Disney Animation Veteran Gives Inspiring Wisdom

there's a great expression they use at disney which is how can i plus this when it arrives in my department or on my desk how can i make this even better if somebody's sense of power or achievement or doing their job comes from making other people feel miserable i think they've misunderstood the job description yeah here's a peculiar thing it doesn't matter what country i'm in it doesn't matter how many students are in the group if i go around and i say what would you like to do if somebody says to me i want to be a character designer my first question is who are your favorite character designers and the answer is always silence if you can't produce work that is interesting if you are not interested absolutely we should be visually curious and visually inspired and there is nothing inspiring about a flat empty white wall welcome to this much anticipated part two of my podcast with frasier mclean fresno mclean began his career in animation with his work on who framed roger rabbit 1988 he has since worked for passion pictures cambridge animation systems teleimagination and disney on such films as space jam and disney's tarzan his book setting the scene is an essential book on animation layout and if you are able to get your hands on one i would highly recommend that you read it we've got a really fascinating conversation coming up but before we get into it i want to address all the video creators who are listening or anyone who has the potential to be a video creator this podcast episode is sponsored by storyblocks storyblocks is helping creators to bring stories to life by providing an unlimited library of over 1 million royalty-free high quality video audio and images through cost-effective subscription plans storyblocks unlimited all access plan gives you unlimited downloads of everything in their library that way you can try out multiple options quickly without worrying about being charged any extra i love that about their service in addition to their hd and 4k footage they also have vast libraries of audio sound effects music which by the way you can use in your video productions without worries of copyright images and after effects templates these are all extremely useful libraries to have access to as creatives and these assets are all under the same subscription plan you pay once you get in you have the whole buffet for someone like me running an independent youtube channel stock footage makes sense in a lot of situations it would cost me so much to travel to some of these locations and shoot these myself or even something like creating a lens flare i could try to construct my own lens flare but it's much more efficient if i use this fast library of stock footage to find the exact anamorphic lens flare i need which already exists so click the link in the description or go to storyblocks.com forward slash howard williams hurst to learn more about storyblocks now let's get on to this part two interview with fraser mclean enjoy you know who andreas deja is yeah yeah okay so andreas deja and myself we're roughly the same age and andreas the first time i met andreas he was one of the animators that came from disney to london to work on roger rabbit and on friday nights when we'd be in the embry castle pub in camden i'd you know i sort of know andreas a bit to say hello to but he doesn't really know me from a crack in the pavement but anyway uh when jungle book was released which was at the end of the 1960s its release in scotland i would have been about eight or nine years old and i remember going to see the film and they sold more tickets than they had seats it was packed and i went home just thinking oh my god that was wonderful at exactly the same time when it was released in germany for the first time andreas deja and his parents were sitting watching it in a cinema in germany and andreas went home and didn't just say that was wonderful can i save up and we'll go back and see it a second time he wrote a letter to disney and said when i'm older i want to work for you what should i do wow and disney wrote back and they wrote back and pretty much just said draw draw keep drawing let us know when you're older and we'll look at your drawings that's amazing and then i became a legend in anime exactly exactly and he was you know mentored by because all many of the nine old men were still alive so when i was working on tarzan you know joe grant was still alive mark davis frank thomas ollie johnson uh ward kimball these you know and even you know the eric larson william wrightham and all those guys were you know so a lot of the people in andreas's era you know bill croyer and all those people were it was the nine old men who taught them so it was a question of aspirational what you imagine is possible and one of the things that i repeatedly have to describe to students because this is important my experience of animation as a child was i was a consumer of animation you know occasionally i mean like other people i would make little flip books on the corners of my judges in school or stuff but it was never presented as something that you could do when you were older it was something that was done by people on the other side of the planet and when i was growing up the 1960s you didn't get on a plane we didn't travel the people who got on planes hardly anybody traveled anywhere by air it was the most insanely you know expensive process we had a kid in our class whose dad ran a stereo supply shop so he had a little bit of disposable income and he took his family uh to disneyland one summer and when my friend came back from it he was like a god in the playground not just because he'd been to disneyland he'd been on a plane and mostly i remember the quite the conversations where half of it was about what it was like to be in disneyland half of it was like what was it like to fly and of course so when we came home from school hannah barbera would be on bbc and i we grew up with only three television channels there's bbc one bbc two and itv and one of the things that was helpful for me when my career did start in the 80s was that channel 4 was launched in 1982 the year before i graduated and its whole remit was to make possibilities available to voices and creative people from the marginal communities who were not usually represented or given access to mainstream television media so channel 4 was really important but when i was growing up there were only three channels so you would come home and it was scheduled so that top cat or the flintstones or whatever would be on when you got home from school on a tuesday evening there was a double bill on bbc one of old tom and jerry the mgm tom and jerry not the the later ones and my dad always made a special thing about watching those and we would all sit around and that that was amazing and even as a child i could look at uh fred flintstone and barney rubble and tom and jerry and i could see there was a huge qualitative difference i couldn't necessarily articulate why one of them looked better or fancier but as god is my witness we were all watching television in black and white until the mid 1970s in the uk but the only time you ever saw disney was at holiday time christmas and easter and in the summer they would have these big disney specials and sometimes on the weekend they would buy in the disney wonderful world of color and you'd see a little bit of the behind the scenes but you couldn't buy and take home a disney movie on vhs until much much later so we didn't have vhs we didn't have download some people would buy super 8 copies of sequences of the movies or you could buy toys add cartridges of them but you couldn't take disney home so you have to believe me when i described this but people would buy the radio times ahead of christmas or ahead of the easter holidays and they would find out when disney time was going to be on and they would have three minutes from pinocchio three minutes from cinderella and whatever the new movie was and while that was being broadcast the streets were empty if you looked out the window everybody timed their everybody was at home because you couldn't record it and watch it later you had to be home you had to be watching it and you had these different levels of disney was operating on people's feelings and emotions and whatever at a high level of intensity that simply wasn't the case with so i had this like three levels of like hannah barbera mgm and disney was like crack for the