Post by Joe Murray

The "On Model" Debate When the powers that be at the new Nickelodeon Channel were trying to convince me to try out an animated series , they said “Think of it as your independent films in a series going out to millions”! Hmmmmm. What became Rocko’s Modern Life was not so much like that. # # What I wasn’t educated on (among other things) was volume animation and the outsourcing of such. We couldn’t afford in-house layouts, so we had to rely on the overseas studio to deal with them and the various poses from our storyboards. What I soon found out was that the really cool character drawings we did in our boards got destroyed by the effort to “put them on model”. I grew to hate model sheets. One of the joys of my independent films was conveying the emotion and storytelling moment in a drawing that we all knew was our character, but was stretched, exaggerated, funny, overly sad, overly happy. The Rocko pilot ( which I animated half of) was all over the place in the sense of model. Of course, feature animators have this luxury, and in an outsourcing environment, I found it depends on the studio you use in regard to them using your storyboards as layouts. My last show was done in Toonboom, and the pre-rigging often led to negotiation on how often we can “Break a rigging” to achieve awesome posing. It’s always a compromise between volume budgets and great animation. But now I’m back to working on my own films ( with breaks for outside projects) and I love not worrying about how “on model” I am. Just like actual human personalities, animated characters have different energy at times that should come out in the spontaneous drawing moment. Agree? Or no? The short of it, is that an animated series is not like making a lot of independent films. Although I value my attempts at the art of the animated series, I’m really loving getting back to my own animation. But who knows what else is in store. #animation #independentfilm #independentartist #independentfilmmaker #animator #animationproduction