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Open houses are
hard on any student. Proud parents, annoying siblings, suddenly pleasant
teachers and the just-plain-curious walk through your school and look at
your work hanging on the classroom wall. But for the animation students at
Sheridan College
in Oakville, Ont., a good open
house can launch a career. Along with the always-embarrassing families at
Sheridan’s annual open house (held this year in early May) is another group
whose presence here is part of a more serious mission — recruiters from the
big animation houses have come to scout new talent. The numbers alone
indicate how much weight a Sheridan animation diploma carries in the
business. At this year’s open house, there are 50 graduating students and 92
recruiters.
After three years
of rigorous training in all elements of classical animation—character
design, motion, backgrounds, layout, voices, sound effects, music and life
drawing—Sheridan’s graduates show their work on a large screen in a lecture
theater, a kind of moving undergraduate thesis. “You’re only required to do
a minute,” graduating student Carolyn Plummer says. “But we’re all real
eager beavers; we all did epics.” Plummer, 32, a former graphic designer who
returned to Sheridan for the animation program, collaborated with two other
classmates on a six-minute opus about a commercial air traveler constantly
frustrated in his efforts to get to the plane’s lavatory. “It wasn’t
completely finished when they screened it,” Plummer says. “[It was] more of
a work in progress.” Another student, John Hoffman, 22, took his inspiration
from the cliff-hanger serials of the 1930s, imperiling his protagonist—a
90-year-old detective named Jerry Hatrick—in a series of close calls over
the course of two high-speed, harrowing minutes.
“During the
screenings, some of the finished, polished films didn’t get the best
reaction,” says Don Graves, Sheridan’s executive director of arts. “But
there were some incomplete pictures—just pencil tests still, in some
cases—that had the audience laughing out loud.”
The last six weeks
of school have been a frenzy for students trying to finish their films; four
hours of sleep a night seems like a luxury. “A couple of all-nighters in
there too,” adds Shannon Penner, 23, another graduating student. His
two-minute, 20-second film—a love story—elicited tears from the hard-nosed
professionals at the graduate screening. “It’s pretty tough,” Penner says of
Sheridan’s training. “The only thing that really compares would be the
program at Cal Arts [California Institute of the Arts].”
The difference:
tuition at Sheridan is about $1,300 each year; Cal Arts—which Walt Disney
helped found, and which his company continues to support—charges about
US$10,500 per year. “[Sheridan]
may be the last free lunch,”
Graves says.
Sheridan receives
2,500 to 3,500 applications for the 110 openings in its first-year classical
animation program. “The demand is just enormous,” Graves says. “It would be
easy to just say, ‘Gee, lets have 500 or 1,000 students.’ But one of the
reasons the [animation] companies come back on such a regular basis is
because of the quality of the training. And that has a great deal to do with
the careful selection process.” Demand for talent is so great that many
studios view admission to Sheridan’s classical animation program as a
qualification in itself. Training often begins with a preliminary year of
art fundamentals—drawing, painting, sculpture and exercises. For the next
two years, students learn the basics: sound synch, design, story writing,
backgrounds, character design, life drawing and the finer points of the
animator’s art—the ability to “act with a pencil.” By the third year of the
course proper, all those skills are supposed to come together, shining
brilliantly in the final graduating picture. “You’re not just animating,”
Plummer says of the final year. “You’re doing everything. You’re really a
whole, entire little filmmaker unto yourself. That’s what makes this course
different. You really understand the process when you get out of here.”
For the Sheridan
students who can handle the all-nighters, the toughest choice will probably
be deciding between three or four offers—all of them with starting salaries
between $40,000 and $50,000. Within two to five years of being hired, they
probably will be making twice that much. Up until now, most of them headed
for Hollywood, where the bulk of the animation business is based. But this
year, that’s all changing: Walt Disney is coming to Canada. A new unit of
the company, Walt Disney Animation Canada Inc., has opened two temporary
facilities—one in Toronto, the other in Vancouver. Last month it began
production on its first project, a direct-to-video feature-length sequel to
Beauty and the Beast.
Disney’s move is a
bold step. And people in the industry agree that while it may be the first
Hollywood animation studio to set up shop in Canada, it won’t be the last.