eyeballs and it was just people were so it was just completely don't do drugs i'm not i'm just saying that figuratively it's so when i went to art college i was not imagining that my desire to be able to draw like velazquez or raphael or michelangelo or any of these people that didn't have a context in which to thrive but the teachers mostly not all of them but the majority of the teachers that i came into contact with in my second third and fourth year when you had to specialize were extremely negative and unsupportive and the external uh tutors that came in were equally unsupported why you as well because because i did not have a style what i was doing was not cool or edgy and all of the illustrators that we were supposed to look up to i can tell you their names you won't know who they are they were famous at the time and they were winning prizes and they were doing all this kind of stuff but i was repeatedly told that my drawing was boring traditional whatever and i began doing work on videotape partly to avoid the confrontation but also because i really wanted to work in moving image and they bought all this equipment they didn't know what to do with and i didn't stop doing those kinds of drawings i just stopped showing them to my tutors i don't call them boring i call them timeless you know they they're gonna remain good drawings so i wound up going into training as a film editor so all my drawings went into a big portfolio under my bed and i was carting them around with me and i took them to london with me when i moved to london so the morning that i saw the job advertisement with the little picture of mickey mouse at his desk saying walt disney animation is looking for talented animation personnel to work on a movie in london combining live action i didn't even send artwork i just wrote into them and i said i want to work on this project and i've been working in film editing for all these years and whatever and they didn't reply so i got the phone number and i called up and i was put through to a young don hahn who went on to produce you know beauty the beast and lion king and he pretty much got my letter out of the trash can and he went through it and he said well we really don't need anybody the cutting room here is really smart you might hold on you went to the art school in glasgow can you draw and i said yeah and he said if you've got figure drawing perspective i've got a ton of that stuff and literally two hours after that phone conversation all the drawings that my tutors told me were got me hired by disney and all these years later i have never once been invited by the glasgow school of art to go back and talk to their students about what i've done because according to the the ethos of the management of the glasgow school of art because i didn't go off into the turner prize conceptual art world i'm basically a corporate media so i can just i i'm a point of embarrassment to them um so i you know i've never felt like celebrated or famous or whatever back back home it's like and the crazy thing is when the book came out i think almost by accident they used to use my book on the glasgow school of art website to tell their students how to make their official harvard style reference uh things for their thesis or their dissertation that's the only time my name has ever been mentioned in the hallowed halls of the glasgow school of art since then so your question about teaching in my view or well all the teaching i do is based on a very simple idea stuff i wish somebody had told me that's it yeah i do not see it as my role to judge i'm not there to police what they do i'm not there to make people feel awful and what i find a lot of the time is when particularly when it comes to feedback because this is the other thing because the universities make so much money of people coming in on these courses many of the colleges don't have a portfolio requirement for entry so i will be asked to teach sometimes almost 30 people in one room where maybe five or six of them are at an acceptable level of competence with draftsmanship everybody else is going i can't draw i don't really want to be in this class because it's like oh well the computers do all the work so i don't really need to be able to draw but when you get people into a context where you can encourage them to make a mark and you can give them feedback that will give them something to build on most of them up until that point in their lives every time somebody has given them feedback on a drawing they've told them it's or they told me they've told them what's wrong with it i'm like i already know what's wrong with it i want you to tell me what's right that i can actually where's the values that do you see any value in that and i think that our role our responsibility in a teaching position is to encourage yeah that's it yeah period to me you know a blank piece of paper starts at zero that's zero it's neutral and then from there you put a mark on and that that becomes positive it adds so any drawing is an addition and that's where i start with it and yeah the only the only bad drawing is one that you're too scared to do going back to this question of fear or you know like what will people think if it's bad well you know chuck jones said you know we've all got thousands of bad drawings inside us we only get to the good ones by getting the bad ones out of the way yeah and you know that's just eternally the case that you know i mean i i did more drawing in 2019 here in guadalajara than i've ever done in my life yeah because i was doing it from a point of happiness i was sitting there drawing these amazing musicians while they were performing and having the time in my life with a biro a standard you know not trying to do anything fancy in terms of technique but capturing movement emotion performance all that kind of stuff but i think that too many people because the academic system requires giving people marks out of 10 for what they're doing they are there to police people's behavior and their timing of their work and to act as judges and i don't like either of those roles i don't want to be a policeman i don't want to be a judge i want to identify what it i want to find out what people are hoping to be able to do and then whatever it is that i can do or say or point them in the direction of to encourage them in that direction that's what i'm paid to do and i often make it clear to the students that the transaction financially if they are paying in any shape or form to be in that room with me they are my employer i don't see the i don't see the university of the institution as being my employer so if they don't get what they want or need from me they had to tell me because that's the transaction as i see it you know i they are paying for my rent and my beer yeah and i i you know if they don't get what they need then i've i've failed in what that i've been contracted to do but i don't see it as my job to make people feel awful i i just and i i'm in my experience in all the places that i've taught where i've had i've been around other people or in a context where i've watched uh teachers or instructors making students feel foolish or miserable or small in front of their friends i that always sticks in my craw i just think that's it's an indication of a lack of self-confidence on yeah yeah it's insecurity it's got to be yeah how do you think if a student would fix that uh if they've been damaged by you know bad teaching would you say it is just trying to get back to having fun with the drawing yeah that's an interesting question because in effect it's a kind of bookend to what we were talking about a moment ago where i was saying well you know don't trust all the people that tell you how wonderful you are on yeah instagram i think it's one of the reasons that people do rush to the internet to get reassured that they're not awful people because they spent the day being told yet so obviously we're more likely to listen to people that be nice to us i think it's here's the thing um if you think of it in terms of music when somebody is singing you know when they're not hitting the note there isn't a question about it it's a frequency you're either on the note or you're sharp or you're flat that's it yeah and in most instances if you look at three-point perspective or if you look at anatomy or you look at proportion where you look at depth or any of those things one of the reasons it makes it still and always will make sense to draw what you see you