But I reasoned that just because you can't afford a lot of drawings, doesn't mean the drawings you do have can't be at least expressive and interesting.
So I took part of the production system I learned at Filmation and Hanna Barbera and added elements of what I liked about classic cartoons to come up with an efficient practical way of making your cartoons look like they are a lot more elaborate than what the budget actually allows.
In order to use this system, you have to do layouts in house; you can't send them overseas. This is the only way you can have any control over having specific customized poses, and individual artistic style - because the overseas animators are trained to not have any style, or not even to know what the story is about that they are animating. They have no personal claim to anything they work on and don't care.
Nickelodeon - when it built its own studio on my foundation used this system (as best as they could understand it). Then other studios copied their (my) system for awhile. It was the "creator driven) system. Since then, I think many studios have abandoned layouts in favor of drawing storyboards with clean lines and sending them overseas to be blown up for the animators. That makes the storyboard artist more concerned with cleanup than with telling a story. It's also much harder to do really specific interesting drawings when drawing postage stamp size. The system has eroded even though there are still many pretend Spumco Cartoons on TV.
Having a sensible production system is just about as important as having talented people on your staff. An illogical system undoes everyone's potential.
If you are gonna do layouts it's really important to have strong artists who are capable of customizing poses and not slipping into stock poses, otherwise it's a waste of money.
