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.