know there's all this thing about or you mustn't try and be a camera you mustn't try and be photographic uh i don't agree because the only way to try and be a camera is to cover one of your eyes a camera only sees from one viewpoint everything that we see is stereo optical so we are constantly understanding distance depth the relationship between things and we are translating from three dimensions into two i think where people have been harassed or criticized into thinking that what they're doing is not good the important thing is to step back and say well okay why am why am i individual why am i doing this what what is this this drawing that i'm trying to create or this scene that i'm trying to animate or this world that i'm trying to design or this piece of architecture i'm trying to capture what is why am i doing this and this is where the whole idea comes in of being able to get people to transcend normal everyday life in a theater or in a cinema there's a when in the when i was writing the book i had to do a lot of research to discover the source of the expression the willing suspension of disbelief where you you give yourself over to the person writing the book or performing the play to say i know this is artifice i know this is fake but for the next couple of hours and this is the contract that we enter into if we go into the cinema when we can go back to cinemas and we buy a ticket to see this week's movie the contract we entered into is i give you my money you are going to lie to me for the next two hours and make me believe that these characters exist make me believe that what they're going through matters and make me believe that that is a world that i also want to enter into and the willing suspension of disbelief is extremely powerful it's our our willingness to enter into a narrative on a page or or whatever but when we are making images i i go back in my animation history curriculum to a book by mark azamer who's a paleontologist in france and he has taken the trouble to use these high resolution images of many of the multiple level animal drawings that are found in the caves in france and in spain and what they found by separating these off and key framing them is that they animate wow and these are tens of thousands of years old and if you go to mark azama and the praise duo do cinema on youtube you'll see it and it's you know the mountain lion doing this it's the buffalo flipping its tail it's the horse it's this whole walk cycles from tens of thousands of years ago so we didn't we we have been studying movement as a matter of life and death for tens of thousands of years and one of the things that i ask students is okay if i say cave paintings what's the image that comes into your head they'll go animals okay what's the viewpoint what what's the angle from which these animals are depicted oh from the side why because the only people who knew what one of these animals looked like face on did not live long enough to make an image of what they they were looking at so it gets back to this idea of whether we have to draw or play music or flavor our food or whatever it's about are we alive yes we're alive so what does that require of us you know what is the what's the deal like we have breath in our bodies we have a pulse we have blood we have eyeballs we can see this in philosophical terms if you look at the universe it's a big dark empty place full of not much else and so far we we seem to be the only ones alive and i'm not so bothered about the idea of us being intelligent life because we're clearly not but we are sentient we are aware of things and i think our job in the universe as little composite bits of carbon and whatever we are the thing that we are able to offer is our reason to be here is that we are aware yeah and we share our awareness of uh danger or love or wonder or something that's funny through how we communicate yeah and we are blessed with the fact that not only can we communicate by touch or sight or language we can communicate pictorially we can make people's emotions change by presenting different colors you know we are trichromate we see in three primary colors so all of these issues if you take the design of the multi-plane camera at disney the multi-plane camera is a proscenium arch theater turned on its side yeah so the camera is where the audience would be sitting looking through the curtains yeah so the whole thing is artificial but it's also that idea that we sit in the dark around the campfire we go into a theater or a cinema what's the first thing we do we put out the lights yes the next manifestation of that something that's been happening for for millennia um across the world across different civilizations some civilizations that have never even had contact with each other we find that they're still doing it because they are living sentient beings colombia they've discovered this huge uh rock face with all of these uh pictorial um representations in the rainforest and it's it's been sat there and nobody's seen it for for ten thousand years but where students have been made to feel like by a a tutor um when anybody has been made to feel like by any other person more fool then yeah you know if somebody's sense of power or achievement or doing their job comes from making other people feel miserable i think they've misunderstood the job description yeah because i don't see that as being a human aspiration that is healthy i don't think making other people feel crap is should be anybody's motivation but sadly it creeps in and i think sometimes when it happens it doesn't happen out of malice i think a lot of the time it happens because the the teachers in these institutions also know that the framework within which they are trying to teach is wrong and they can't change it so they are often disappointed uh fail they feel they failed and what they're doing and they carry a lot of pain and a lot of hurt and a lot of and they don't realize that it's spilling out they don't realize that they're so it's not a lot of them go home unaware of the fact that they've made you cry or unaware of that because they go home and they cry too it's it's a really really i this is why i think the situat the situation needs to be addressed because it is causing people so much sadness and causing people so much discomfort and uncertainty and that should not be the function of it but it can only be the function of it if there is no consensus about why we are learning these skills so in any instance where people have been made to feel that they've failed or they've done the wrong thing you often have to ask of whether what you were aiming to accomplish with your drawing or your animation or your design is actually what the institution or the course or the tutor was asking you to because you may just have been trying to do two different things so it's not necessarily that you've failed it's just that there wasn't a clear enough agreement about what the goal was but the other thing is it's it's a symptom of the fact that we are concentrating on individual people being brilliant or clever or or whatever it is and the the anonymity of being one of the builders of the cathedral or one of the players in the orchestra that's what's so great about being in that big long crawl of people on a movie credit is you're just one of thousands of people making people go ooh dara can watch it and it's you know occasionally when people find out that you've played a part in it it feels terrific it's really nice when people say oh wow you worked on roger out that's so cool but i i wouldn't say that at any point in the transaction that you have between teacher and student or whatever that you're i'm always trying to approach it not just from the point of view stuff i wish somebody had told me how can i encourage this person is also to look at it as this is somebody who i think of as a potential colleague you know i want to build up a relationship that if we get the opportunity to work on something together will do a good job collectively so it's not that idea that you know i'm this high up the ladder and you'll never catch me or whatever there's lots of people that i've taught that have gone way past me i mean just so they are so much better than i have ever been any of the things that they i mean i i i can't count the number of students that have overtaken me uh and that but that's that's cool that's great you know as opposed to thinking like that wasn't the idea like i only ever wanted you to get to