Are show productions taking advantage of their storyboard artists by having them write and draw at the same time?
Before, storyboard driven shows were just so artists could fill up a simple premise with as many gags as possible. Now storyboard-driven is being applied to shows with an overall narrative, continuity, and world-building lore. It feels like this is just an elaborate way to make the artists work twice as hard for the same pay.
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The fuck are you talking about? They are writing on the storyboards to tie-in the dialogue from the script to a particular frame of the animation. Kill yourself.
>Being this literal
I know people throw around the term "autism" a lot on this board, but that is legit autism to misunderstand a sentence that poorly.
Except if you weren't a dumb retard you'd know that script draughts exist well before a storyboard does.
This just seems like a transition to an "agile" form of production where changes to the scenes can more easily can be reflected in the script and vice versa, without overall production having to cease until the script and the storyboards have reached parity again.
>Dumb retard
>Mistakes word "draughts" for "drafts"
Except a script draft for these world-building shows like Steven Universe, Star Vs, Adventure Time are more likely rough outlines that span to one-to-two pages long. And the other artists typically do not communicate with one another on different arcs or points of the story. So artists are typically doing narrative-building 11-minute stories on a 2-week deadline using nothing more than a loose outline and have to think of everything else themselves from start to finish. Which is a ton of creative work to balance outside of spending four weeks (Because storyboard deadlines used to longer in the 90's) thinking of gags for a pure slapstick cartoon.
Storyboard-driven cartoons have truly destroyed Western animation. All other problems with the industry are minor in comparison.
Other nations in the anglosphere use draught instead of draft, or both interchangeably with no credence given to one form above the other. Generally in British English it is acceptable to use draft when referring to shit like a sketch, for example. Some others don't care because the term "draft" when taking the noun form becomes "draughtsman", even in British English.
Anyway, back on tipoc: what current shows are confirmed storyboard-driven? It's all well and good bitching about a particular system but if you don't give evidence of it so that it can be analysed then there's little point in having the discussion. I mean you say "more likely" which means you don't know for certain. How do you know the outline that image never spawned a script and wasn't just a treatment typed up by the script-writer before he knuckled down to type up some draughts?
Don't forget that "outline" and "treatment" are often one and the same.
Most of the problems in storyboard driven cartoons would have been solved if they just extended the time. Shame, cause like the user said above, it used to be longer in the 90’s. Executives want quantity over quality
The problem is talent, not time. Screenwriters don't really get much time to do their work either.
Professional writing and storyboarding are two completely different skillsets and thus occupations
>Anyway, back on topic: what current shows are confirmed storyboard-driven?
Just about all of them. Script-driven cartoons are the rare exception now, if there are even any left.
Confirmed?
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Several interviews confirm those treatments are the script. Several production blog posts confirm it. List of storyboard-driven productions:
>Star Vs
>Steven Universe
>Adventure Time
>Harvey Beaks
>Pickle and Peanut
>We Bare Bears
Off the top of my head. But the major ones I am referring to are the first three that have a lot more writing work than just shoving in as many jokes as you can before the deadline hits like We Bare Bears.
I'm not about to find every single reference point for all of those shows and the many interviews that confirm this is how these shows operate because this isn't an essay and I don't need cite my references. People here have general enough cartoon knowledge that it's unnecessary. If you don't even have that, then why even bother putting your two cents into a conversation you have no idea what people are talking about in?
Confirmed for numerous shows, yes. Often it is obvious from the credits, and/or someone from the actual crew confirms it.
Obviously I haven't checked every single running cartoon there is (not least because I probably missed some altogether) but there's more than enough of a sample size to go on.
Only script-driven cartoon I can I know of that’s still on air is Gumball.
Loud House is script-driven, I believe. And I'm just gonna assume all the action cartoons (Justice League, Voltron, Star Wars, Avengers) are as well, but I assume we're only talking about comedies here.
And it might as well not count given how long ago it started, as it's basically unheard of to switch that in the middle of a show. Also its popularity seems to be hovering around zero right now anyways.
There's the proof I was looking for.
