Life Sucks 2 sc 4-Storyboards are for STORY, not finished art

Here's an earlier sequence from Life Sucks. This is where Ren first approaches Stimpy in his garden. Stimpy thinks nature is proof that the world is full of beauty and joy and Ren begins to burst his bubble by explaining how much torture goes on in his lawn every minute of every day.




These two still drawings are Nick's cleanups of my scribbly roughs. This animatic is mostly drawn by me in my "bus doodle" style.

I have a few different drawing styles and I use them for different thought processes. When I am writing ideas, I draw them, but I draw really fast, with no regard to construction, perspective, line quality or any finished techniques. I am purely drawing feeling. I am trying to draw in real time as the events play out. I look like a complete spaz when I'm doing it and people make fun of me and imitate it.

The drawings are very scribbly but have the germs of all the visual ideas in continuity. Once these scribbles are complete, then I switch my brain to style mode and draw bigger versions of the same drawings that use more solid principles. This step (layout) requires slower, more carefully choreographed drawings and uses a completely different part of the brain to do. If I was trying to storyboard a scene in this finished style, it wouldn't work. I would be thinking of pretty drawings rather than story and emotion and continuity.

This is a major flaw with TV studio systems today. They expect their storyboard artists to draw finished clean drawings "on-model" so they can send them overseas and then have the animators just xerox them up. This is an extremely inefficient way to use storyboards.

Storyboards are called "story"boards because the story artists are supposed to be writing the stories, not doing the animation and layouts. The more time they waste doing clean stiff on-model drawings, the less time they have to spend on making the story work.

Executives do not understand storyboards anyway, let alone rough drawings. They are easily impressed by a clean inked line, and even if the story isn't working they will quickly sign off on a fancily rendered finished looking storyboard.

Stupid.

You should look up some of Mike Maltese's storyboards for Chuck Jones to see how writers used to work.

Anyway, this animatic is made up mostly of my bus-doodle style. Scribbly but emotional. The few clean and semi-clean drawings are done by Nick Cross and Matt Roach following me up.
LS
Uploaded by chuckchillout8

Eddie has a great storyboard drawing style. It's simple but full of amazing life, fantastic strong clear poses and staging and composition. I used to shudder when layout artists would get his boards and then instantly tone down all the poses when they added the details and put them "on-model". I loved doing layouts from Eddie's boards because all the thought and life was there, and I got to add my own creativity in the finished design details and adding a few poses.

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From John K., the creator of Ren and Stimpy

Acting 5 - Ren and Stimpy "realistic" sitcom acting

I don't expect everyone to want to do specific or realistic acting in cartoons.

I sure don't want to have only realistic human acting and expressions in cartoons.



We can't compete with live action by only imitating what live action can do. Real people can act real and make real detailed specific expressions and move with real weight and physics a lot easier than we can draw them.

Our drawings are flat colors bordered by lines. Real people have light, shadow, and lots of facial muscles that can make barely imperceptible shadings and super subtle differences that can convey a lot of nuance that is impossible for pencils to capture and more impossible for CG it seems, which I can't figure out.

Actors can do all this in real time.

By the time it takes us to animate 10 seconds of screen time, an actor can have acted a whole half hour show full of tons of original expressions poses and mannerisms. And if we tried to merely imitate realistic humans, we would fall pitifully flat by comparison.

Cartoons can beat the hell out of live action by doing funny impossible things though:



With all that said though, I still like to add some ideas from other mediums to my cartoon toolbox . I never want to abandon what cartoons can do that nothing else can, but there's no reason to not supplement our magic pencils with amusing things we observe all around us.

I've always thought real people were funny. Real specific people who have their own unique mannerisms and funny ways of doing things. I try to put a lot of that into my cartoons.

I think adding the dimension of reality to the characters makes the unreal impossible world they live in -where anything can happen because it's a cartoon- seem all the more accessible to the audience. It's like "Wow! What if I could live in crazy world like this? How would I react?"

Actually, now and then live action takes cartoon ideas and mixes them in with real people and gets hilarious results-like Monty Python and Green Acres.

So I combine cartoon expressions and poses with human expressions and poses. It's fun to do and more challenging than always relying on the same stock animated acting that is so prevalent. I've been yelled at it many times too! I had to do a lot of convincing to powers above that cartoon characters could make expressions that they had never seen cartoon characters make before.

I would go nuts if I was forced to draw expressionless drawings all day:




Here is Ren with half a cartoon expression and a bit of reality. Stimpy is almost pure cartoon:
Here are some frames from a scene that is an homage to classic live action comedy on purpose. I love the Honeymooners and the 3 Stooges. They depend on many scenes that contrast the relationship between an asshole and an idiot.

Moe is the asshole, Curly is the idiot cartoon character.

Ralph is the asshole, while Norton is the surreal idiot character that drives him nuts.

Ren is the realistic character who is constantly driven nuts by Stimpy's unreal cartoonish antics.

In scenes like these, some of the comedy comes from the clownish character doing his clownish antics, but the silliness is enhanced by the mean character who is enraged by silliness.

This kind of classic comedy happens all the time in the real world. It's like when your Dad explodes at the dinner table because you and your friends are having a laughing fit, while you should be at the serious business of chewing your asparagus into a pasty bolus.

Moe Howard, Ralph Kramden, Oliver Hardy are all masters of the slow burn. It's part of Ren's charm too.
This starts out like many classic comedy shorts with low class characters trying to act polite and debonair, and quickly the scene reveals their true boorish nature.
Ren's expression here is purely realistic. I know because it's my expression when Eddie tells me a theory I disagree with.