this level so i'd still be you know top of the heap with um these big productions which involved multiple people you know roger rabbit and and whatnot uh were you ever did you ever feel kind of unsatisfied with the fact that you know you're looking at this thing that you maybe don't identify as being your vision or do you ever kind of look for the little part that you did in it and say oh that was my piece i'm really glad with that how do you find fulfillment in something which you can't really identify as your own i think that's always the case i mean because it's not yours you know and that's not why you're there uh you are there to help the directors achieve their vision it's not your job to be the director right so the only the parameters within which you get the chance to shine are very set parameters and i mean i remember very clearly you know conversations but you know i was a cocky little when i started off i was i was the first film director i ever got to meet and talk to was peter greenaway and i bought into his whole idea that you know cinema is too powerful a medium to be left to the storytellers and it was only when i got to disney in the states that i got away from that terrible condescending attitude that i was kind of doing everybody a favor by bringing my art school sensibilities into this crass commercial environment and it was only when i realized that i was the one that was being crass that i i began to realize what the power was of popular cinema i but no i mean when we were working on roger rabbit or when i was working on tarzan tarzan's another good example tarzan was not an original property tarzan was edgar rice burroughs and a lot of the popular associations with the original tarzan movies were very uncomfortable because a lot of it was very um racist for one of another word right so part of the mission that uh kevin lima and chris buck and the crew were on was to identify those elements of the original tarzan stories that were not there in the early cinema interpretations which were very much of their time and carried the prejudices of that era so they were looking at a much more um contemporary and much more ecologically and socially conscious narrative that could be brought out of jane being made into a stronger character the relation between man and nature being emphasized the futility of violence as a tactic and all these things and at the beginning of the process i just signed a contract and it's like my next project is tarzan my last one was space jam i i've only ever watched space jam a few times you know i i i built up a lot of very important relationships and friendships through the production but the movie itself is not it didn't have an impact on me as a movie the way that roger rabbit did or or tarzan or little dorit but that's always the case you know if you're the same way that if you're an instrumental player you know i know a lot of very accomplished orchestral musicians who don't particularly like stravinsky or who don't particularly but if they are asked to take part in a performance of the right of spring they will give it everything yeah because that's what you do as a musician and it's what your role is it's this idea the difference between being picasso and the sing single signature in the bottom right of the canvas you are not a single signature in the bottom of a canvas not when working on a film yeah you are stuck there in a crawl of other people that either suck it up and go with it or or you're just going to be at war the whole time with your your circumstances it sounds very much like you have the the kind of solidarity and faith with your your team members that you you trust them to do their part and you you're going to do your very best with your part and that that's like the the beautiful thing about collaboration there's an interview with um that i saw with mark andrews who worked you know he directed brave and he said you know and i interviewed him for the book and the guy's an absolute genius guy fantastic storyboarder he wasn't particularly keen on having to work on ratatouille because he didn't particularly like the underlying scenario but he found what the area was that he could really sell and get that's part of the you have to psych yourself up for the journey that you're going on and just say okay it's like you can you can actively find a way to like things especially these like films that are very likeable like you know with brave or with ratatouille there's something in there you might not like the whole thing i personally do love ratatouille as a film so don't worry but you can i mean you're bound to be able to find at least something that you can kind of attach your enthusiasm to and be like oh this is i love this of course and also i think it's important to remember that as as you go through life your perspective does shift so some of the things that i was very snitty about when i was starting out i look back and i just think if i'd been a little bit less sure of myself and i don't think that's very good i you know i i missed out on some stuff because i was i was being too superior to everything because i just thought i was i was above all of this and that took me a good ten years to knock that that out of me but once it was out of me there's a great expression they use at disney which is how can i plus this when it arrives in my department or on my desk how can i make this even better right how can i plus this i like that yeah and i i think that's the the way to go about it because you do have to you know it just is not humanly possible for an entire crew of people to be working on a project uh whether it's a movie or anything else and just think this is what i was born to do because you start often quite often just like yeah and then and some of the things that people start off meh lion king is a great example um it it is only an accident of history that you know all these people said oh yeah lion king i knew that was going to be great when lion king was being made it was the poor cousin pocahontas was the big sexy project everybody wanted to get onto and that was going to be the groundbreaking and it doesn't look that way looking back no lion king is like an absolute classic by now and they had so much trouble i think less people have seen pocahontas by far than lion king and you got to try and like try and separate lion king as a as a standalone film from the reception in the box office and all of that and that's how it was during production it's like they didn't know which one was going to do so yeah yeah and i think that we can't know everything we can't see the future we can't but i think it's it's really important to be positive and respectful about about what you're doing i think that's one of the difficulties when when we're younger we want the world to be perfect and we want we don't want to compromise and we want you know a lot of the idealism that we have when we're younger it gets chipped away at a lot of the time and we're we're having this conversation on you know the 13th of uh january this is exactly the day two years ago that i arrived in mexico i flew from the scotland to mexico on the 13th of january 2019. and immediately before just going back to this you know when i was mentioning about the perceptions that the younger people had in austria about the austrian history and the relationship to fascism in that case you know what we're looking at happening in america at the moment when i just before i came to mexico i had a trip to costa rica and then i spent a week at the frederickstrad animation festival in norway and i'd been teaching in norway for three years and i was responsible for helping organize some of the international guests at the festival and the frederickstown festival happens on thursday friday saturday sunday and on the sunday morning they arrange a tourist trip for all the international guests but i was interviewing kieran duffy who was the art director on breadwinner in the afternoon so we didn't go on the tourist trip and we went to have coffee to talk through the questions but all the people who did go on the tourist trip wound up with all this iphone footage of a neo-nazi march and i had this really weird set of conversations where people were saying you're going to mexico but latin america is very dangerous why are you going to and i'm saying so it's dangerous in latin america and you've got neo-nazis on a sunday morning walking around frederick's stand you know actually in public with