chapter 13

getting the job – the business of animation

My first experiments in animation were in my first year of art school. It was an assigned project, and after my first test shots, I knew this was for me. It seemed to be the perfect mix of art; sculpture, painting, lighting, performance and music. From then on I had a fairly clear path to follow. After two years in art school I moved to California to go to film school. I never had any training in character animation. I just interpreted my film assignments in animation, extremely crude, misinformed, uneducated stop motion. It was fun and I loved it, but the films were total crap. After I graduated I heard they were doing The New Adventures of Gumby in San Francisco. It was perfect, low-end entry level stop motion. So I moved to San Francisco to beg for a job, and eventually, they let me in. That's where I met a lot of the animators that I have worked with through the years, and that's where I learned how to animate.

Trey Thomas, animated Sally in Nightmare Before Christmas
and James and the Giant Peach

know your limitations

Many animation courses leave you unprepared for the business side of animation, concentrating more on giving you the experience of developing your ideas. When the likes of Jeff Newitt and Trey Thomas started out, an animation student was a rare thing. Nowadays, there are hundreds of animation courses. You may think that having done a three-year animation course, that you are an animator and ready to start work in a studio. This is of course possible, but there is a great difference between the type of work done at an art college and the sort of work that people make a living out of. In some rare cases a graduate will hit the market with just the right idea at the right time and have their work spotted at a festival or a degree show by a company representative. But for most of us there is a more circuitous route and it involves developing an understanding of what studios do and what they may be looking for by watching programmes, reading journals and trawling through websites.

different work, different studios

All studios have different reasons for their existence. Some are set up by animators trying to make their own films, but in order to sustain their work they may need to take on commercials from time to time. Others produce a steady stream of children's TV series. Very generally speaking, the UK animation industry struggles to survive in a market-driven system that means that often the only way the general public, other than small children, will get to see good British animation is in a commercial.

The UK does produce more animation than other European countries. In the past the French have had more luck with government subsidies and their television stations have had to follow a quota system that meant they had to show a majority of French work, but that seems to be changing now as funding becomes scarcer. American 2D animation is still the most popular, watched worldwide. However, the animation is kept to a limited style by budgets, and it tends to be dialogue/narrative driven.

The pre-school audience seems to be where model animation makes the biggest impression, especially in the UK. Its tactile, dimensional nature is what makes it so successful in marketing to a younger audience. In the US Clokey Productions make Gumby while in the UK, HOT Animation makes the very popular Bob the Builder and Cosgrove Hall Films produce a large number of the UK's children's TV programmes including remakes of popular classics such as Andy Pandy and Bill and Ben, and their own creations, Fetch the Vet and Engie Benjy.

commercials

Commercials are the jam on top for many animation teams. This is what the studios hope will pay the overheads and the wages for what is usually a skeleton staff. If all goes well they can salt away a little, and it may be used for projects that could expand the studio's repertoire.

With the kind of budgets sometimes available for commercial work, one would expect the benefits to be the high production qualities, innovative ideas and a chance to display one's talents. This is not always the case however, as the costs of the production can sometimes spiral in the decision-making process – and the results may not be quite the showcase one was expecting.

Loose Moose are a London-based animation company, mainly involved in commercials. Their clients include KP McVities, Kraft Foods, Energizer Batteries and Pepsi Lipton. The commercials they are best known for are Peperami (seen in the UK) and Brisk Tea (for the US; Figure 13.1). The team consists of two animation directors, Ken Lidster and Ange Palethorpe, two CGI animators, the producer Glenn Holberton, a production assistant, and a marketing manager.

In the first stage of the process, the client will choose an agency with a good track record. The agency will invite various animation companies to pitch for the job, sending round a script and a storyboard. Companies can invest a lot of time, effort and creativity just pitching for a commercial – developing characters and set designs and filming sometimes quite complex animatics. Ange Palethorpe, describes the process:

When we pitch a job, we cost up all the character designs, and sets, crew and post production. Once we've got the job, there's generally 4 to 5 weeks of going back and forth to the client, checking characters. Then the Plasticine sculpts have to be approved by the client.