No wonder those shows seem so disjointed. I think Star Vs is about the only one in that list which seems to have a cohesive, multi-episode plot. A shame, since when I was a media-then-animation student I was taught that the script is king.
Regardless of Sup Forums's feelings on the cartoon, it should be mentioned that MLP does as well. They have script-writers working on each episode.
>Star Vs
>cohesive plot
Please tell me you're joking.
"which seems to have", user.
What do you mean by JL? And Voltron isn't on TV
>A shame, since when I was a media-then-animation student I was taught that the script is king.
It's been a thing that "animators hate writers" for a long, long time. John K made a big fuss about it. Chris Sanders wrote a storybook about it that he slipped into some Disney exec's folder back in the 90's.
Justice League Action. And I assumed "on air" just meant "currently running" not actually airing on TV, since there's about twenty or so stream-exclusive cartoons ranging from Hulu to Amazon to Netflix that are still to take into account for.
>It's been a thing that "animators hate writers" for a long, long time
Probably because writers are consantly insisting that shit be changed because they've had another creative epiphany that they demand be included in the ongoing production (causing all manner of snags in the chain) because the change feeds their ego a little more. Writers are mostly idea-men after all.
It's not the only one of those shows to have tidbits of lore and continuity scattered throughout, user.
The problem is, without writers it's done shittily.
Pre-2ndMovie SpongeBob and original PPG were also board-driven.
Go to bed, John K.
Most people can write, but few people can draw well enough for that to be their job. The asymmetry there means that artists will always be more in demand, and when you cut costs, you hire one person who can draw okay and write okay instead of two people, one who can draw okay and another who can write well.
Only the first season was board driven, though.
Citation needed, preferably for all seasons.
>It's not the only one of those shows to have tidbits of lore and continuity scattered throughout, user.
But it has more of that than the rest. Episodes of Star VS are much less self-contained than SU or whatever.
That makes no sense. If it were actually harder to find artists as opposed to writers then they would be paid more, negating the advantage in the first place. But in fact they are paid significantly less.
>Most people can write
Go look at a fan fiction site and then say that
Normies care a lot more about great art than great writing, though. It's only Sup Forums that bitches about plotholes and ruined characters. I think that's user's implied point over there.
>Normies care a lot more about great art than great writing, though.
That's why South Park, Aqua Teen, and Beavis and Butthead were huge hits, right? While Don Bluth films were financial flops?
No one gives a shit about cartoon writers. Directors or artists are the people who get recognition.
Well to be fair outside of the 80s ones (Nimh, Tail, Time) there are no good Don Bluth movies
Sorry, when I wrote "great" I meant from a normie perspective. Not Sup Forums's.
(In fact really good-looking animation is very likely to be pigeonholed into the anime - and thus for basement dwellers only - category.)
What in the world do animation directors even do? I've never been able to pinpoint any impact one has had on a show, unlike writers and artists.
Well.. Yeah, exactly, because the writing sucks.
This is not a "normie" thing. General audiences will take a good story with shitty art than the reverse. In fact, animation communities are the only ones that care about art. Why do you think so many ugly looking cartoons get made?
Unikitty is script-driven, FOP has been for most of it's years.
It's because writers, are simply not animators (usually), and what they do is write comedy that has the visual element as an after thought, which is terrible for animated comedy, a lot of the humor in animation draws from the movement, the physics, the expressions, or even more subtle things like line work or style, and when the animator has more control over this animation has room to shine through, rather than merely match the words and direction and the vague idea in a writer's mind.
Of course, this applies far more to comedy, and having a cohesive story requires rigid guidelines to set a certain tone, and give certain information to the viewer, and this should be done by someone with a more detailed idea of what's happened and what's going to happen in the story, who and what the characters are, and this should be consistent throughout the entirety of the production process, and this doesn't leave a lot of room for animators thinking up random ideas or jokes, so while it can be done by an animator (who is skilled at storytelling) it's not exactly cost effective to draw everything out first when you gain very little visually for it because it's grounded by the rules of the story.
So it's generally reasonable to say board-driven shows allow much more artistic freedom and comedic visuals.