exactly what we saw in charlottesville with people arguing for um it's very easy to forget that the tectonic plates are constantly moving under us so our perception of the american animation industry or you know this was what happened with uh the wind rises miyazaki's father was an aircraft engineer and idolized the designers of the that's where the studio ghibli name comes from it's the name of an italian aircraft engine yeah and uh in turn it's the name of a wind like the misdraft desert wind but the if you look at all of the political arguments around about uh grave of the fireflies and wind rises there were a great many people that were not comfortable about the manner in which that filtered uh japanese perceptions of japanese history in terms of uh of the war but i think the fact that you can have a movie like klaus and a movie like i lost my body coming out pretty much the same week at the same time after years of people saying oh hand-drawn animation is dead and none of this matters and one of the things that i was really really one of the nicest things that's ever happened i was in madrid while they were still making klaus and sergio animated tantor on tarzan so i and i went to visit my friend steve mcdermott who was an effects animator on klaus and he'd worked at disney in florida and sergio said look we had great difficulty finding anybody who understood layout because we had to build a department and most of the artists were young concept artists in the games industry could you come in and do a presentation about it i was like yeah so i went in on a friday evening to the cloud studio thinking that because it was friday evening they would all just go to the pub and i would have like four people and that would be it and the room was packed and i did the big dog and pony show about you know why i wrote the book and why layout is so important and how come it doesn't get taught and last year one of the artists who was on the crew came to visit his girlfriend in colombia he sent me a message and he said when we came into that presentation we all felt like we were the department that didn't really matter we were kind of like not the glamorous people he said when we went in again on monday morning we felt like we were the most important department on the movie let's say well because you are yeah you know because you are the guy and that was why you know the book was written really out of frustration that again in the university context all the skills that were being discussed were the skills of the character animator the glamorous skills the the slums are kind of romanticized these romanticized to be at the lightbox table and flipping through keyframes it's but then there's like a lot of practical input implementation with things like the uh the uh the multi-plane camera how to line up each shot and and also like how to plan it so that you have a better time later on in compositing these are not quite as romantic but uh try making a film without one without yeah and here's here's the deal and i hate to blow everybody's cover but if you sit down as a character animator at disney on any of these movies your start and end positions for the character are worked out by the layout department you don't do it yeah you don't decide where they are you don't decide how big they are in the frame you don't don't decide the path of action you don't decide any of that that's all worked out um i mean you know i'm overstating the case but the the idea that all of the brilliance of the performance and the staging the choreography comes from the character animators is simply false it's not how it happened historically and it's not it's still not how it happens today and the idea that and you know i the first college that ever invited me into teach i had the course leader when i was saying well you don't have any of the kit to do layout properly how do you handle it and the course leader was like what's layout i'm like you are supposed to be teaching this to a university degree level and you've never heard of this and because i asked a lot of people that i knew in the industry who were leia artists it's like am i being an idiot is there a book out there and i just can't find it that's how you know your book is needed that you couldn't find a book that you wanted because i was building up my own library of books on storyboarding and the response everybody made was the book is not there yet it would be great if somebody wrote it but it's going to be a really difficult thing to do because everybody has a different definition of layout which is why one of the opening chapters is called what do you mean by layout because everybody has a different definition i mean even i even as i was reading that i was thinking like i have a certain idea in mind of what i think of this layer i mean i see the thing i admire about layout not necessarily what i would contain it in but it's like it's like creative problem solving the storyboard artist or whoever the visionary is they have a vision of how they want it to look and then the layout artist is is instrumental in getting having a practical means to doing that if you want a camera sweep over a landscape with like uh you know a bird how do we do that okay well it's cool that you have that idea but how do you do that and and that's maybe why it's they're the unsung heroes is because people place seem to place way too much value on the idea and not as much value on the execution i think it's also it's also down to the fact that in the uh period of time where you know disney always did behind the scenes footage but once we had vhs and dvd and blu-ray it became the thing to have the commentaries and it became the thing to have the behind the scenes and i'll give you a good example i went the first group of people that i met to interview for the book was at blue sky studios and i flew over to new york and i interviewed john cane maker about windsor mckay and i and then i traveled up to visit rob cardone and his layout crew and he got permission from fox to close the department for the whole day and the morning was a kind of town hall meeting and i had this tiny tiny little stereo microphone this tiny little olympus audio recorder to record across a desk interviews and i was holding this microphone up and i had people shouting this was people who had been in the industry since the 50s and 60s who were mad as hell that every time the opportunity came up to describe how a sequence or a movie was made people would just walk directly past them and go straight up to the character animators and say how did you make the movie and it got to the point where i just had to say one at a time you know you could you just yeah and just let them get this off their chest and i also spoke to drew gentle whose father bob gentle did a lot of the watercolor background paintings for the tom and jerry things and drew went into layout brilliant layout artist and i said okay so from what comes out of the layout department at disney on a feature film you have the background layout which is the pencil artwork that describes all the scenic elements whether it's the background or an overlay or whatever then you have the camera diagram which is showing the start point and the trajectory and the motion of the camera over that scene and then you have the character layout which is the staging or they also used to call it bluesketch where you position the keyframes of the characters and sometimes that's a bit of to and fro between scene planning layout character animators whatever they but often the basic stuff is keyed out by the the layout people and then the character animator will follow it um but a lot of the character layouts are just not there in the archive yeah and i was saying to drew gentle so is that accidental and he said no a lot of it got balled up and thrown in the bin and he said there was two reasons one reason was that if the layout were not was not as good as the character animator wanted it to be and the character wasn't on model or whatever he said but a lot of times it was because they didn't want the evidence that it wasn't them that were you know that it was actually better than what they were going to do and it they they just you know saw it as i've used it i'll throw it away and then i can have my way with how the scene is but a lot of people just didn't the evidence is gone because the work that they did as a layout artist to stage the movement of it was thrown in the bin by the character