A shorts program should allow the directors and cartoonists to try things out, to experiment and make some mistakes that they can learn from. If each crew only gets to do one short, that's a total waste.
You need to keep a crew going for awhile to see if they learn and get better. Instead of having 20 shorts in a year and 20 units, have 2 units who do 10 shorts each. That makes a lot more sense for a number of reasons. Here's two:
1) you can't find 20x 10 per crew people (200) who have lots of talent. It waters down the potential of each unit. Just hire a handful of really good talent and let them make a bunch of cartoons until they get good.
Tex Avery didn't make a hit with the first cartoon he made. Neither did Walt Disney or anyone else. All the most successful people in history needed practice, experience and the opportunity to make some mistakes.
Of course if you have a unit that ONLY makes mistakes and never gets to the point where the audience likes their cartoons, then fire the director and try again.
2) having 10 or 20 crews (too many) means you never develop a studio style or personality. Warner Bros. started with 1 crew, then went to 2, then 3 and then 4. The whole time they were developing a style and attitude that the audience could recognize and anticipate. They were "building a brand".
HAVE ONLY ONE EXECUTIVE - A CAPITALIST WHO WANTS TO SUCCEED
Looney Tunes had the best production system in history. The one most guaranteed for success. There was only 1 executive - Leon Schlesinger. Leon had 2 traits that made him so successful:
1) He was greedy.
2) He liked to laugh.
If you could make him laugh, then he was smart enough to know that the audience would laugh too. The more you kept him laughing, the more time off he could take to go to the racetrack and spend all the money you made for him.
Use common sense and let talent thrive
Today's executives don't want to make any money for their companies because they don't own the company. So instead, they like to SPEND money - like water! They hire more executives who all get involved in interrupting the creative process. A bunch of hippie communists who can't make decisions so want to spread the blame amongst other equally uncertain slobs.The money wasted on pseudo-science could fund more cartoons and get to finding stars faster
They not only can't make decisions amongst themselves, they then go and spend ridiculous sums of money on voodoo science called "Focus testing" and "Market Research". This makes each short cost 10 times what it would if they just hired an experienced and funny cartoonist, gave him a unit of talented cartoonists and let them make 5 or 10 shorts, letting each one get better. You shouldn't expect the first characters the crew creates to be a hit either. It takes time to find and develop good characters. How long did it take Warner's to "discover" Bugs Bunny? They went through a few dud characters before they even got to Porky Pig.
But once they found their style, they were on a roll and created money-making character after character.
WHAT'S EVEN MORE IMPORTANT THAN IDEAS AND CHARACTERS?
The talented people who are able to constantly produce new ideas and characters. Today's execs seem to think ideas exist in a vacuum. That an idea is either a "good idea" or a "bad idea", so they go through young cartoonists like crazy trying to find the one who has the latest good idea, rather than developing talent and a whole studio system that allows people to gain experience, work together and try new things on an ongoing basis, the whole time improving their skills without interference from amateurs.
Bugs Bunny is a good idea, right? Then why has no one been able to make a good Bugs Bunny cartoon since the 1950s? Because other people with less experience, talent or time to work together tried to compete with what took years of a long gone logical system to produce.
CREWS NEED TO GET USED TO WORKING TOGETHER
The crews also need to learn to work together which is very important. Even a great established director needs more than one cartoon to get used to a new crew and have them get used to him. Making a few cartoons lets them find out what each other's strengths and weaknesses are. Like sports teams, they should be able to trade team members who don't fit in with another unit that might suit them better.
The talented people who are able to constantly produce new ideas and characters. Today's execs seem to think ideas exist in a vacuum. That an idea is either a "good idea" or a "bad idea", so they go through young cartoonists like crazy trying to find the one who has the latest good idea, rather than developing talent and a whole studio system that allows people to gain experience, work together and try new things on an ongoing basis, the whole time improving their skills without interference from amateurs.
Bugs Bunny is a good idea, right? Then why has no one been able to make a good Bugs Bunny cartoon since the 1950s? Because other people with less experience, talent or time to work together tried to compete with what took years of a long gone logical system to produce.