Warner Bros., SKG DreamWorks and other studios are also rumored to be
looking north. For Sheridan graduates, it means they have the option of
staying home; for our existing animation houses, it means they’re suddenly
playing in the big leagues.
Making cartoons in
Canada makes sense—so much sense, it’s surprising no studio has done it
before. For years, this country has been the source for hundreds of the most
talented animators working in Hollywood. Walt Disney himself would have been
Canadian, had his grandfather Kepple not forsaken Southern Ontario for
Kansas in 1878. “There just seems to be something about Canadians and
animation,” says Greg Lucier, director of operations and studio manager for
Walt Disney Animation Canada, who spent his spring sifting through the 9,000
resumes, videotapes and portfolios piled in his temporary Toronto office.
Disney already runs
facilities in Tokyo and Sydney. It has been planning its Canadian initiative
for three years, but internal changes at the company caused delays. “I’m
surprised it has taken this long,” says another Canadian expatriate, Lenora
Hume, vice-president of international production for Walt Disney Television
Animation. “We got the approvals from Investment Canada three years ago.”
The next step is finding a permanent home: the studio has to be about 50,000
square feet (“Without our having to run up and down seven stories,” says
Hume) and it has to have sufficient power to run lights, cameras and
computers. Just about everything else, such as location and amenities—is
determined by the preferences of prospective employees. “These people are
drawing all day, every day,” she says. Animation’s current boom is traceable
to Jeffrey Katzenberg’s years at Disney’s animation division. Katzenberg,
formerly chair of Walt Disney Studios and now one-third of SKG DreamWorks,
along with Steven Spielberg and David Geffen, was heavily involved with
Beauty and the Beast (1991, gross: US$141 million), Aladdin (1993, US$217
million) and The Lion King (1994, US$312.8 million). More modest Disney
efforts, such as last summer’s A Goofy Movie, were surprisingly profitable
too. Then, home video offered a revelation that the company had previously
missed. The Return of Jafar was originally conceived as a made-for-TV movie
spun off from Aladdin. Early in Jafar’s development, however, the company
decided to release it as a direct-to-video movie instead. It sold 10 million
units. “That surprised the heck out of everybody,” Hume says. “We had to
rethink our business.”
The Canadian
operation will be devoted exclusively to direct-to-video feature-length
projects. First up is a holiday sequel in the Beauty and the Beast saga, the
working title of which is Beauty and the Beast: Christmas Belle. For that
project, Lucier will have to hire some 200 animators, as well as layout
artists, background painters and support staff.
Getting recruited
by a big animation studio isn’t like being picked in the first round of a
football draft—you’re not expected to make an immediate impact. It’s more
like pro basketball, where you spend a couple of years on the bench.
Sheridan grads usually angle for work as “tweeners”—the hardworking grunts
who create the illusion of fluid movement between “key poses” drafted by
lead animators.
Disney recruiters
started holding interviews in January for the Toronto positions. “They sit
you down, they go through your portfolio,” Penner says. “By that point,
they’ve seen everybody’s movies, made notes during the screenings and have
some idea of your skills.”
“It’s pretty fast,”
Plummer says. “They’ve got a limited amount of time to get to everybody, so
it’s a brief session. They’ll critique your portfolio. Then, if they think
you’re a candidate—if they’re thinking seriously of hiring you—they’ll often
give you an in-betweening test.” Students are given some key poses and a
model sheet of the character, then given from two hours to a couple of weeks
to animate a sequence.
The critical and
commercial success of Pixar Animation Studio’s Toy Story has focused more
attention on computer animation. Penner and Plummer, who graduated in
classical animation, jump to the defense of their art. Penner: “A computer
is really just a very big, expensive pencil.” Plummer: “A computer can save
you a lot of work—testing a sequence, for example, or doing the intermediary
drawings in a sequence. But the artistic skills you learn in classical
animation are still at the core of the work. They don’t change.”
However, computer
animation may do much of what’s currently done by entry-level, sweatshop
animators. Sheridan now offers a one-year graduate program in computer
animation. Even Disney, which has always approached classical animation the
way the Florentines once approached linear perspective, may be making the
technological leap. “I went to Disney’s first ‘cattle call,’ “ says one
Sheridan computer animation student. “They were looking for digital.”
