the road to disaster
May. 9th, 2007 12:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
egypturnash"The Simpsons Movie" is coming out in two and a half months. Its writers still barely seem to know what happens in it. They've been working on the script since 'late 2003'. They're throwing entire animated scenes on the cutting room floor.
The poor bastards who actually have to draw this endlessly-revised shit are, of course, barely mentioned in this story. Except for a quote from Groening about the suppressed tension of the animators every time they make them try to twist in yet another direction.
From outside, this sounds like exactly the same kind of obsessive revisionism that I saw happening on "Ren And Stimpy Adult Party". There were episodes that turned into two-and-a-half show epics due to endless storyboard "improvements", eating up all the budget and time, leaving no room to actually animate it well. The bar for the Simpsons is lower, in animation and drawing quality, and the budget is higher, so they can just drag in more people to hack out half-assed scenes and slap some shadows on top of them to make it look 'cinematic' and probably get away with it.
But I bet there's more than a few people in the trenches of this show who're going to have the last spark of giving a damn for animation burnt out by this death march. There're going to be scenes someone put their heart and soul into, that set some new milestone for them, that get tossed because these fucking writers can't nail down a story in the boards and stick to it. Yeah, let's have a widescreen shot of every character who ever appeared in the show. Maybe we'll cut it later.
Fuck. In another world where I'd iterated on the test for the show a couple more times, I might be one of those people. I could see settling into a comfortable rut on that endless show and putting enough into the odd scene to get asked to work on the movie, and actually really love a few scenes of my own. Would I get to see my work up there on the big screen? It wouldn't be down to my well-honed skill; it'd be up to the whims of the writing committee. That's a horrible place to imagine being in.
The poor bastards who actually have to draw this endlessly-revised shit are, of course, barely mentioned in this story. Except for a quote from Groening about the suppressed tension of the animators every time they make them try to twist in yet another direction.
From outside, this sounds like exactly the same kind of obsessive revisionism that I saw happening on "Ren And Stimpy Adult Party". There were episodes that turned into two-and-a-half show epics due to endless storyboard "improvements", eating up all the budget and time, leaving no room to actually animate it well. The bar for the Simpsons is lower, in animation and drawing quality, and the budget is higher, so they can just drag in more people to hack out half-assed scenes and slap some shadows on top of them to make it look 'cinematic' and probably get away with it.
But I bet there's more than a few people in the trenches of this show who're going to have the last spark of giving a damn for animation burnt out by this death march. There're going to be scenes someone put their heart and soul into, that set some new milestone for them, that get tossed because these fucking writers can't nail down a story in the boards and stick to it. Yeah, let's have a widescreen shot of every character who ever appeared in the show. Maybe we'll cut it later.
Fuck. In another world where I'd iterated on the test for the show a couple more times, I might be one of those people. I could see settling into a comfortable rut on that endless show and putting enough into the odd scene to get asked to work on the movie, and actually really love a few scenes of my own. Would I get to see my work up there on the big screen? It wouldn't be down to my well-honed skill; it'd be up to the whims of the writing committee. That's a horrible place to imagine being in.
no subject
Date: 2007-05-09 05:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-05-09 05:23 pm (UTC)This is something that Actors have had to put up with for some time. You can put your heart into a role, and end up with most or all of it on the cutting room floor. Animation hasn't had as much of it due to the expense of production leading to most of the cutting happening at the animatics.