The puppets are so expensive; all aspects have to be approved before being made in to real puppets. Something like the Brisk Tea ads will take longer as there are so many characters involved. We usually use Mackinnon & Saunders for puppets and Artem (a London company) for sets.

Figure 13.1 Still from Rocky. Courtesy Loose Moose Productions. © Brisk Tea/JWT

Based in the West End of London, a large studio space would be prohibitively expensive, so Loose Moose hire the space and the crew. Working in this way, they can rely on the professionalism of a team of experts, but as it's a hired space, they can't afford the luxury of testing time, unless there is a particularly generous budget. So the animators have to be prepared to go in and start ‘cold’.

On a commercial Loose Moose shoot on average about 3 seconds of animation a day and shoot for about 10 to 15 days. If there is a chance, they will set up two units for a seven-day shoot.

By contrast Aardman Animations has most of its production on site. Even though they will hire in freelancers, they have a core of staff animators, a camera department, model making department and administrators. One of Aardman's creative directors, Luis Cook, describes his approach and the relationship between animation company and agency:

As a creative director you need to know exactly what is going on around you, go to exhibitions, watch TV ads, look at hoardings, magazines. It may be art, it may be fashion, you might not like it – but you've got to be aware of it.

When a job comes in I try and make it look as different as I can. Partly because it makes life more interesting for me and hopefully you don't get too stuck in a style. The idea always comes from the script and listening to who your client is – tonally. Which way they want to go with it? Is it going to be dark, is it going to be serious, is it going to funny, is it going to be brightly coloured, is it going to be fast-cutting, or slow? D'you want to make it boring? D'you want to make it exciting? All these things come from the script. D'you want to make it minimal or overloaded with imagery? Sometimes it's really obvious, other times you have to work at it and coax people round.

You can only trust what the agency tell you, the client wants one thing, the agency another – it would be useful sometimes to go straight to the client, but you can't. You have to trust what the agency tells you. You have to remain calm if the agency goes wobbly. If they're coming at you with a terrible idea say ‘hmm that's interesting. Let me have a think about it and get back to you’ to give yourself space!

On a recent commercial this American guy from the agency said to me ‘This is a million dollar campaign, get rid of the art!’ Culturally we were coming from different backgrounds, for him my ideas were too abstract. But, he was right – it became a very successful campaign and they shifted a lot of product!

series

Series work is often defined by its quick turnaround, lower budget nature. The characters are often refined down to a simple stylized design; the animation is also simplified, for greater speed and efficiency. It's very often these elements that make this form of animation so popular with children, and the same elements that give the characters marketable appeal. This in turn can make the medium a hot property for the TV companies and licensees.

Bob the Builder is a good example of a popular pre-school children's series. The studio, HOT Animation, was set up five years ago to produce this series and four half-hours of Brambly Hedge for HIT Entertainment. As Jackie Cockle, producer/managing director who runs training courses alongside the studio work, explains:

When I first started HOT, I didn't want to be part of the battle with other studios for freelance animators, I wanted to grow my own. We started out with two experienced animators and we took on 5 trainees on our scholarship course for 12 weeks and those animators went straight into production, so then we had our first seven. That's how we built the company up. It's only now that we're starting to use the odd freelance for holiday cover. We've trained up 15, and not lost any. They all do different characters and get involved in research and development. A lot are experienced prop-makers, in ‘refurb’ periods (between shoots, the puppets will be refurbished at Mackinnon & Saunders) they work on props or make flying rigs. In our company, runners usually go into editing or rigging work rather than go on to animate.

The animation is shot on a Bolex RX16 converted to Super 16mm, preferred by the US as it resolves well in High Definition.

You're striving each time to be better than the last, sustaining the creativity, the designs – we've done over 100 episodes now. It's character driven and we try to keep the characters growing and interacting all the time.