One of the problems of the modern-day mentality of hating writers though is that a LOT of cartoons do not utilize zaniness or cartoon wackiness as much as they did in the 90's. We are no longer swimming in shows like Rocko, Ed Edd Eddy, Ren & Stimpy, Cow & Chicken, Courage, etc.
Shows like Clarence and We Bare Bears don't seem like they benefit from being storyboard-driven and don't seem like they would be impossible to produce if you wrote a script first. It seems like they would function the exact same way either or.
Gumball and Uncle Grandpa are some of the few cartoons since Flapjack I can think of that actually utilized the capabilities of having a cartoon visual storyteller's touch.
>One of the problems of the modern-day mentality of hating writers though is that a LOT of cartoons do not utilize zaniness or cartoon wackiness as much as they did in the 90's.
That's rather beside the point though, isn't it? The quality of people who get hired is completely separate from what makes board/script-driven different.
>Shows like Clarence and We Bare Bears don't seem like they benefit from being storyboard-driven and don't seem like they would be impossible to produce if you wrote a script first. It seems like they would function the exact same way either or.
Well yes, unskilled people cannot take advantage of either production style well, or maybe they are skilled and choose not to, but that's nothing to do with why many people in animation dislike script-driven shows.
Well I don't think it's a matter of skill or not skilled. I enjoy Clarence, but I definitely would not be able to tell if it was script or storyboard driven if I didn't already know. I think it's just an issue of misusing techniques or production methods because CN has been founded on mostly board-driven productions and doesn't want to go out of that bubble with some exceptions every now and then.
Something like We Bare Bears clearly does not want to be Ren & Stimpy, and that's fine. It seems to want to be a sitcom, so why shouldn't it be written like a sitcom? As much as people hate TTG, it's script-driven and written like a sitcom and can get out a lot of funny moments when it wants.
We Bare Bears barely makes me crack a smile. And I don't think it's because the people working on it suck, I just think they were funnelled through a mismatched system. Much like how SU falls apart because of the way it's made even though the individual people working on that show are pretty good, too.
>Something like We Bare Bears clearly does not want to be Ren & Stimpy, and that's fine. It seems to want to be a sitcom, so why shouldn't it be written like a sitcom
But there are many scenes in We Bare Bears that do creatively use many of the principles of animation to add more subtle but enjoyable layers to a scene.
>As much as people hate TTG, it's script-driven and written like a sitcom and can get out a lot of funny moments when it wants
Literally never. But yes, Script-Driven shows can be funny, there is often very little use of animation as a medium to create things that are visually comedic
I mean, you can use something like the Simpsons as an example of this, sort of, but the Simpsons animation are/were incredibly inventive in the way they visually portrayed certain scenes or actions.
I'm not saying you absolutely can't make a serious story with a board driven show, or a comedy with a script, but things like pic related don't come easily from typing in a word document.
Yeah, it comes from being a literal genius. That's very rare. The fact is, the reason most cartoons suck is they don't have geniuses working on them.
I'm not going to disagree that the people involved weren't amazingly skilled at what they do, but I don't think you need to be a genius to make something funny, and I think there's a lot that can be done when someone who is even slightly decent (maybe less than decent) at animation is given the freedom to create something ridiculous and exaggerated
Would you prefer shows with fewer episodes but longer deadlines or shows with more episodes but shorter deadlines?
I'd like to take a peek into an alternate world where the former happens so I can see if the quality goes up.
If it doesn't, then I'll stick with the latter since if we're forced to sacrifice quality regardless, may as well take quantity.
Current season SpongeBob is script driven. I think it has made a positive influence as the writers are a team of people who storyboarded some classic episodes mixed with newer ones.
I wonder whether Tangled: the Series is storyboard or script driven.
Bob Jaques was the best animation director for Ren and Stimpy. He helped animate, fix the stuff John and the crew couldn't do, tell the animators how to do their job.
I also forgot to mention that the last SB season has also had some classic 90s storyboarders like Bob Camp and animation directors simultaneously. I guess that they tried to leave the heavy work on the writers and make the storyboarders push the jokes further with the plot and main jokes already clear.