Directing Animation: a preview

My new book, Directing Animation, flies onto shelves November 2, and boy will its arms be tired. Don't get me wrong, I know I'm not Chuck Jones, Richard Williams, or Preston Blair. First of all, two of them are dead, and one of them is in his 70s. And, since I don't have an AARP card in my wallet (yet), I can't be in this august company. But, what I have tried to do is write a book from the perspective of a working director, with six series, a half-dozen pilots, dozens of shorts for Sesame Workshop, as well as a smattering of indie films behind him as well as just about every mistake you can make, some of them with career-altering consequences.

I recently had lunch with a young animator who told of working on an animation gig at a studio where her director stayed bunkered in his office, only coming out to yell at his team or give vague direction. The director made it clear each day how angry and disappointed he was and how he wished to fire everyone on the crew. Stories like this are why I thought there was a need for this book, not that I hope to reform an individual like that, but you never know.

The education of an animator––from school, books, and instructional dvds, is all geared toward learning the craft of animation (bouncing balls to walk cycles, and advanced acting). The trouble is that at some point a gifted animator might be promoted to director where her duties will then require management, communication, and leadership skills. So all of a sudden a good animator is now expected or assumed to be a good boss. That's the basic and eternal challenge: Who better to direct animation than someone who's come up through production, starting as an animator or a storyboard artist responsible for only his/her own work, and hopefully having a full understanding of the entire production so to be able to be able to see the big picture as a director must. But what prepares him or her to take on all the roles and responsibilities of management?

To write on this unexplored yet important aspect of directing animation was an enormous challenge, but as with my previous books, I didn't go it alone. I'm very grateful to include new interviews and stories from some of today's top animation directors including Cordell Barker, Signe Baumane, Don Hertzfeldt, Marv Newland, Janet Perlman, Bill Plympton (who also provided the cover illustration!), Michael Sporn, Mike Overbeck, PES, J.J. Sedelmaier, Dave Wasson, Ian Jones-Quartey, Robert Marianetti, David Palmer, Sue Perrotto, Rob Renzetti, David Wachtenheim, Tom Warburton, Paul Fierlinger, Yvette Kaplan, Nina Paley, Andrew Stanton, Tatia Rosenthal, Xeth Feinberg, Dan Meth, and Amy Winfrey.

I'm hopeful that Directing Animation can do some good in the industry (at the very least it's a juicy read full of anecdotes and warts-and-all stories), throwing an important spotlight on what might be the hardest part of directing animation to master: the people factor. Pixar legend Andrew Stanton told my NYU class that a journalist interviewed him about his upcoming experience directing the live-action feature film, John Carter on Mars, asking, "Are you nervous that you'll have to talk to people on set?" Stanton replied, "It's the same with animation. I don't talk to computers. They don't do the animation. I talk to people."

Trouble at the Top: The Producers' Dilemma

Despite the recent increase in available freelance work across town, those at the top and the bottom of the animation food chain are struggling the most. At the bottom are the recent grads, of course, seeking to break into a difficult industry at a challenging time. I've written a lot on this side of the topic, as have many other bloggers and commentators on the animation scene. So my focus here is the top level workers: the producers. Sure, there are producers working around town, some at Electric Company or other divisions of Sesame, some working on a few series orders at Out of the Blue, and some are attached to studios such as Curious Pictures or Flicker Lab. But, because of a recent 10-year low in NY area series production, many producers are between jobs.

This was first made really clear to me when I attended the last Kidscreen Summit in February, where many of the attendees (if they weren't network execs traveling on expense accounts) were out-of-work producers handing out business cards listing them as the presidents of their own (one-person) media "companies." The savviest among them were aligned with creators and pitching projects (or, as they call them, "intellectual properties"). It made for an interesting vibe because just two or three years before these producers were employed by networks or thriving studios. I could see both fear and excitement in their eyes as they operated in the uncharted waters of a changing media landscape mixed with an uncertain economic recovery.

