Which, for the record, is the same amount of time it took me to learn how to operate a damn Keurig. So nine months to make a single episode of The Simpsons—which is definitely longer than you'd imagine, since it is the twenty-first century and all. And yet—and here's the real kicker—it only takes a writer two weeks to write the script, which is about forty-five pages long.
So what's everybody doing the other eight and a half months? Getting drunk? Playing bocci ball? Fan-fucking-tastic, am I right? The very hard and laborious work of thinking critically and having standards and killing their darlings in order to go from good…to great.
And I thought that was a nice dose of inspiration for all of us, ya know? How often do you come close to quitting because it's taking you forever and you don't think you've got it in you? The best work takes twenty times longer than you've planned. The best work happens when everybody else goes home.
The best work happens when you're poring over the details. And the best work happens when you GET that creating something kick ass doesn't happen on your first attempt: it happens over time, in layers. Day after day, you add to it. And day after day, it becomes better. It has no choice. If some of the best writers in the world put in nine months for just one episode, how much time might you need to put in to create something great?
I didn't just pull all of this out of my ass. Yes, I AM shitting my pants, thanks for asking! And to the guy who said that he would name a candy bar after me? I fucking love you, man. Established from Santiago, Chile.
Nine Freaking Months. Well, let's take a little looksie, shall we? First, when the writer hands in the script, it gets read and annotated by the head honcho, noting alllllll the changes to be made. Because there are always changes to be made when it comes to writing, ya'll. Today, story reel and storyboard processes are combined, leading directly to storyboard revisions. What follows is a step that formerly existed within the creative process. The work of the story reel artists, a mix of character and background animators, can range from polish to triage, depending on the storyboard's quality upon arrival.
As Escobar explains, the reel artists add additional characters' poses, clean backgrounds, and incorporate notes from the director, who at this stage is refining the composition of the shots. As work is completed, the artists once again upload to a server, and the editor inserts the fleshed-out segments in place of their respective portions of the storyboard until the entire storyboard is replaced with a completed story reel.
The two phases sound quite similar, but they serve different functions. Where the storyboard is somewhere between a picture book and the flip book, the story reel visualization ideally plays like a barebones, black-and-white version of the actual episode.
Once the reel is ready, shareholders — Al Jean and the producers, writers, and episode director — meet at Fox for a screening. After a short break, the team reconvenes and watches the episode again, this time stopping and starting the reel to discuss how those changes will be incorporated, sketch rough stills of what the changes should look like, and nail down any other tweaks to be made by the storyboard revisionist.
Storyboard revisionists get roughly two weeks to revise or outright create new scenes, following notes from the previous screening. Because hundreds of hours of animation and design have already gone into the storyboard, revisionists try to salvage parts from scenes that have been cut by repurposing them within the revisions. The revisionist must also make sure the changes flow with the rest of the story reel. On his blog, Escobar provides an example:. According to Escobar, few American animated shows still do the layout process, let alone do so in house.
Layout, he says, is the closest phase to what the layperson imagines animation to be — that classic image of a Disney cartoonist fanning paper back and forth, sketching characters into motion.
At The Simpsons , layout is a digitized version of that method. Each animator — divided into character and background artists — uses Pencil Check Pro to animate roughly 15 scenes for an episode, making as accurate a depiction of the final product as possible. While storyboards are rough, layout is refined. Whenever Homer shouts with joy, the style sheet explains, his mouth opens in just this way.
Arguably the most important function of the layout artist is imbuing the static storyboard images with performance. When Homer cracks a beer, Lisa plays the saxophone, or Sideshow Bob steps on a rake, the layout artist decides precisely how that will look.
In some capacity, they double as actors, using the storyboard and voiceover as direction, then emoting through the residents of Springfield as they feel fit. The acting, the poses, the backgrounds, props, emotions — everything the story layout artists draw will be directly incorporated in the final "clean line" version of the episode animated by the studio in South Korea.
Along with performance, layout is when shots are framed, as they would be with a camera in the real world, exactly as they will appear in the finished episode. Story layout is the longest and most detailed step, and can take anywhere from a month to a month and a half, depending on the complexity of the episode and whether or not other episodes are in production. As soon as a character layout artist finishes a scene, they deliver to the timer.
If the layout artist's work is the wood for your new bookshelf, the exposure sheet is the instruction booklet. And like any furniture instructions, it's indecipherable to everyone but the experts. The role is called "timer," because in the past, the timer broke down all dialogue and animation, assigning tiny pieces to specific frames — or times — of the episode.
Each line on the exposure sheet represents a frame or group of frames of film. To the right of each frame number, the timer writes what needs to be animated and how. The Simpsons is animated at 24 frames per second — every second, 24 images appear on the screen — which is to say thousands of drawings can compose a single scene. To break down all of those drawings, the timer writes dialogue phonetically, and the established mouth shapes that match each sound, onto the exposure sheet.
For example, Homer saying his own name would look something like Hhh-ooh-ohm-me-er-Si-im-ps-suh-hnn, each sound running down the page alongside their assigned frame numbers. And the timers, of which there are two on The Simpsons' team, do this for every character in every scene. For those fascinated by the most unusual and overlooked position, former Simpsons director Chuck Sheetz created a tutorial on how to write classic exposure sheet, which should help you picture the timing in action.
Escobar says that with the move to digital, character layout artists often "rough time" their scenes by creating a digital animatic, using the frames they've drawn to produce a very rough animation of a scene.
The really flashy, fast-moving, large-scale scenes that feature a bevy of characters: they usually go through here. Two checkers review everything — all of the character layout artwork, the exposure sheet, and the printed materials — and they make sure that every piece of art and line of direction matches on the exposure sheet.
The role of Akom, a South Korean animation studio located west of Seoul, is to animate all of the frames between the drawings in the final reel delivered by the layout artists. Say the layout artists animated 20 frames for a 3-second scene. At 24 frames per second, the sequence is 72 frames long. The animation studio would need to do a clean line version of the original 20 frames and the 52 frames of animation between them. Heartless18 posted A few weeks?
Try a few days. Trey and Matt are notorious for their ability to make an episode capitalizing on a recent event within a WEEK of it occurring. If memory serves, they managed to whip up an episode about Saddan Hussein within days of his capture.
User Info: Lostfan User Info: linkkhalid I recall Trey and Matt mentioning a piece of news before some local news stations even got to it. They also made their episode parodying "Inception" within one week, and "accidentally" plagiarized someone else's parody because they had only seen the trailer and were unaware that said parody was not using actual dialogue from the film.
User Info: rockoperajon. A Simpsons episode takes about 9 months to make because there's still a lot of animation done by hand, a larger cast to deal with, and they make full episode seasons, so they have to work on many episodes at once. South Park, on the other hand, does almost all its animation by computer, the animation is very crude and simple, they only do 14 episodes a season, and usually, Trey and Matt do most of the voices themselves. Sometimes less. We happy few More topics from this board Keep me logged in on this device.
0コメント