Series work sometimes gets put down as being a poor relation to specials and features. In fact it deserves applause because it's such hard work, you need a crew that's dedicated and efficient. It's like a little army getting down to work. We have week by week planned, we can tell you exactly what stage the production will be on a certain day. If your sets and your puppets and your costumes aren't ready, you're sunk.

Series work is one of the best training grounds for animation. Some of this country's best animators, Loyd Price, Paul Berry, Barry Purves, all developed their talent working for several years on programmes like Wind in the Willows, Chorlton and the Wheelies and Cockleshell Bay at Cosgrove Hall, a company who have produced 21 years of children's series for television.

TV specials and features

Probably the most challenging task for any animation team is a feature film. A half-hour TV special is a wonderful experience for animators in terms of handling continuity, and character development, but making a feature film tests the cohesion of a team in many ways. A feature film requires a huge team and soaks up anyone with animation skills for a long period. Often a graduate's first experience on a feature is being on a production line making one small part of a puppet, or cleaning up the same puppets over and over again ready for the next scene. This can be dispiriting, especially if you never get to see the rest of the studio. It takes all the company's resources to sustain in the crew a sense of following through a big adventure, and belief in the ultimate goal.

Working on Chicken Run was a much more fast and efficient way of animation. Before I was into refining movement and detail. Chicken Run was about making it work. The puppets were not really designed for refined animation, and yet that was what we were asking of them. A lot of the work was struggling with the puppets. Because clay is not really conducive to refined animation, but they asked an incredible preciseness, they pushed us far beyond anything I've ever done – it was the hardest thing I've ever done I think. As far as subtlety of emotion and subtlety of expression, Nick pushed us far beyond anything I've done before, maybe beyond anything that's ever been done, with claymation.

Guionne Leroy

Moving up one notch from being an animator to directing a team of animators can be a difficult transition.

Barry Purves reflects on directing Hamilton Mattress, a BBC Christmas Special made by Harvest Films:

On Hamilton Mattress I was directing four to five animators. The difficult thing is keeping an overall style and they were four very different animators. You have to allow them their creativity, so that when one makes Hamilton do something extraordinary, you have to let the other animators take elements of that. In trying to get a walk similar, an animator can be so focussed on that scene; he may forget how it fits in to the rest of the story. So I try to keep them all on track. When I'm the director and animator if I see a gesture going wrong, I can work my way out of it. Or if there's a cut point coming up – and I realise I'm just not going to be able to do it in time, then I can find something else to make it work. But directing animators, you are one step removed. It was hard trying to pull it all together, but the rewards are amazing, especially when some of them do something you just wouldn't have thought of.

Nick Park of Aardman Animations comments:

Working with a small team is quite easy. I still stayed very much in touch with the Plasticine myself on Wrong Trousers. We (Nick and Steve Box) did roughly half the animation each, but even on Wrong Trousers, I didn't want to let go of Wallace and Gromit, so Steve did all of the penguin. By Close Shave I did let go of it. Doing the animation of Wallace was the main risk: he might get a different shaped face – because we were manipulating his mouth in such a big, radical way it would be easy for the individual animator to put his own stamp on it and take it off in another direction. On A Close Shave we developed pre-made ‘replacement’ mouths for Wallace. We used it on Chicken Run, where each character had their own set of mouths. It helped keep it all consistent in style.

But each film I had to step back more. I say stepping back – it's not really stepping back, I did do a few scenes of my own in Close Shave – so I did feel I kept some hand on it – but on Chicken Run I couldn't animate. I never felt I'd lost control. There is a part of it I regret, because I do like doing the animation, I love doing it, but at the same time, to make a film of that size you can't afford to do that, because you have to spend your time going round telling everybody what to do. It is easier to do it yourself than to tell everybody else what to do!

