By: JEFF DEGRANDIS

JEFF DEGRANDIS — Sat, 10 Dec 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Hey Cartoon Kids!
Yeah; I too am guilty of having a lot of stuff in the storyboard that need to be hacked out. We all love our precious stuff, but we need to “murder our darlings” as Chuck Jones has said to me on many occations when I used to pitch shows to him. It’s better to have too much good stuff than not enough. If you have a ton of good funny cartoon stuff and remove half of that, you still have a half a ton of funny cartoon stuff. Now that’s not too bad, is it? I know we all hate to get rid of all that good stuff we love, BUT, the audience will never know what you took out. Only you do. They won’t know what’s missing. Save it for another cartoon. That never works for me. I find that when I get to a gag that’s similar to one I killed in another cartoon, it turns out better than the first time! Perhaps the situation hones that gag into a more powerful gag. It’s case by case.
I have found the pitching process good for streamlining my cartoons. You need comments from people who haven’t been sitting in the creative chamber with you, while you board. I’ll talk about pitching and boarding more in another blog entry next week. I’ll also talk more about our “internal” animation time clocks we all should have.
This will all be part of a series I’ll talk about from my animation experience.
Thanks, and we’ll talk soon.
I wish everyone the very best on their shorts! It’s all fun and all good!
We make cartoons for God’s sake! How great is that?!

Comments on: 7 minutes too short

By: JEFF DEGRANDIS