Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1120864
F E AT U R E Notes are part of every collaborative process especially in the creation of a TV series or film. If you are realistic, and figure that nobody gets it perfect on the first pass, someone will have an opinion at every stage along the process, from sketch to storyboard and, possibly, all the way up to screen. Perhaps the joke isn't landing, a color is off or a character isn't sprightly enough. Maybe an effect needs to be punched up or an established rule of a show's world has been overlooked. A scene might not be cinematic enough or—oh the irony!—the rendering may be too artistic. Many an artist has an anecdote equivalent of Paredes' " WTF"— receiving a hostile or nonsensical note. Notes can be delivered via a face-to- face meeting in the writers room, in a series of emails, on a "noted-up" Google doc file, or via reams of post-its affixed to storyboards. The artists and supervisors interviewed for this story offered an assortment of advice for giving and receiving notes. To a person, they emphasized that creative notes delivered in the service of creating a quality finished product should never be taken as an evaluation of one's artistic ability or character. In other words, notes aren't personal. At the end of the day, as one interviewee said: " We're all just making cartoons." Not that this knowledge makes getting notes any easier. "Notes are always scary—both giving and receiving—because to give a note means that you're giving somebody work to do, and to get a note means that you have work to do," says Jim Mortensen, a supervising director at DreamWorks TV on Trolls: The Beat Goes On. "In getting notes, there's a lot of feeling, 'Oh, man, did I not do this? Did I not do this good enough? Does this person not like my work?'" Artists who cling to their own vision instead of the vision of the show may chafe the most strongly at notes, and they may also be early casualties if they can't adapt. Industry veterans say that there are ways for artists to either work around notes or come up with a compromise provided that there is available time and the note giver has an open mind. But given the time and budget constraints that come with studio productions, a note-challenger may invariably end up having to make the requested change. "Sometimes a choice like a prop's color or initial design doesn't seem important in the context of your scene, but it might actually have technical or long-term story or design reasons for being the way it is that you as an individual storyboard artist may not know about," says G. Melissa Graziano- Humphrey, a storyboard artist on Paradise PD. "You could have the coolest idea in the world, but if your supervisor tells you to change it, you change it." 28 KEYFRAME