In the recent past, more of us animation artists would have been connected to their current situation. After all, less series work means less work for all of us. But, animation artists have been more resilient in this climate than our producer brothers and sisters, and I think it's because even in downtimes like this, there's still a decent amount of opportunity through a variety of freelance, staff, and self-initiated work. After all, an animator can be their own producer, but a producer can't be their own animator. Any animation artist that freelances has some producer-like skills such as managing time, setting budgets, keeping schedules, making work deliveries, and communicating the daily status and needs of a job.

The other issue is that many of the studios still standing (in the wake of the decline or demise of big studios) are the small indie boutique-style studios built around one or two animators who, again, tackle producer chores themselves as a natural part of their business model. And, who could blame them? After all, a producer's salary could blow out a whole profit margin, putting a small studio in the red. Besides, small studio owners often go into business to do things their way, not to hire a boss for themselves.

Surely there will always be a need for producers as part of feature, TV series, and commercials productions but, the producers who survive these times of limited opportunity must not only be the best and most passionate at their job, but must also be something they didn't have to be during times of more plentiful work: savvy entrepreneurs and go-getters with a keen ability to build relationships, attach themselves to future work, and understand where the shifting mediascape is heading and how to stay relevant within it.

Burger Time

In my last blog post (scroll down if you're curious) I wrote about the increase in NY animation talent leaving town for other opportunities. I am firmly in the I "heart" NY camp, so I don't see myself leaving anytime soon. Instead, I try to use networking opportunities to bring work from outside of NYC to me. This lets me sometimes work for clients in faraway places without moving my life, and because I run my own home studio, it doesn't even require putting on shoes.

Right now I'm bidding on a job from a Texas-based firm and writing for a studio in Vancouver. In the past three years I also tackled series work, and a pair of pilots for studios in L.A. and San Francisco. The latter of which, I'm proud to say, has just spun into a full-fledged series coming this fall to Fox prime time: Loren Bouchard's Bob's Burgers (pictured above.)

I first met Bouchard when we were both jury members at The School of Visual Art's senior film show (The Dustys) in 2002. Being on a film or festival jury is a great opportunity to meet folks from diverse backgrounds or areas of expertise. This was important to me, especially since I was smack in the middle of my eight-year entrenchment at Nick Animation, where I worked with the same set of people for a great span of time. Bouchard was then living in the Boston area and working at Soup to Nuts (now owned by Scholastic) where he had a key role on such shows as Dr. Katz (my personal fave), Home Movies, Hey Monie, Science Court, and more. Later he branched out on his own and opened up a small studio in San Francisco, where he landed a series on Adult Swim, the 3D computer-animated Lucy Daughter of the Devil.

One of my favorite networking stories is from Codename: Kids Next Door creator, Tom Warburton, who, at the start of his career, wrote articles for ASIFA-East about local studios, thus putting him in direct touch with most of the employers in town. Much the way Warburton started his career, I've used the interview and research stage of my book projects as an excuse to meet or reconnect with some of my heroes. So while I was writing Animation Development: From Pitch to Production, I naturally thought of Bouchard as a good interview subject. Our reconnection dovetailed with his plans to test out a possible After Effects production model for a hypothetical future season of Lucy. Knowing that I worked primarily in AE, he brought me onboard as a consultant to help try out his new process/pipeline. It was only a couple of days of work but it was a good test of our working relationship.

After that we stayed in touch and a few months later Bouchard called with the great news that he scored a green light for his own prime time Fox network pilot. He asked me about the possibility of animating his pilot in the After Effects. I was very excited to be hired to supervise the animation production as it's lead animator, for which I also helped build the pipeline and process, find the crew, as well as schedule and assign the animators' work.

I rounded up six great NY-based animators for Bouchard to check out and he selected those that best matched his vision for the pilot. Joining me to animate the Bouchard's two month pilot production were the excellent animators Dale Clowdis, Dayna Gonzalez, and Hilda Karadsheh.

Bouchard directed us from San Francisco where he was encamped with a small crew, including the pilot's producer Ralph Guggenheim. New York animation is so dominated by preschool work that it's wonderful to have a chance to stretch your creative legs on something like a Fox prime time pilot for an adult audience. Bouchard's script was top notch, his voice actors were made up of a who's who of today's top comedians from stand up and improv, and the guy did his own musical score! Talk about talent...