i'm so thankful that you you came in and rescued a lot of the the most amazing uh layout pieces uh from from the productions because uh they could have been lost to history and then they still could they still could i mean a lot of them are not kept in particularly good conditions uh for example all the pencil artwork from tom and jerry in the texas avery's is in the dhoni memorial library they don't have the budget to these things are in cardboard office containers yeah and they the looney tunes backgrounds the long panning artwork it's only because maurice noble and all these other guys insisted on using the same paint that was used to paint the cells which is chemically constituted to be flexible these things are coiled up like watch springs and they've been in there for 60 years we had to put sandbags on them for them even to be flattened to be reproduced wow and then they just coiled up and put back in the box and some of the stuff at the dhoni memorial library had been damaged in a flood because there's no shelves for them to go up on or there's so a lot of this stuff don't imagine that it's all being kept the way that it's kept to the animation research library at disney and temperature controlled rooms that's how i imagine it but i guess that's not disney it's not the ones with the budget to do that i guess people don't have the resources that one of the biggest archives where a lot of the big studios have their artwork stored is down a disused salt mine in kansas and it's not even retrievable like you know to to go to there and go down in their lifts and like you know so yeah it was a bit of a detective work it's always been my favorite or one of my favorite things to do is to watch uh the behind the scenes featurettes of films and maybe that's just because i'm a fan but i don't know i feel like that has that should have appealed to everyone especially if you've seen a film and you were like really blown away by it don't you want to know what went into making it what because to me that that heightens the experience of watching it it's like oh wow this i'm watching a piece of art it's an interesting point because when i was starting out you couldn't find that information it just wasn't available uh other than disney i i know it wasn't disney was consistently made now that it is widely available the peculiar thing is that a lot of students don't access it so i i you know here's another thing that is really just i i'm amazed that this is true but it is i uh you know when i started out pretty much everybody wanted to be a character animator nowadays a lot of people want to be character designers a lot of people want to be concept artists here's a peculiar thing it doesn't matter what country i'm in it doesn't matter how many students are in the group if i go around and i say what would you like to do if somebody says to me i want to be a character designer my first question is who are your favorite character designers and the answer is always silence people don't know if some people say i want to be a concept artist sometimes they've got a name a lot of people will want to be a character animator they don't even know the names of character animators they particularly admire so they don't go and study them i i often say there are only three words you need to remember from anything that i say do the homework if you can't produce work that is interesting if you are not interested absolutely and if if you really believe that you're going to go out into what is now a an aggressively competitive market and get anybody interested in what you're doing and you in an interview can't name the people that have inspired you what is your expectation of how inspiring they're going to think your work is and it's a big shock and a surprise to people to discover the work of carter goodrich or mary blair or whatever and i'm like this the information is so available now yeah and the very fact that it's not difficult to access it people go yeah whatever and i'm like you should never think yeah whatever about stuff that matters to you because that's an indicator that it doesn't really matter to you you're being drawn in by the wrong stuff you should be amazed at this stuff it's a yeah it's an amazing privilege to have the internet and to be able to to find all of this stuff you can you can find so much on the internet and people should people should use it to the fullest extent and like one of the easiest ways of doing that is just by first of all if you find an image save it save it to your a folder on your computer so you have it later and also to actually you can you can even reverse image search and image if you don't know the name of the creator of it yeah reverse image search into google images and it will come up with then it will probably you'll be able to find the name and then research all their other stuff look at what era they were you know actively working and what other projects they did what they're doing there's another there's another really interesting thing which allison ibarti also touched on yesterday when she was talking to everybody about all the work that she's done as a producer and how important it has been to her to know what everybody and everybody in every department is doing because of the digital digitization of every stage in the process one of the things that i say in every campus context that i'm asked to teach is why is that wall empty where is the artwork because people will come up to me and they'll say do you want to see my sketchbook and they'll open up a laptop do you want to see my storyboard they'll open up a laptop the minute the laptop is closed nobody sees it if you go into the building at pixar if you go into disney if you're going to sony there is no empty wall space every single every way you turn your ahead even if it's something that was created digitally and then printed out and framed yeah or it's just been pinned to the wall but you need to begin to inhabit the world that you're creating and one of the most amazing things about working on tarzan one of the development artists they had was john watkins who created these kick-ass life-size oil paintings that looked like john singer sergeant had done that you know john singer sergeant was and i walked out of my office and that's what i saw i walked into tarzan's jungle and even though the movie wound up looking different to john walker's paintings everywhere you look there was work by maurice hunt there was work by doug bull there was work by all these extremely uh creative and accomplished artists some dealing in a cartoon style some in a very photorealistic dan cooper's color scripts and a lot of people don't realize the physical importance of using the space around you nobody and i'm saying this in front of an empty yeah there's a reason just thinking that i'm in a rented apartment so it's okay i don't want to freak out the landlord but everywhere that i am that is my working environment if you saw my office on the campus last year people used to come to my office like it was a kind of freak show because i there was no empty wall space because the idea is if we are awake we should be visually curious and visually inspired and there is nothing inspiring about a flat empty white wall yeah but people are only looking at tiny little images on a tiny little screen on a phone or a tablet and i'm like that get stuff on the wall so the the the space that you inhabit in your cubicle or your corridor or your campus or whatever is permanently 24 hours a day sending you information about how wonderful this is going to look when it's up on the screen and that is missing from so many creative environments these days and more fool the people who don't understand why that matters yeah um and yes it costs you a bit on printer paper but man it pays off yeah absolutely yeah i'm not really fully set up in my room right now but uh one of my sheets yeah um one of them's fallen down and i haven't been bothered to put it back up but i think as soon as this is over i'm gonna put it back up but it's the same for storyboarding you know even if you're using storyboard pro or even if you're using a browser-based thing for it you still need to be able to i mean this is different in the japanese and the american tradition there's very much a kind of like book binder approach to storyboarding in japan because they don't have so much room but the big conference uh approach to it where you get the big eight by four boards that still works