Figure 13.2 Courtesy of Harvest Films. © Hamilton Mattress 2002

As great as our animators were on Chicken Run, I think by the mere fact that a lot of people are working on it, the style can get homogenised, because everyone's trying to aim at a common thing. It's much harder to keep the edge on the style.

applying for jobs

When I got to college (Middlesex Poly) there suddenly was the facility, all I needed, 16mm gear just hanging around, Steenbecks, dubbing. So I started making films. I was making 3D as soon as I could, using Plasticine. I rang up FilmFair (a London company) and managed to get in there while I was still at College. They were doing Paddington Bear and I got involved making props. The college course was so unstructured that I was able to do 2 days a week at Film Fair. I then took all the bits I'd done there back to college and ended up with a very good showreel, with finished films rather than tests. In 1985 I finished college and went back to work at Film Fair and within a few months I was co-directing a series.

Jeff Newitt

He makes it sound so easy. These were different times – and Jeff, let's face it, is an exceptional talent.

Getting work with an animation company is more often than not a question of luck and timing – being in the right place at the right time. To improve your chances of being in the right place at the right time research the kind of work the companies do. Read industry magazines like Campaign, Televisual, Creative Review, Cinefex. Get a copy of Animation UK: it's a directory with almost every animation company listed in it as well as TV companies, distributors, festival information – invaluable. Most companies now have a website which will tell you if they are looking for any particular skills. As a freelancer you need to be flexible and able to take a variety of different styles of direction. You also need to be prepared to relocate or work away from home.

Try and get a studio tour or a day observing or shadowing an animator. A good way in is to get work experience in a company. Ring the company and ask the receptionist first if they take on people for work experience and then ask who would be the best person to talk to. You have to be lucky, but if, once you are in, you show the right qualities: keen, quiet, good humoured, interested but not nosy, react quickly and ask good questions – you may get asked back. Remember when talking to the receptionist, they have the power to stop you right there – that is the person you must be nice to!

Degree shows are important – the better colleges mail out to invite production companies to degree shows. And the companies come if they can. Make sure your college does this.

your showreel

If you want to send your work in to try and get a job, it's important to follow a few basic rules otherwise no one will see your work.

Label it. Sounds obvious, but we've all seen reels that once had a cardboard case and now are a blank VHS, or CD. Label the tape itself as well as the case with the title, your name, contact number and email address.

Put your best work at the front. This could either be a quick compilation, or a short. There is no point in sending a long tape with examples of all of your work – unless your tutor or mentor advises it. But if your piece of work is very long, and the best bit's in the middle, edit! Give the viewer a 30-second trailer. Because if they haven't seen what they want in that time, they'll probably eject it.

For the big companies, like Aardman or Cosgrove Hall in the UK or Vinton or Tippett Studios in the US, you should be prepared to wait for some time for a response. Usually they will view the work, then if it arouses interest, it'll go further and maybe be viewed by a director. If they want you, they'll call you. But the bigger companies get many showreels in every week and can't always get to look at them immediately, especially after graduation time. You may have to wait for between 2 and 3 months for a response; then if you've not heard anything, you could ring and ask for constructive comments. If you are sending work to the US from the UK, remember it must be an NTSC conversion, that's their standard – and for tapes coming to the UK from the US, a PAL conversion is needed.

Another important point with your showreel is to clearly identify the pieces you have worked on and in what capacity. It's no good sending in a clip from something like Chicken Run on an animation showreel, when the truth is you were refurbishing parts in the model making department. Be honest and clear.

Update your showreel every six months.

When you are making up business cards put an image from your film on it. This helps people see immediately what you do, and fixes your work in their mind.

Be reasonable about how you classify yourself – ‘Joe Bloggs, Animator’ sounds better than ‘Joe Bloggs, Animator, Designer, Director, Illustrator’. The latter sounds like you don't have particular skills or ambition and will take any old job, this might be true but it doesn't instil confidence!

festivals

Try to keep your work seen – festivals are a growing business, there are more and more small festivals looking for different things.

The British Council (www.britcoun.org) list all the festivals and what the festivals are looking to screen, when their deadlines are. They can help with travelling expenses if your work is being screened abroad.

