ANIMATION SPOT
By Howard Beckerman
The Old Refrain
It has happened to me and I'm sure that it must have
happened to you at sometime. You're with a group of animators at a studio at
some crowded lunch spot and someone, maybe even yourself suddenly shouts,
"What do they know about running a studio?" I remember hearing this
exclaimed, about a studio that had hardly been in business two weeks. The
carpenters were still putting up the partitions and the owners hadn't even
decided what peg system they were going to use. The funny thing is that many of
those who have shouted that phrase to the heavens in appeal, are now operating
their own shops. Does that mean that they know how to run a studio?
How does anyone know how to run a studio anyway? They don't
teach it at the New School where they can guide you through the intricacies of psychology,
languages or even how to tie your shoelace, but even among the listed film
courses there is no one offering to teach anyone how to operate a cartoon
emporium.
Firstly, all cartoon companies change their shape. In the
old days, when animation meant films for theaters, shops were peopled by hordes
of staff artists: no one freelanced. Eighty to a hundred persons crowded
together to do all of the work on a regular daily basis. Sometimes the
population exceeded 200 animators and other technicians. The people in charge
had brothers-in-law or other talented relatives administering to the needs of
the labor force to guarantee that production would be maintained. Today with
smaller shops the general rule in most instances to create television spots, so
what good is all of that big studio knowhow. Instead of sending word to each
member of the staff through memos, the small studio executive just pops his or
her head over a partition and whispers, "I'm going down stairs for a sandwich,
you answer the phones."
The producer may find that on the way to the sandwich place
it might be a good idea to drop something off at the camera service or on the
way back, stop in at the hardware store to pick up a new light bulb for one of
the animation desks.
The point is that no one knows how to operate an animation
studio since it's a talent that is acquired. It's a creative thing consisting
of thousands of little bits and pieces of information fed into your own
personal psyche and it comes out either as great organizational ability or as a
series of lucky close calls. The problem of trying to tackle it as a science
falls apart everytime the field goes through one of it's periodic flips. The
producer that bought seventy-five coatracks at auction is now trying to unload
them so that he can make room for a new flat bed editing machine. What good are
40,000 judiciously punched peghole reinforcements, when in the near future you
may be generating commercials with the aid of a digital computer. One oldtime
producer didn’t even have a clock in the studio. The animators told time by the
height of liquid in the ever present whiskey bottle on their boss' desk.
So, the next time you hear that old refrain from the boys
and girls gathered around the xerox machine, "What do they know about
running a studio?" Tell them that they're right. They don't know how to
run a studio, nobody does. It's the way studios are run, it's a tradition, and
who the hell wants to mess with a tradition?
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