because you want people to sit back and all be able to see the drawings on the opposite wall so i i get students to buy lightweight uh architectural board and mount their their uh paper print out so that they can count off the numbers of the you know see the the sequence emerging and makes a tremendous difference you can kind of read the story from left to right totally and again it's that thing of the relationship between the space in your head the imaginary realm and the physicality of the space in which you work but as it's become increasingly private and individual and digitized a lot of that is is down here on the uh the the the workspace on the desktop of the computer and that's not useful it's not yeah and and you know people can make a tremendous start on their animation project with with nothing they don't need to wait until they have until their new state-of-the-art tablet arrives they can get a stack of a5 sheets of paper and start sticking them up on a on a wall do you have a wall yes do you have a wall do you have an adhesive probably a5 sheets of paper start drawing them and then that's all they need hold on i'll show you hold on we're going to see something i was working with one of the students a couple of students last year on a music video and they're in a different part of mexico at home and oh yeah you know so for us to be able to do the video conferencing with the client over the thing um i was and it's it's lightweight board and it's just blue tack that's that's what keeps the stuff up on the wall but it means that everybody can sit back and go ah i can see this but if you're just flipping out one image at a time many of the people that you're dealing with do not have the same visual literacy that you have yeah and to be able to use the wall space for development artwork or for storyboard work or for design work in progress is extremely useful and not enough people are doing that now what do you think about committee decisions on storyboards versus like it the individual's expression do you think something gets diluted when you have too many people too many cooks in the kitchen uh with the story depends on the kitchen depends on the cooks the best example i can give because this was all new to me i mean when i started work on tarzan most of the work i had done had been very departmental and very closed off you know because on roger rabbit i was doing effects work and lighting effects and work would arrive on my table i would add to it on my desk and send it up to somebody else but i had very little opportunity to go around the building and see what everybody else was doing on tarzan when i got hired i was i was still working on space jam and kevin and chris uh when i went for the second interview they said um do you have any we'd like to offer you the job as artistic coordinator but do you have any reservations about it i said yeah i've got a bucket full of reservations because i've never done this before and i said you know i've not actually been involved in one of these movies from the story conferences through to the happy meals and he said well how could you you know we've been the only studio doing this up until now so he was the guy that really introduced me to this idea that the only stupid question is one that you're too scared to ask so he said while you're working on the movie if you hear us using any terminology or vocabulary that you're not familiar with put your hand in the air stop the meeting and ask and we will tell you and nobody will think you're stupid for asking and the first time that there was a really big collective uh conference for one of the sequences was the baboon chase because that had to go into production first because it was a lot of the deep canvas shots right crowd scenes with the baboons a lot of camera movement it was intense and you don't leave that till the crunch time you get those ones out of the way early on and they had one of the biggest story conference rooms in the disney building in in on riverside and burbank and glenn keane flew in from paris because it it was partly done in paris partly done in burbank we had the ken duncan and the jane crew there we had the story artists we had bob and noni who were the writers chris and kevin the directors and the two dans the art directors and it went on for hours and hours and halfway through they stopped for refreshments and somebody brought in a tray with coffees mineral waters whatever and put everything down and she was just leaving and she looked across the room towards one of the big eight by four boards and her eye stuck on something on the board and everyone in the story crew was like what is it and she was like oh no i don't i don't i'm not on tarzan and i'm not i never know what have you seen and she was like really i'm not involved in this it's not no no just what are you looking at and she just went well won't that be funnier if this happens first and they just went of course and they changed it because they had been like this with the project for weeks and it took somebody coming in from outside to notice that there was something that needed to be switched around and that was somebody plussing something yeah even though it wasn't her job to do it and even though she was not on the crew if it makes it better and it makes it stronger it goes in yeah a good idea can come from anywhere i guess and it's ordinary people that are going to be watching it at the end exactly exactly but also there is that thing of being so up close to what you're doing that you just don't you lose perspective on it yeah but the important thing in your question about whether somebody's individual vision can be i mean i think it's a question really about the auteur approach to movie making and i have zero patience with that i have to say because like i say my first idol was peter greenaway and i think he's a an important figure and a fantastic guy and he was nothing but kind and and encouraging and sweet and pleasant to me but it took me a long time to realize i didn't really like his films there were things about prospero's books that i loved there were things about all of the movies that i admired i think the cook the thief his wife and her lover is amazing i think drasmus contract is great do i actually enjoy of an evening or on a weekend sitting down and watching them no i don't and i felt that i was duty-bound as somebody who went to art school to be highbrow in my expectations and i'm like well what is highbrow yeah it and it's another form of cool it's another form of exclusion it's another form of saying we understand this you don't we are cleverer than you are and i'm like that's not what popular entertainment is for the clue is in the word popular yeah just because something's accessible doesn't mean it can't be profound in in many ways completely and i mean i go back to iron giant i mean iron giant is a you can read it almost as a piece of uh buddhist teaching yeah uh and you know brad bird probably would think i was being a bit of an and saying describing it that way but that's that's a way that you can look at it but if you have any sense of condescension towards your audience you have no business making movies because anybody is free to watch what you make and again it was actually i was doing this thing a presentation about you were asking about propaganda and we worked on a series of chiquita banana commercials when i was working at passion pictures in london and when i visited costa rica i noticed that we were driving for hours and we never stopped passing continuous chiquita banana plantations and so i dug that out as an example for my advertising class and i wound up having to use it in the propaganda class right because i discovered that the cia the united fruit company and a psychopath called edward bernays had used the chiquita banana lady and you know basically what happened was that the democratically elected president of guatemala was overthrown in 1954 by the cia edward bernays in the united food company and here was this cartoon character selling bananas that's why we get that's where we get the word the phrase banana republic all right yeah so here were animated cartoons promoting fruit products and then united fruit company owned the communications network they owned the travel network they owned the and they overthrew a democratically elected government on the strength of selling bananas so this whole idea again of i know that's a a long way removed from the idea of auteur