Tuesday, January 02, 2007

The New Simpson Models?

And this isn't one. It's just a semi-relevant illustration from the internets.

After a week off, I got back into harness and traipsed around Starz Media where "The Simpsons" series moves along on the third floor with fewer artists. More of the Simpsons' pencil-wielding troops are being redeployed to the first floor (how many times have I noted this?)...

Questions about the 401(k) Plan (see below) predominated, but as I looked at a model sheet of Homer Simpson, an artist pointed out to me that this was the old Homer Simpson model, even though it said "Homer Model - Feature". I asked if there were newer Simpson models. He immediately showed me Bart the Old and Bart the New. "See the more subtle lines? The characters more tied down now."

I made grunting noises like I totally got the more subtle lines and the new, more "tied down" Bart model. Truth to tell, the old Bart and the new Bart looked pretty damn alike to me. But that's the trouble with showing artwork to a union rep/cartoon writer. It's kind of like displaying a Monet to a cow. Pretty much a pointless exercise.

Addendum:

Another project in the building is Turok, Son of Stone, a property that's seen service as a Gold Key comic and video game. Well, it's now boing to be a 70-minute DVD produced for Classic Media being supervised by animation veteran Tad Stones.

3 comments:

Kevin Koch said...

It's funny how much artists can make of subtle model changes. When I was in clean-up, we could usually tell exactly which artist on our character's team had done a given drawing, just by the tinest variations they tended to introduce into their drawings of that character. And when someone from another character team would pitch in on our character, we'd howl with laughter at how badly they "screwed up" our beloved character.

Of course, when we would look at another character in the film, one that we weren't spending 8-10 hours a day drawing, we usually couldn't see those super subtle variations, and if we were the one's drawing those characters we weren't used to, we'd be the ones screwing it up.

Amazingly, it works the same way in CG animation -- once you animate on a film for a while, you can often identify a given animator by the subtle differences in the way the move the characters and the way they handle subtle facial expressions.

Not that the audience picks any of that up . . .

Edward Liu said...

Minor correction: it's "Turok," not "Turoc," Or at least I hope it is...

Anonymous said...

Typo noted; correction made.

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