Best of all, Bouchard had a complete vision for what he wanted out of the animation and explained it to us at the launch of each sequence. Whenever my animator was to start a new section, we had a three-way conference call so he could relay his vision for the action (including acting notes, story points, scene blocking, and comic beats). He preferred limited movement where a character only moved when it was funny or when absolutely necessary. Once an animator turned in a first pass, Bouchard followed up with detailed notes containing frame specific instructions, along with lots of appreciative compliments and encouragement. Our New York crew, each working from home, felt like part of a real crew. It was a dream scenario in every way.

We were all pretty blown away by how good the pilot turned out, so, it was no shock when we got the news that Fox picked up Bob's Burgers for a 13-episode season. Although Fox insisted that the project be animated in Los Angeles and Canada (where they were already set up to handle the series order), thus leaving New York out of the series production, we in the NY crew still shared in his victory and were very proud to have this pilot as part of our legacy.

Anyone can grow opportunities where you get a chance to work with new people from different parts of the country (or world) on exciting projects like this one. Networking is not only a survival skill, it's part of what makes this business fun. After all, who wouldn't want to schmooze with like-minded individuals working the same field with the same interests? Besides, without networking, us work-at-home folks might be pretty darn lonely.

The Frame Drain

Image from Chris Prynowski's MTV Animation series "Downtown," a production from 1999, the last era where work was abundant enough to temporarily slow the flow of NY animation talent heading west.

In the 1960s Europe faced what became known as "the brain drain" as individuals with technical skills or knowledge emigrated to the United States and other places where they could earn more for their skills. Since 2008 or 2009, New York City animation has undergone what might be called "the frame drain," as some key animation talent has moved to Los Angeles to continue careers or, in some cases, start them.

For example, Kat Morris and Rebecca Sugar, two of the most talented animation artists to graduate SVA in recent memory, both headed west to take advantage of the greater opportunities out there. Venture Bros. director Ian Jones-Quartey recently split as did N.Y. stalwart and Codename: Kids Next Door creator Tom Warburton. Another departure was the amazing husband-wife team of Toni Tysen and Danny (Kano) Kimanyen. Indie superstars PES and Patrick Smith also got out of Dodge (to La-La-Land and Singapore, respectively).

Now I've heard word that four more of our brightest and best are planning to scoot (two because of scoring a two-year artists' residence in Europe) and two because of L.A.'s sweet siren call. Even as a booster of the N.Y. animation scene, I can't deny the advantages that Hollywood provides. For one thing, there's an actual animation industry there. When you work on a TV series for Cartoon Network, for instance, you work in a building bearing its name. When the series job comes to an end, there will likely be another job for you on another series down the hall or on the next floor. There hasn't been anything like that in NY since MTV Animation quietly shut down in 2001.

All this departing talent of the past two or three years could sound pretty disheartening to those of us remaining in the Big Apple, if not for one important thing: the natural renewal that is already in progress. Animation, like many industries, seems to have up cycles and down cycles.

At this point in time, I can happily report that most of my peers have either full or part time work. Even the most pessimistic among us would admit that things were a lot worse as recently as a year ago. How well this translates to opportunity for recent graduates is yet to be seen. I suspect there is still a long way to go in that area, but the arrival of new studios such as a Saatchi & Saatchi’s commercial animation division and the July 2010 arrival of the New York branch of Chris Prynowski's successful L.A.-based studio Titmouse, Inc., gives us reason to believe there's even more opportunity brewing for the second half of the year. Knock on wood.

Besides, New Yorkers departing for the West Coast is nothing new. It's been happening since Walt Disney first put California on the animation map. All of us animation folk are gypsies of a sort; whether we pack up and head west or not, we all exist from job to job, opportunity to opportunity. And, no matter what path we each take, we're still a part of the extended community that is New York animation.

Formative Stories

*image above, my Long Island grammar school, also known as the location of my first commercial art/business venture.

Because I'm currently co-writing Bill Plympton's "Art of" book, I'm spending a lot of my time editing the words of the master showman of indie animation. Working on the manuscript has caused a couple of stories from my past to bubble up in my mind, and I thought I'd share them here.