Stimpy is making cartoon expressions. Ren is real. I posed in the mirror for all these Ren expressions. Katie drew the final scenes.

Because we are so unused to seeing cartoon characters making realistic faces it makes the cartoons seem extra weird. I think that had a lot to do with Ren and Stimpy's success. People thought they were looking at something weird even when something very real was happening.




Here Stimpy has an expression that is obviously impossible, but it still reads in context.

These Stimpy expressions are based on Eddie's pose in the storyboard. This is how Eddie acts out in high society when we take him to the opera.

Ren and Stimpy decide now that they are part of the "upper crust" they must learn to go around with their zippers up.
How sophisticated!

There are some purely impossible cartoon gags in this scene too, but Eddie asked me if he could post about them, so I deferred to his theory greatness.





The Honeymooners, "Pardon My Glove" (1956)Here is classic asshole and idiot situation comedy done by two geniuses in real time. I'm so jealous of this aspect of live performance!

Ralph wants a bite of Norton's pizza....

Ralph wants to eat Norton's pizza
Uploaded by chuckchillout8

Writing For Cartoons 7 - Continuity, Personality

Continuity

Each idea has to be linked to the next idea. Each line of dialogue has to follow from the previous and into the next smoothly. Each scene should connect to the next.

There can't be gaps, where the audience wonders "how did we get from here to there?"

The outline should have the basic structure. It should link each scene.

The detailed continuity should be up to the person doing the storyboard.

This storyboard was done by Vincent Waller. Those little sketches were done by me, either in the layout poses first and then doodled onto the board to time from, or I doodled them first and then addedd them in the layouts. I don't remember...
Either way, pose artists animators, directors and assitant animators each fill in more continuity.


The storyboard artist/writer links the dialogue, the action and the acting. Between each major expression, there are smaller expressions that connect them.

The outline is where you contruct your story. The storyboard is where you write it and connect the dots.

Understand Personality

This is not essential, because many cartoons are not about personality. Tex Avery never used layered characters in his MGM cartoons, but still made some of the best cartoons in history.

Disney's characters are one-dimensional (if they are lucky!) but that didn't stop him from being pretty successful.

But you should know enough to not have your characters all of a sudden do or say something that is totally out of character-unless the story supplies a believable reason for it.

Your characters' actions and their dialogue should come out of their character.

Ren doesn't do things the way Stimpy does. Bugs talks and acts different than Elmer, etc.

I had a really good board artist doing a scene for "In The Army". Ren and Stimpy were doing KP duty, peeling potatoes, and in the board Stimpy was cross with Ren. He was chewing out Ren for getting them in trouble with the sergeant over and over again. It was beautiufully drawn, but out of character, so I asked the artist to rework the scenes so that Ren is the mean one and Stimpy thinks that KP duty is a reward. Stimpy almost always thinks that Ren's mischief is a good thing. You have to push him pretty far to upset him.

Needing to understand character seems obvious, but I have yet to meet another cartoon writer who can keep their characters consistently in character. I usually have to do that part myself, but I could sure use some help if someone exists out there! There are a lot of great and funny artists, but less that can create inspired characters and certainly none of the writers can. That's the whole history of the business. Warner Bros. seems to have been the big exception.

Character Treatment

I actually frown on writing up character treatments- a description of your characters' personality traits.

They (TV execs) make you do that when you start a project or pitch one. They make you write a "story bible" and as part of it you have to describe who your characters are and worse, what their catch phrases are.

The bad thing about this is that if you force yourself to try to figure out everything there is to know about your characters before you start making your cartoons, you end up restricting yourself to what you thought you knew about them early on. The execs make you stick to it and your characters are forever limited to being cardboard cutouts.

What you find from actually making cartoons is that you think of many more and better ideas along the way and your characters evolve as they find themselves in new adventures.
Ren and Stimpy, George Liquor, The Ripping Friends and old cartoons all evolved along the way. They would maintain some of their core traits, but they would get more shaded as more stories got produced.

Catch Phrases
If catch phrases happened, they happened by accident. They weren't "created" upfront, like they are now. How many times did you cringe as a kid when you heard "Welcome to the 90s!" or such other writer creations? (Hey share some of the most obnoxious catch phrases from your childhood cartoons here in the comments!)

When I had Ren say "You bloated sac of protoplasm!" and similar things, people would yell them at me at appearances. I would see them on t shirts. People make me say "No sir, I don't like it" all the time. None of the lines in R and S were ever meant to be catch phrases, but they would just catch on, and Nickelodeon would lean on me to use them again. I resisted as much as possible, figuring that funny dialogue in the next cartoons would also catch on naturally.

Characters should issue from your loins
If you are truly a good character creator, you understand your characters from inside. You feel what's right for them, but you allow them to breathe and grow naturally as you make cartoons. They aren't a list of arbitrary traits and catch phrases. They exist and you are just relating their adventures to the audience.

Many of the artists who work with me add shadings-although if they add something that I feel doesn't fit, I suggest something else. Voice actors would also bring new shadings to the characters when we rehearsed the stories, and their inflections would give me ideas for new stories and new ways to develop the characters' traits further.

If you watch the Ren and Stimpy shows, you can see the characters evolve not only in design, but in their personalities too. I would purposely write whole stories just exploring their personality traits-like Stimpy's Invention or Ren Seeks Help.

OK, enough crap...to get to the point, I did write up a character treatment for Ren and Stimpy-not for myself, but for the Nickelodeon executives and for the artists and story crew on the show. Here it is, if you are interested.



I have one for the George Liquor characters too if you ever want me to post it. Let me know.