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tealinWhen you work in the animation business, if you want to stay employed, you have to take your lumps. I've been very lucky with some of the projects I've landed, but also worked on my fair share of unexceptional cartoons – the one that really takes the cake was WordWorld. When I first started working on it (2005?) it didn't look much like what you see on the website; it was going to be 2D and was being remotely micromanaged by the clients in New York who had an excellent eye for detail while simultaneously being relatively ignorant of quality or aesthetics. To say the style was less than challenging is an understatement, but because of the number of revisions we were getting and the production schedule, hours tended to be long, which left little or no time for anything else that might be more fun or rewarding.
I came as close as I've ever come to a nervous breakdown doing boards on the show, and the designers had to design everything twice because the clients didn't know what style they wanted, which resulted in 80-hour weeks because they had double the work with the same schedule. It's not so hard to dedicate your life to a good project, but everything about this one was bad; the writing, the voice acting, the leadership, the designs they gave us to work with, the utter lack of entertainment ... It looked like it was going to continue this way for the rest of production but a few months in, just as we were ready to send the first episode overseas to be animated, the project was put on hold – the clients were working on a grant from the US Department of Education, which involved periodic checkups from the DoE, and they were so dissatisfied with their last one that they ordered the production halted for six months while they retooled everything virtually from scratch. Rather than lay us all off or sit around losing money, the studio I was with took the opportunity to run for the hills and shuffled us all onto different productions.
We all have our battle stories in the biz, and no one likes working on these things, but they do certainly give you a sense of perspective. People always complain about their jobs and they are legitimately worth complaining about, sometimes, but I am very grateful that I worked on this show – not only because it had a great crew and we all supported each other to get through it, but because now I know that nothing I ever work on in the future will ever be as bad as WordWorld.
I came as close as I've ever come to a nervous breakdown doing boards on the show, and the designers had to design everything twice because the clients didn't know what style they wanted, which resulted in 80-hour weeks because they had double the work with the same schedule. It's not so hard to dedicate your life to a good project, but everything about this one was bad; the writing, the voice acting, the leadership, the designs they gave us to work with, the utter lack of entertainment ... It looked like it was going to continue this way for the rest of production but a few months in, just as we were ready to send the first episode overseas to be animated, the project was put on hold – the clients were working on a grant from the US Department of Education, which involved periodic checkups from the DoE, and they were so dissatisfied with their last one that they ordered the production halted for six months while they retooled everything virtually from scratch. Rather than lay us all off or sit around losing money, the studio I was with took the opportunity to run for the hills and shuffled us all onto different productions.
We all have our battle stories in the biz, and no one likes working on these things, but they do certainly give you a sense of perspective. People always complain about their jobs and they are legitimately worth complaining about, sometimes, but I am very grateful that I worked on this show – not only because it had a great crew and we all supported each other to get through it, but because now I know that nothing I ever work on in the future will ever be as bad as WordWorld.
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Date: 2009-03-28 09:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-28 09:34 pm (UTC)I am also very excited about the potential for a Pratchett movie--i have not read Truckers, though, and thus cannot really comment on Dreamworks' ability to slaughter it. Jack Black's joke at the Oscars about being in KFP and then betting all the money he made on it for Wall-E was pretty telling though, I think.
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Date: 2009-03-28 10:38 pm (UTC)"WordWorld" sounds like a bad ripoff of "School House Rock."
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Date: 2009-03-29 04:34 am (UTC)My children LOVE that show. I'm so sorry you had to work on it. It sounds mind-numbing!
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Date: 2009-03-29 07:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-29 05:02 am (UTC)A little while ago we were working for a live-action guy who got the grant for a short and we were supposed to do computer modeling, animation and green screen. This guy can't make up his mind--insulted everyone by saying, "You're not fooling me--I know animation! I took a six month course!!"
I'll just leave it at that. ^^"
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Date: 2009-03-29 06:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-29 04:50 pm (UTC)The boss canceled the contract to keep everybody sane. Anyway, his actors bailed on him because he can't seem to make up his mind about the script either and no other studio didn't want to take him in. (we didn't even talked to the other studios about the ordeal either because we had other things to do)
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Date: 2009-03-29 07:13 am (UTC)Personally, I know absolutely nothing about animation, except that anime kind of annoys me. But at least I know I don't know anything about animation.
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Date: 2009-03-29 11:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-30 07:30 am (UTC)