The first steps of my creative/business life was producing and selling my own comic books, while still in the fifth grade. I charged five cents for each Xeroxed five-page issue, which were mostly my takes or spoofs on Batman, He-Man, and Inspector Gadget. In one month I raked in $50 of sales (that's a lot of sales at five cents each!), which kept my belly full of gummy bears, and my hands full of baseball cards and real comic books the whole summer.

I remember once, when I was selling comics at lunchtime in the school cafeteria, the much respected and feared phys-ed teacher walked in and grabbed my merchandise out of my hands. My heart thumped loud in my chest as he flipped through a comic sporting his fierce poker face. Then he roared loud enough to get everyone's attention, silencing the room by announcing, "David Levy is selling comics! You should buy one."

But other teachers and administrators were not so kind. One teacher chastised me for my comics' poor spelling and grammar, and the assistant principal barred me from selling the comics in the school. Happily I took that literally and moved my sales operation to the school playground where every recess I had a line of kids (their pockets heavy with quarters) ready to buy my latest issues. My success was not lost on two other artistic students who tried to compete with their own comic book empires.

I went home and complained to my dad about my new rivals, and his answer was to fire up his compressor and add a dash of air-brushed color to adorn the covers of my comics. Now I had something my competitors didn't have. I needn't have worried. My rivals only managed to produce an issue or two, while I had stacks of new comics each week. Eventually the assistant principal caught me selling again and explained that the school playground was still the school grounds, thus marking an end to my comic book adventure.

So what? I had animation on the brain, anyhow. And I went through a pretty typical animator's right of passage, attempting to make my own animated cartoons on the family super 8MM camera as well as on a new circa-1985 video camera. The video camera couldn't shoot a single exposure so the film route was the better choice. By the end of high school I made about six one-minute cartoons, the final two of which were reasonably sophisticated by my standards at the time.

One day I went to my high school's AV department (of which, I was NOT a member, thank you very much) and ordered an 8-mm projector to be delivered to my Spanish class. Imagine my teacher's surprise when, right on schedule, there was a knock on the door, and a projector cart was wheeled in. "There must be some mistake," the teacher protested. I stood up and confessed that I had ordered it because I thought it would be fun if I could show my new cartoon to the class. The teacher, a fairly stern woman, was caught temporarily off guard and curiosity got the better of her.

"Okay, thread it up." she allowed. Before you could say, “Rushmore's Max Fischer,” I had projected two cartoons, and even though the second one got stuck and started to burn, it still counted as my first public animation screening. Just as you don't have to ask permission to make an animated film, I found that a similarly bold move could help get the film seen by an audience. The best part was that I got to try out being an animated-film maker early on, and thus could confirm that I truly had been bitten by the bug (even if my talent had a long way to catch up to my enthusiasm––and still does!).

What are your formative stories? Feel free to share below in the comments!

Bad Writing

*drawing of Fred Seibert by Dan Meth

If I stacked all the TV scripts and pitch bibles I've written on the floor it would be taller than a foot stool but shorter than a dwarf giraffe. And, it would smell like chocolate. Okay, that last part makes no sense, but you get the idea. Frederator president and executive producer Fred Seibert and I don't agree on everything, but one bit of wisdom I got from him is the idea that animators have a lot of trouble writing scripts because they haven't written enough.

"How many drawings have you made in your life?" he'd ask an artist pitching him a project. "Now, how many scripts have you written?" Obviously most artists spend more time drawing than writing, accounting for the weak writing and the lack of a engaging storytelling in many pitches (many of mine included!). Fred's premise is that a typical would-be pitcher has to get a lot of bad writing out of the way before they can produce quality scripts--just like the artist has to spend many years making bad drawings as part of the his/her development.

Writing scripts for my pitch bibles has helped me develop as a writer. Like most self-development, it happened on my dime and schedule, and there was a long slog where I wasn't sure if it was getting me anywhere. But, then something interesting happened with my development deal at Disney in 2007: I became a paid TV writer! In all I turned in five short scripts for the project. Right on the heals of my Disney deal (the "House of Mouse" did not option my project beyond one year), that same executive parlayed me onto writing for another internal project. In a way that meant even more than the opportunity to write the scripts for my own deal because when it's your creation, nobody knows it better than you. So to be trusted to write for someone else on their project seemed like a major victory.