What does Disney
coming to Canada mean for the established houses here? “I can’t see this as
anything other than a win-win situation for the industry in this country,”
Graves says.
Not all Disney
competitors agree. “We’re all facing problems right now hiring enough
people,” says Michael Hefferon, vice-president of production and development
at Toronto’s Phoenix Animation Studios Inc. “Even before Disney came in,
there was zero unemployment in our business. We’re taking people out of
first year at Sheridan.” Since pay rates are steady throughout the industry,
an artist’s choice of employer is often determined by the work. “If I want
talent to come and work at this studio, I need to make sure our projects
interest them,” Hefferon says. “Money is always an issue, but for a lot of
artists it’s the project-they’re going to invest a year or more of their
lives.” Artists working at Phoenix Animation can switch between projects and
disciplines—something less common at Disney, where animators can spend
several years on a single character.
“In the long term,
Disney’s Canadian operations are going to be good for the community,” says
Michael Hirsh, chair of Toronto’s Nelvana Ltd. “At first, there will be an
immediate squeeze on talent including Disney, by the way. It has had trouble
recruiting, compared with what it thought it could do:”
Disney has two
advantages over its Canadian competitors. The first is security. “Disney
offers longevity,” Alan Kennedy says. His company, Canuck Creations Inc. of
Toronto, has about 40 people working on a Warner Bros. feature called Space
Jam, starring basketball titan Michael Jordan alongside Warner’s cartoon
stars—Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck et al. “Already, a few of the people working
with me are going over [to Disney],” says Kennedy. “They have families and
they want the security for three to five years.” The second plus for Disney
is training. “Disney can provide a training ground that I can’t,” Kennedy
says. Despite his enthusiasm for the Sheridan program, Kennedy believes it’s
no substitute for ground-floor commercial work. “[Animation students] learn
the essentials in school, but they don’t realize the reality. I just had a
couple of students in here and did a test. They were rated as fairly high in
school, but there was no way. Even they said, ‘Wow, we can’t work on this.”
Other studios just can’t afford to wait. “I can only take the very top
students out of Sheridan now—people who can animate immediately,” says Lee
Williams, vice-president of production for Ottawa-based Lacewood Studios
Ltd., which has done work for Disney’s cable channels, CBC, CTV and the USA
network. “The problem with animation in Canada right now is a lack of
funding.”
For some producers,
Canada is the second link of a tripartite production chain: studios in
Hollywood usually conceive the projects and write them. Figuring out what
they’re supposed to look like—storyboarding, art direction, character design
and key animation—is done in Canada. Then, the studio ships the project to
South Korea, Taiwan or the Philippines for in-betweening, ink-and-painting
and cleanup. The Far East gets the grunt work for three reasons: its
animation factories are quick, meticulous and cheap because of economies of
scale. One of the most popular Korean studios, Akom Studios, has a main
building with seven vast floors, with hundreds of in-betweeners and
assistants working constantly.
Will Canada become
the next Burbank, Calif., of animation, or the next Seoul? In Vancouver,
particularly, much of the business is work-for-hire—a step up from the
drudgery of the Korean factories, but not much of a step. Disney claims it
wants to do its training here, with an eye to one day originating new
theatrical releases out of the Canadian studios. The current crop of
Sheridan grads isn’t exactly waiting around. Hoffman has already found a job
with Fox Animation in Phoenix, Ariz., which offered him a position several
months before graduation. Plummer wants to work for a multimedia educational
house in San Francisco. Penner had pushed harder than anyone for an offer
from Walt Disney Canada (although he ultimately took a job with Fox). “The
Disney people said [my film] showed character and ‘acting’—and that’s what I
was going for. That’s what they’re looking for, since you’re going to be
doing feature-film stuff instead of shorter, more comedic things.” His
gamble paid off. In May, Disney offered Penner a job. “I went for something
more dramatic, with less comedy, but,” he says, with a canny eye for the
universal Disney touch, “ending on an ‘up’ note.” |
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