CREWS NEED TO GET USED TO WORKING TOGETHER
Ways to waste money that could be better spent directly making cartoons
Execs today spend a fortune worrying about each short - rewriting it 20 times, testing the damn thing, writing storybibles, taking luxurious treks around the world to "creativity summits"
having too many discussions about the characters and their motivations - instead of planning the big picture and building strong crews and a studio personality. LA is just stuffed with talent more than capable of doing what Looney Tunes did. So is Toronto and Ottawa. -and Vancouver, as someone just reminded me - the home of the great Carbunkle Studio and many other animators. It's the system that's messing it up.Creative growth happens naturally if you just set up the system to let it. Like Leon did.
Leon would give each director and crew a year at least to see how they did. If they did well, they stayed on and kept improving. If they made boring pictures, he fired them and replaced them with some eager new director (who had worked his way up the ladder by assisting, animating, writing gags and learning the whole process.) He didn't hire inexperienced kids off the street and put them in charge of his own loyal experienced animators just to kill their loyalty.
Everything about the Looney Tunes system made perfect logical common sense. It was geared for success at the least cost, and it achieved it, both in terms of developing the best talent, and creating the best, most and longest lasting cartoon characters.
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So when execs say they want to discover the "next John", they need to understand that I wasn't 20 years old when I made the Ren and Stimpy Show and I had learned a lot of stuff on my own (since there was no supportive studio system in the 80s) and made some mistakes that were also valuable and helped lead to the success of my first self-created show.
HOW I LEARNED FROM THE OPPORTUNITY TO MAKE MISTAKES
In 1987 I got my first shot at directing from Ralph Bakshi. I hired the crew and we made the first real cartoons in 25 years. (meaning actually created by cartoonists and using the medium)
http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2007/10/mighty-mouse-show-presents-tribute-to.html
I adapted my layout system to the show and added new production systems that combined the realities of TV budgets with the creatively more efficient classic Looney Tunes Unit system.
The show was innovative and a cult hit but not mainstream and popular enough for CBS to keep on, so I scratched my head and sat down and figured out why not.
I didn't consult any focus groups; I just used common sense and reasoned it out. Some cartoons got bigger laughs than others, and it seemed to me that they were the ones that had the most personality and structure.
I swore if I ever got to make my own cartoons, I would concentrate more on the characters, which is what I like the most anyway.
So when Ren and Stimpy sold, I already had a lot of experience, had made creative mistakes and learned from them. It wasn't merely talent that made the show work. It was experience guided by logic. And weird ideas, of course...but controlled weird ideas. And PRACTICE!
I also had a team of great artists that I already had worked with. We knew each others' styles and strengths, so I took advantage of that on Ren and Stimpy.
The show was a smash hit, put Nickelodeon on the map, bought their studio and put cable cartoons in business. All this with no marketing, no focus testing and only 1 executive. A very good deal for Nickelodeon and it killed Saturday Morning Cartoons (which were already pretty unhealthy). And then of course Nick didn't give it a chance to make further money and cut it short. God how they hate to make money the easy way. Now they have been copying it for years using theories, market research, voodoo, soccer Moms and clones and the "formula" gets watered down and the clones get replaced by new clones after every few months. Then they wonder "where is the next Ren and Stimpy?"
They could have had 20 more by now if they just let it happen while we were on a roll. Instead they waited 10 years and spent a hundred times the cost until Sponge Bob snuck in through the back door under the radar. Now of course they want the next Sponge Bob "but not so weird". So why don't they get the Sponge Bob crew to do it?
Because that would make too much common sense. Get other people with no or little experience to imitate it superficially, then apply market voodoo to it and make the same mistakes over and over again and watch the quality and originality get filtered out year by year till we end up with intensely simplified formulaic copies of what was once alive, exciting and evolving.
Of course now the question in everybody's mind is probably:
Where do you get all around experience in each department today?
Since most of the essential work is done overseaes...
continued next post...