Be sure you know what formats are required for viewing, i.e. don't send a CD if they request VHS viewing copies.

sending proposals to commissioning editors

The job of a commissioning editor is to find the right programmes for a TV company. They have to find an idea that they believe in enough to be able to convince their own company as well as others. So this is what they need to know about your project:

1.What is it about?

Send them two lines that encapsulate the whole idea. And a one-page synopsis of the proposal. That is what most commissioning editors want to see at first. They don't want pages and pages of script, or descriptions of merchandising opportunities. The idea is everything – the rest comes later.

2.What will it look like?

Send some designs for your characters and some key visuals that display the style of the film. Don't send in original work, as this makes the recipient very nervous! No-one wants to be responsible for losing your work. So send in copies.

3.What sort of audience will it attract?

Are you aiming this at children or adults? TV companies have very specific age group targets – look at channels to see how the programming changes throughout the day. Is your idea going to appeal to pre-school (1–4 yr olds); 5–7 yr olds; 8–10, 11 ,12? Children change very quickly through these ages. If it is an adult idea – how much animation do you see that is purely for adults? They do have to consider their market, and a really strange and obscure idea may not help them attract viewers.

4.What slots on TV will it fit into?

Commissioning editors would all expect anyone approaching them with an idea to know what sort of format they are looking for – to have an understanding of which slots they can programme animation into.

5.What's the duration?

Give them a story that fits their slots. Some will have slots for 5 or 10 minute animations, more common is the 26-minute series, in fact 13 x 26 is a favourite – so can you see your idea developing into 13 episodes?

6.Is there anything similar already on TV or in production?

The commissioning editor needs to be aware that this idea is not going to be too like anything else that's coming on air. It sometimes happens that an idea becomes popular, several people seem to come up with the same idea – don't get paranoid, it doesn't necessarily mean that your work is being ripped off, it just means that you have your finger on the pulse and have created something of the moment – it happens.

Make your presentation look good. Handwriting can be charming but honestly it is better to have your stuff typewritten with a good layout – and no spelling mistakes.

You have to do everything to accommodate people who look at several scripts per day and, however dedicated they are to getting animation on TV, don't have all the time in the world to talk on the phone and to dwell over long scripts. If they are interested from your initial approach, they will invite you for a meeting, and if still interested they would probably draw up some sort of formal development agreement. You should get some legal advice of your own at this stage. The next stage would be for them to commission you to write the script. After that they would start to move on to looking at a production and budgeting – then you may be on your way...

Even if a commissioner wants your idea they may not be able to fully finance it. The majority of TV channels are not able to fully finance any project and will take a project to other companies for co-financing. They may take it to somewhere like the Cartoon Forum – this is a marketplace for work, set up by Cartoon, the European Association for Animated Film, an organization based in Belgium. It takes place in a different location in Europe each year and is attended by over 250 potential investors, all interested in animation. So it can be a very slow process from script to screen.

Commissioning an idea doesn't necessarily mean they want you to write it. An animator who can write their own material as well as direct and animate is a rare being (Peter Peake who directed Pib and Pog and Humdrum is one exception). It is likely that the producer would bring in a writing team or a script editor to work on your idea.

Be aware that what starts out as a personal project may end up being a very different, very public experience due to the nature of production and the sheer amount of people that become involved. It's like letting your baby grow up – don't be too precious – let it go into the wide world.

Lastly, there is a growing volume of work being done on computer. For all the horror stories I've heard about model animators being dragged kicking and screaming into the world of CGI, there are plenty of other success stories. Many successful model animators have made the transition to work in CGI and can move between the disciplines comfortably. Keep up your computer skills; in quiet periods between jobs, train up on new software, always keep on your toes and be aware of what's going on around you. But remember that animation skills are what is important – not software skills. Software will change, animation timing and performance are fundamental to all animation.

The last word goes to Jeff Newitt who has given me some great quotes to use in this book:

It's always a dress rehearsal – the public think you can hone it and hone it, but you can't – you only get one go. With a play like Hamlet, you know the story, you have the sets and the costumes – and you rehearse it. With animation its just ‘You're on! There's the audience and there's the camera. Go!’