Since then, I've written paid treatments for two more properties. One was for a famous children's clothing empire, and the other was for Mr. Magoo! As a lifelong UPA fan, I considered the Magoo job a dream come true. The opportunity came after a casual cup of coffee with a producer on the series, which is being produced in France for French public television. When I turned in the treatment for the series, it was accepted without a single change, but I have to assume that the resulting series could go in a very different direction.

My latest TV writing gig concluded last week. A major kids channel, producing a few pilots to a set educational curriculum, reached out to established studios to secure pitches. One of the studios enlisted me as a part of their core creative team, and I ended up taking on the main writing duties as well as some art direction and overall project guidance. As this was speculative work for a pitch, it was six weeks of unpaid time, but I'm connected to the project should it go forward, and very proud of the creation our team turned in. Tackling the writing duties on this project felt like a culmination of all those years of scripts and pitches. Not only did all that writing time logged in help snag me this opportunity, it also gave me the confidence to write with conviction and trust my instincts.

I never took a creative writing class, so my own scripts and pitches have been my boot camp. The same opportunity is open to everyone. I know this concluding thought is beating a dead horse (particularly if you've read my other posts and books), but whatever we hope to achieve in this industry is based on the work we ourselves do. Nobody else has the power to make us anything or deny us anything... I find that this awareness also smells like chocolate.

While we all know that we can't get better at something without practice, the tricky part is that we don't usually make ourselves practice. It takes a willingness to go through a "bad writing" stage. You have to give your self permission to fail many times. Besides, learning how to handle failure is good practice too.

Saturday Morning Conga

*image above from a new short created by me and Xeth Feinberg.

It's Saturday morning as I write this post and I've just finished animating the same three-character conga dance for the third time on my new indie film, a collaboration with filmmaker Xeth Feinberg. A few months ago I tackled a freelance job which had me animating a dance between two potatoes––something I had to animate twice to get right. In both the freelance job and my indie film, the problem was the same: I first animated the characters separately and then attempted to combine them later in After Effects. It didn't work then and it didn't work now. Perhaps this time the lesson will stick.

A while back, indie animator Pat Smith told my SVA career class the story behind his debut indie film Drink: He had to wake up early each day to steal a few hours to work on the film before reporting to his job at MTV Animation. It's hard to imagine a better example of the sacrifice it takes to make indie films, to fit them in to an already busy work life. You have to be a little bit crazy to embark on such an adventure. Only passion can force you to stay on course in light of every other possible way you could be spending your time. How else could I justify spending a lovely Spring morning animating a Frankenstein monster, a little girl with a cat on her head, and a European Villager doing a conga? Insert dirty joke punch line here.

I didn't plan on making this film. Xeth Feinberg and I had co-created an educational series pitch for ages 5-7 that we thought had legs. Although we had lots of good meetings before enthusiastic executives, there was no deal forthcoming. Usually one just stops right there and moves on to other things, but Xeth and I thought a bit of animation could help us demonstrate our idea even better. That bit of animation grew into a four and half-minute film which we are finishing up the end of this month.

So, on the third try, is the conga perfect? Certainly not. But, it's better. Nothing in the film "perfect." And, that's a huge part of the point of our film. Dora the Explorer is perfect in its own way... and perfectly successful. And, that same perfection––where every drawing is on model and every episode is sewn up in a rigid formula does not appeal to me. Yet, at the same time I admire its success and impact in the market. And, I appreciate that it provides an exact opposite area for Xeth and I to explore.

Why can't an educational series be character-based (in other words, based on an interesting character) instead of using characters as wide-eyed blinking props? And, while Dora is not a flash or After Effects puppet-based show, it might as well be, because the drawing is so contained and predictable. Instead, Xeth and I have made a film full of off-model drawings that celebrate hand-drawn animation in all its clumsy glory (in our hands, that is).

Will anything come from this odd hybrid of a self-produced pilot and an indie film? I have no idea. All I know is that it was fun to make and along the way I discovered how much I like to work with Xeth Feinberg. Success can be defined many ways. As my friend Elliot Cowan says: "You better like your film, because you might be the only one that does." In that category, we are already successful.