Monday, April 06, 2009

goals of a shorts program 7 - Create experience in house by bringing animation back

Sorry that I haven't done much writing lately. I have been madly putting together a George presentation for a pitch tomorrow, so have only had time to put up some pictures.

Here's a truncated version of the next installment of the shorts program series:


To Give Cartoonists Real Experience


A sensible shorts program wouldn't be sweeping the nation looking for the next inexperienced kid who has a an executive worthy idea. Yet this is what the networks do over and over again and never learn from it. They purposely look for people with little to zero experience. They think that these young prodigies will be untainted by knowledge so will therefore be more freely creative.

I say Hogwash! Let's do the most sensible thing, the THING that we have been avoiding for the last 35 years. The thing our business is called: Animation

Bring Back The Goddamn Animation

People in America need to learn from the ground floor up. They need to assist, then animate, then do layout, storyboards etc... until they gain enough experience to know how cartoons and their various departments work together.

And I don't mean animating it in flash. I mean drawing the stuff. For real.

The argument against this is that it's too expensive, and that may be true at some small places, but not at the majors. They have tons of money that doesn't ever make it to the screen. They just toss it out the window by spending it on too many execs, market research, bureaucracy, development departments, executive trips around the world, retreats, indecision, rewrites, too many department heads etc. etc.

Take that money and start a unit system. Put it directly on the screen with no waste and into the crews so that they can learn to make cartoons well.

Hell, HB made shorts for $3,000 when they started. With the budgets the big TV studios have today, they could do much better than that (although with less experienced animators). But that's the point!

Let's give them some experience. The shorts program IS the development budget. Start with the funniest most experienced director you can find and let him hire the artists he wants and start making cartoons. This is pure logic. There is no mystery science to this. No Hippie thinking. It's the quickest cheapest road to success and domination of the field.

Build Crews and let them get used to each other (Director's Teams)
Experiment Through Trial and Error, and Learn from mistakes and successes.

Crews should be able to remain together for stretches of time and over a bunch of cartoons as they try out assorted characters, not just one set.

More to come...