filmmaking but but you've got to bring it back now well but the point is this if you put all of that time and energy into making a world and a characters and a story convincing um you have to have concern and respect for the people that you are aiming to convince and in the research that i did for that pair of classes on animation and advertising and animation and propaganda i discovered also that frank capra who directed it's a wonderful life um he was in the american forces um film unit during world war ii but he was thinking of abandoning his career as a commercial movie maker because people were so insulting about his films and they had they referred to them as capra corn and what made him decide not to stop being a movie maker was that he and a group of american movie makers were invited to the museum of modern art in new york to watch rene liefenstein's triumph of the will and he was so horrified at how brilliant that film was at stirring up hatred yeah that he realized that if one more filmmaker with a positive agenda left the table it was opening things up to the negative voices to be more influential and with what's unfolding at the moment that has never been more important than than now because we're into this world of post truth post facts fake news or whatever so those of us who decide that our business our work is to create imagery to make particular stories convincing we are part of a very powerful network internationally of people who do that so we had better be doing it for the right reasons right yeah otherwise who's going to address the issues of climate change he's going to address the issues of social inequality and the the gap between rich and poor and down through history you look at the history of drama satire comedy whatever you look at walt and el grupo animators play a part and i think that the idea of wanting to realize one single artistic vision smacks to me of a kind of selfishness and conceit that is not it's like i'm the most i'm the most brilliant person in the room none of us is the most brilliant person in the room you know we're lucky to be in a room with other people who are not like us and it's not a it's not a qualitative thing on a scale of one to ten we're different and i think that that you know there's room for it you know there's auteur movies that i can enjoy but my most miserable working experiences ever have been working with or for people who got really successful really early on and they think their doesn't smell and they i i won't name names it's not a great it's not a great scenario because it gives you a warped idea of your own importance and none of us ultimately is you know we're we're kind of in service of something yeah as storytellers we we are custodians of what we believe to be important and we have to be prepared to defend that on you know something slightly stronger than i felt like it you know yeah yeah it's it involves too many resources and too many people and it is designed to influence an audience and that is not something that you know all those freedoms come with a matching responsibility or a set of responsibilities i think it's at the moment what is happening around the world with uh animation as as a medium or as a group of media is really exciting uh but i think it's also a point where which we we've got to be we we have to appreciate that we are not in a separate bubble we're not in some you know we are on the ground with everybody else and the the problems that are uh around us every day are ones that we are all going to have to play a part in in solving so it's connected and and what we do as filmmakers has real impact on the world and it can have it does have and we we have historical evidence to demonstrate that and we have living evidence to demonstrate that people are influenced by moving images and they're influenced by stories and they're influenced by how it's presented where they're produced by that you look at the amount of news footage now or documentary footage that is accompanied by music that is supposed to be working on our emotions at the same time as the information you know this is it is designed to have an impact and like i say with that comes responsibility and it's not just about whether people think we're clever or whether people like our work or whether people think we're cool or we are gonna die and people will forget our names but even though most of the names involved in pinocchio are most of the public generally never knew it that movie every time it is re-released still kicks ass at the bottom piece i absolutely love pinocchio such compelling such a compelling film yeah guillermo del toro is doing his new version of it in stop motion so we've got another one coming out i i wonder how that will match up but there's a story behind that as well if you go back to because pinocchio was created during the rise of mussolini right pinocchio is not hundreds of years old pinocchio's i mean the idea of pygmalion or somebody falling in love with a sculpture or a puppet or a toy you know it's an ancient theme but the actual collodi episodic stories his family tried to sue disney for being disrespectful to the american culture and this was all played out against the backdrop of the rise of fascism in italy so you know pinocchio as a story doesn't exist in a bubble either go read you know do your homework go type in collodi at disney and find out how how pissed the family were oh yeah that's another that's something i'm gonna go down the rabbit hole and have a look at yeah check it out see what it is it's it's kind of mind-blowing yeah it's very easy to look at something like pinocchio and just assume that it's like cinderella or you know that there have been these thousand year old versions of it there are versions up to a point but the actual raw material is is much more recent than people think amazing well again thank you so much for this this is uh this is fantastic and i think people are going to really appreciate um all of the knowledge you've been uh been giving us yeah i'm actually just about to go back and fact check that because i'm just trying to get what was the kalodi what were kalodi's dates or was it his nephew or i'm trying to remember what the actual timing was of the writing of it but certainly the anger over it was at the time of the production of the movie which was as the uh americans were becoming involved in world war ii so that's why was it like 43 what was the date when it was released well that was complicated by the war because all of those movies uh uh the date of release of pinocchio's 40 yeah what am i saying about doing the homework and i so the adventures of the so the atta the adventures of pinocchio 1883 by the italian writer carlo kolodi of florence uh pinocchio of the film was 1940 but it was pinocchio but it was kolodi's um i believe it was his nephew uh who was objecting to the way that it was being dis uh portrayed um and you know again this idea about the the um the morality tales the idea of why pinocchio was this flawed character and why he would make bad decisions and all this kind of stuff but it was seen by the collodi um descendants as being insulting to italian culture to americanize it in this way and actually a lot for a lot of people the only reason they know about pinocchio is because of the yeah the the the disney interpretation of it yeah but the original uh tales according to wikipedia uh 1880s was collodi's original but his family against the backdrop of what was happening in wartime italy were not happy about it that's fascinating it's very nice to see howard and uh yeah and thank you so much for catching up thanks for doing all these podcasts and thanks for uh giving a damn about the medium and about the the process and everything that's uh it's it's great that you're doing this so thank you yeah you found a fellow animation enthusiast bye

Channel: Howard Wimshurst

Views: 18,566

Keywords: animation, Howard Wimshurst, animatorguild, timelapse, animation process, animation production, how to animate in tvpaint, animation professional, disney animator talk, disney animator podcast, disney animation inspiration, disney animation career advice, animation career advice, animation education advice, traditional animation discussion, animation podcast, fraser maclean, layout animation, animation layout, animation expert, animation inspiration, setting the scene

Id: 3EguQC5ZmXA

Length: 71min 57sec (4317 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 10 2021