L.O. 9 What is The Hardest Job At Spumco?

In my experience, Layout is the toughest job. If you have done some of the previous exercises, you probably agree by now.

Here's a storyboard panel, one of many poses that take place within the same setup (same background)WRITING IS EASY

What's the easiest job in cartoons? Writing. It takes a morning to come up with an idea for a story, then to get together with your funny friends and have a gag session. (of course if you're not funny, then writing will be hard). That means exploring how many funny gags and situations can come out of your story idea. This takes absolutely no skill at all. It takes raw talent and funny people.

After the gag session, the "writer" then applies skills to the idea. He takes an afternoon and maybe another day to structure the story- to line up the gags and ideas into an effective progression that lays out the ideas step by step and builds on them to lead to an exciting conclusion that wraps it up. This job takes some skill and brainpower for sure, but once you have it, the job itself is not difficult and can be executed in a day or 2. Then you slap the backs of the other writers and get ready for 10 months later when you can take credit for the success of the cartoon, or blame the artists when it doesn't play funny.

STORYBOARDING IS HARDER BUT IS FUN AND CREATIVE

A storyboard artist needs more skill, and it's a harder job in terms of man hours. He has to develop all the ideas, fill them out, add continuity, stage the ideas, add dialogue etc...applying all this to a story outline takes a few weeks of work and complex thought.

BUT! The storyboard artist has much freedom from other pesky skills. He doesn't have to make all his poses flip. He doesn't have to make finished clean drawings. He doesn't have to make sure there is room in each panel for every action to take place. He doesn't have to worry about the characters' proportions changing somewhat from panel to panel. If he had to worry about all that, he wouldn't be concentrating on telling a funny and gripping story and his storyboard would end up stiff and boring. His mind needs to be on the story, not every visual detail and perfect functionality of the drawings.

My bacon scribbled storyboards are evidence of that. I draw them fast and loose, with no worry about perfecting each line. I'm telling the story and trying to make it entertaining. That's a fun, fairly easy job. The hardest part is just how long it takes compared to writing, which takes hardly any time at all.

LAYOUT TAKES THE MOST SKILL

The hardest job of all is LAYOUT, for many reasons. The main one, is you have so many restrictions and rules to follow. You also have to be a killer artist. If you don't draw very well, still can't draw construction, then forget it. A storyboard artist needs to be able to draw funny, but doesn't have to be a stylist or a skilled draftsman. This has always been the hardest job at Spumco, and definitely the hardest to teach.

The ideal layout artist has to be:

A great draftsman.
A stylist and designer.
An actor.
A problem solver.
Patient and focused.
A multi-tasker.

This poor bastard not only has to have great skills and talent, he (or she) has to balance a ton of rules at the same time he's trying to make all the drawings look pretty. It's not like drawing a random pose in your sketchbook and hoping it comes out looking swell - which is much easier to do than doing functional drawings, as we all know.

LAYOUT ARTIST HAS LESS FREEDOM (at first)

The layout artist is also not completely free to make up anything he wants. He is not anywhere near as free as the story artist. He has to use the story artist's ideas as a guide - and clean up all its problems. This sounds like a dreadful boring, laborious task - and it can be while you are learning layout skills. But it doesn't mean it isn't a creative job. To me, it is the most essential job in the studio, because it's where the characters come alive - if you know what you are doing.

I'm always on the lookout for potential layout artists. it is the hardest skill for me to train people in - even though the artists with the potential to do it have to be the most naturally talented and skilled cartoonists. I have a bunch of them in my secret college blog, and this is definitely the hardest exercise for them to do. They are all already good at design and most are good at construction when they draw one individual character floating in space. When they have to translate storyboard drawings into layouts, they quickly realize what a different world the world of functional drawings is. It separates the men from the boys, especially if they are girls.

BUT...the layout artists are the stars of the studio. It's their drawings that end up on the screen entertaining the kiddies out there and making them giddy with jiggling pantloads of pee.

Unless they tone down all the storyboard drawings to make them look like illustrations in a Jehovah's Witness tract. Then they are dirty bums.

So... here's the beginning of a series where I will try to explain what a layout artist has to do.

The very first thing to do is READ THE STORYBOARD AND UNDERSTAND THE STORY!
If you just look at one panel at a time as you draw, you will find yourself heaped in mistakes that you will later have to go back and redo, because you didn't see all the problems lying ahead.

So READ THE STORY:
http://jkcartoonstories.blogspot.com/2009/12/slabs-first-fist.html

OK, once you now why everyone is doing what they are doing and where it is all heading you can start taking individual panels and analyzing them:

1) Look for the mistakes
2) Look for the good things - that you'll want to preserve and enhance

The first mistakes you will find will have to do with staging and cramping. Storyboard artists draw small and tend to clump their characters too close together and end up with problems of cramping.

You can see in the panel above that Slab is so close to Ernie that I didn't have enough space between them to fit Ernie's hand- so I cheated and drew his hand too small just to get it in there. I left the problem for the layout artist to fix, poor bastard, so I could go on to the nest panel and just have fun telling the story.

There are other cramped areas in the picture. The background is to small. The jagged edged fence is running right through the characters and threatens to draw attention away from them. The sidewalk is too thin and everyone's feet are right on the edges of it.

The worm and flower heads have tangents-they touch the line of the sidewalk.

So, If I'm to get to the point where I can have some fun drawing layouts, I first have to take a deep breath, roll my eyes and start figuring out how to fix these problems.

Next: Fixing the cramped areas, by opening up space.
After that, looking for mistakes in construction, perspective.
After that, FINALLY, looking for the good things: contrasts, line of actions, funny expressions and strong poses - then caricaturing them.