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: 2007-05-11 04:40 am (UTC)- the injection that Count Nefarious gives Drew Blank was supposed to turn Drew into a toon! We did a lot of work on animations of toon Blanc interacting with the other characters, all of which was cut
- Count Nefarious and Fluffy Fluffy Bun Bun were eventually combined (I'm not certain how) into a single character.. a huge, horiffic rabbit monster thingy, which terrorized Drew and Flux until...
- they get it into a crazy machine that first sucks the colour of of a toon, then sucks out the line cleanup turning them into rough animation, then sucks that up turning them into a rough doodle, until finally they are completely gone.
I know there are other sequences that were cut, but I don't remember exactly what.. I worked on a lot of bits and pieces so I never got a good overview of what the whole storyline was supposed to be.
Nelvana was one of two studios working on the animation.. I believe we were initially just contracted to do layout and design but the animation coming back from Korea was just atrocious and had to be fixed.. in many cases just re-done from scratch. I bet it would've been cheaper just to do it all at Nelvana in the first place. -.-
According to Wikipedia there was plans for a sequel, using some of the material that was cut from the first one.. guess it just wasn't meant to be...