September 2002 Archives

Guidelines to Character writing for animation (with help from Malcolm) :

* There should be a Hero. That goes without saying sometimes. He should stop at all small towns on his travels to nowhere and investigate any mysteries along the way. If he lacks in personality and is hard to animate, give him a pair of overalls with a patch on the knee. Kids love it.

* A Girlfriend for the Hero who does little except look good and ruin any escapes by falling down intermittently just before capture or being crushed by a large stone ball armed with a heat seeking device.

* The Hero should also have a Superhero Vehicle, something that is small and compact in size similar to a golf buggy yet able to carry all of his friends and equipment in cartoon fashion. Everyone appears to sit in the back seat which is actually the front seat in reality. Maybe add a surfboard in the back to prove that there will always be room for one more.

* The Hero should also have a sidekick Monkey who has a speech impediment and is afraid of his own shadow. The purpose for this being that if anyone else fails to save our Hero from a last minute death that the Monkey will be available to drive the Superhero Vehicle into the most unreachable location and rescue all.

* The Hero should have a small gang of friends. Preferably a big dumb friend, a small brainy friend and a very cowardly friend. The Big Dumb friend should be so hideously stupid looking that he may be recognised as missing from the local gumboot hospital. His small brainy friend should have a fully equipped nuclear facilitated lab under his parents house. All mysterious noises are to be investigated by the most dimwitted cowardly character who will no doubt lose a torch in a dark tunnel or get lost in a wet paper bag and scream for help.

Notes from a meeting with David Mack ...

Whilst catching up with a few colleagues a while back I got the chance to meet up with David Mack. Here you will find finally some notes I’ve been able to piece together that will hopefully give you some insight or that little bit more information you were looking for about the comic book industry.

On Art ...

One unique thing I noted from David that I had never heard of before was this. After writing a script for his surrent piece, David proceeds with doing layouts of all the pages of artwork. With these layouts done he then uses a large table to place the pieces in sequence out spread in a way that you can read the story with ease. While starting from the beginning of the story sequence, David goes through artwork and if he feels strongly about a layout that may enhance another section of story he would pick it up and move the layout to that area. After rearranging the sequence of artwork according to his feeling of strengths and weakness in visual style, he would then rewrite the script to work with the art.

Hybrid artforms that become so popular attract the big business who come along and target these forms only to make a formula of its success to then mass market. Ultimately destroying the shelf life of any of these creations.

On Writing ...

Although he doesn’t always illustrate everything he writes. David also contributes scripts only and may also provide thumbnails or simple layouts for the artist to follow.

As with all business in the comic book field money is the bottom line, especially for DC. And with budgets comes the obligation to publish monthly. David mentioned that in his experience, the teams at both Marvel and DC in particular do not want any formula based scripts.

David mentioned he usually pens a new comic every 2 months. For those a little baffled maybe, David writes a comic book called Kabuki and also writes on the Daredevil series.

I have just been reading an article in the recent issue of Encore magazine. The demise of Energee Entertainment. When working there I always had a feeling, like a gut instict when you first enter a room, that there was something not quite right about the place. The brothers Travers were the head honchos of their sisters company. Neither of them knew or had experience in animation. One brother exclaimed to the animation department, " I don't care how shitty it is just get it done!" . While the result of being liquidated is not of their own doing directly I feel that they were certainly responsible for some of their coming apart. I think there was an amount of disrespect between all that worked there and it was the respoonsibility of the head honchos to overcome that. Instead people like myself never saw or heard from these people. The company could have been quite successful but I fear that it was driven by the greed of two who had no understanding about the animation industry. A bad move on their part and the result is devastating to our lives. The people I knew working there are now in the ranks of the unemployed unless they can grab the few vacancies Disney have in Haymarket every year. Other than that it may mean interstate or overseas travel to look for work. I wish them luck.

Lovely as it seems, I think Flash gets overrated considerably. The issue is that it can make a daft twit look like a mediocre graphic designer with a few simple strokes and a few library items. I used Flash when it was once called SmartSketch. I think sometimes it should have stayed simply as a drawing program. The amount of Flash content I have encountered recently has gone beyond irritating. Enough talk of Flash, I've got a headache.

Been working on a new comic strip of recent. All seems to be coming along well. Just need more time to find for getting it done and out of the way.

Recently I decided to take up writing the comic strips first and leaving the drawing to later. The reason for this is that I have since found it very hard to write comedy. Sure you can draw and write at the same time but I felt that it raised an issue of whether I relied too much on the drawing or the writing to make the laugh. I have actually found that by writing gags first, you tend to build a stronger idea and greater gag. All the editing happens in words first. This may not be unusual for sitcom writers but from a cartoonists perspective it is a little different. I now write between 4-5 gags in about 3 hours and all are very strong. When it comes time to nail down the artwork it is so much easier to focus on the drawing rather than the concept not working for some reason. Knowing the gag is solid is a relief when it could have taken a lot longer had I been drawing and writing simultaneously.

I have been doing some reading recently of comments on how some cartoonists are using clipart images of their characters to produce a cartoon. This seems to attract a lot of attention as many would say that the cartoon would lack a sense of originality. Well, I think you'll find that most of the best known comic strips around either have a team of artists working on it, which would mean there is a model sheet all must go by to create the same appearance to characters ie. like Garfield, or it is a single person doing a bit of cut and paste in Photoshop. Personally I think that it is ok to reuse some images but not frequently. What a lot of people don't appreciate is the time consumed to produce a cartoon. Some deadlines are so short the only way is to piece together something from already archived material. It really isn't about taste but merely being able to produce on time. Some of us don't have the luxury of being able to write weeks ahead and make the time available to complete all by hand. I personally have had to reuse some old artwork just to change the appearance of the strip as a last moment effort for editorial reasons. So I can't say I'm not one of those who do it. And I don't blame anyone for doing it either.

Driving to work today I saw a girl who reminded me of someone in one of the animation studios I used to work in. I began to reminisce the old days when animator's diets were made up of 2 minute noodles and toast.

The worst time for me was working on a series for a studio in A****mon. I had a small studio with a few colleagues in Crows Nest just down the road. The ******** on the show was a real **** towards me ( I assume because I was like a fish on a line ) and I hated taking my scenes in to be checked. I dreaded the day I had to go in. As a freelancer you only got paid when your scene was approved. Some weeks I made a whopping $60 and the next maybe $200. By the time I was due to report in with my scenes all the easy stuff had been picked by the moonlighting ***** at Di**ey. There were a load of moonlighters there signing their names under pseudonyms so they wouldn't be sacked by the mouse factory.

I ended up taking the s*** scenes with me as there was nothing left. I always thought the name of the series I worked on should be called "toilet break" because that was all the time you had left in the day to do. I slept in the studio for maybe 2 hours a night and sometimes went 72 hours straight without sleep just to get the scenes done. Looking back at those times I really don't miss it. I miss the noodles though.