Willard Bowsky, formerly of Fleischers', killed in action and Marvin Firotkin, former cameraman of Jam Handy, reported missing in action on the Western Front...

Toot Toot

My old pal Andrew Kaiser sent me a jeering email the other day about this piece which ran in our high school alumi newsletter. Funny, since I don't even get the alumi newsletter.

We've been remiss in sending out press -too busy -so I had forgotten how strange it is to see someone writing about your work. I thought it would nice to share.

By the way -anybody interested in doing press for us, please drop a line.

This article is written by Bill Avington.

*******

This is the Gesu church, attach to my high school. 20 years ago I thought it was impressive,

now I think it's kind of a monstrosity. Also this photo is taken about 10 feet due West

of where I broken leg and ankle going to the SATs.

As a student, Richard O’Connor always thought his career goal would put him on stage. Turns out, he accomplished that goal but not quite in the way he expected. O’Connor is an animator, not an actor, but all of the things he does end up “in front of the camera, that’s one of the interesting things about animation,” he says. “When you create something you make it perform.” O’Connor is president of Asterisk Animation, which beganin 2004 when he and co-founder Brian O’Connell branched off from another firm. Since then, the company has been busy doing documentary work.

Most recently, the group worked on putting together 20 minutes of animation about Buddha for a piece produced by David Grubin. “A lot of times, people producing documentaries will come to us with an idea, basically saying, ‘we don’t know what we want, can you help,” he says. The 2008 Presidential election was also an interesting time for the company. With newspapers failing, animation filled the gap for commentary. Asterisk partnered with The New Yorker to produce several election shorts (which can be found at http://www.newyorker.com/online/nakedcampaign/videos).

I took this trolley just about everyday, graduating in 1991, its quaintness,the church's grandiosity

-

can hardly mask the fact that the neighborhood is a rough place. One classmate,

on a scholarship for neighborhood kids was gunned down in a random shooting our Senior year.

“This form is something that can bring illustration into a new age,” O’Connor says. Along those same lines, the company was working on content for “CBS Sunday Morning,” which O’Connor describes as a “weird mix between documentary and animation, bringing in all sorts of realms of knowledge but trying to make it entertaining.”

O’Connor never studied animation but in some respects he believes that helps him. “I answered a job out of the New York Times for an office assistant at a film studio and after working there for a couple of months, I knew it was right,” he says. “I think the fact that I didn’t study animation in school gives me methods of inquiry into the art form that others who studied animation never really had.” He also believes that his high school training helped prepare him to take on his current career. “The type of education I got at the Prep allowed me to see the world in a bigger way and to apply different skill sets to this particular field of study,” he says.

He jokes that “there is a downside to a Prep education…I’m a lousy businessman. I’m always trying to live that whole MFO thing (men for others), you know treat people well, make sure they have benefits, etc. On the good side though, it does make people want to work with you.”He adds that Asterisk lives the Magis in one of the company’s mottos: “let’s make it not stink.”

More seriously though, O’Connor points to his study of Latin as a huge help in his current work. “I know a lot of people complained about Latin but it was great to have that knowledge skill and that view of history that you would not get just from studying modern language,” he says. “The study of the classics gave me such a broad perspective on history and understanding. It was the base that has helped me understand everything else.”

And O’Connor is taking that understanding and working to increase his business. “There is always a new, better, more interesting, cool way of doing something in animation,” he says. “Animation is about problem solving. To make something look good you have to spend a lot of energy to do it.”

George Kaplan

"Matte painting" is a term that has taken on a few meanings.

I've spoken with at least a dozen artists who put the position on their resume, all of whom have "painted mattes". They have all meant the frame by frame filling in drops in keys for composite shots. The painting of the actual matte.

In the olden days the matte painter was the guy who created the image that filled in the hole they cut out.

Watching "North by Northwest" last night, the terrific mattes stood out -especially the United Nations.




These were painted by Matthew Yuricich .

In this little interview he expresses a client process that's different from the typical one.

Sometimes we'll do it his way, but usually find its better to get the client involved early.

Scoooooooo

Back at The Ink Tank we did three pieces for Comedy Central's short-lived TV Funhouse.

Having heard some horror stories about the SNL version as well as our own experience doing work for a different SNL producer, we were somewhat reluctant going in.

Turns out that Robert Smigel was very easy to work with. The projects were easy despite the warnings from several quarters.



I'm not really crazy about the films, to be honest. But people seem to like them.

This one is a parody of Scooby Doo and the "infantilazation" of cartoon characters.

The animation is mostly by Doug Compton. The best part, in my opinion, are the backgrounds. The first couple were done by Nash Dunnigan who also taught a few other artists his tricks.