House of Paul Villeco

Some boards I did for the Change Your Mind Steven Universe special, more below the fold, posted here until I figure out a better website for this.  Remember to check out my twitter, https://twitter.com/paulvilleco

Some of my boards from the ep!  There’s monsters, crayons, tears, and stick figure warfare below the fold.

Hey, thanks!  I’m glad I can help.

I wish I didn’t have to say this, but unfortunately, I think it really is difficult to major in animation if you don’t have money.  The well-known schools cost a *lot* of cash, and the less known, inexpensive schools tend to have teachers that don’t know the industry.  They’re also less likely to offer what I think is the most important part of art school, which is being surrounded by other energized, enthusiastic artists planning to make it big.  So the cheap animation schools really might not be worth the money.

BUT, the good news is, having a degree is really not necessary.  It’s hard, but it’s totally possible to learn the skills to draw and animate without ever going to school for it.  I can’t say that it’s *easy* to learn this all on your own, and I can’t even say that I could have done it, but I know people who have.  If you can just get your skills up to a high enough level to get your first animation job, you’ll be at the same level of hirability as animators with full degrees.

I also don’t think your plan is bad at all.  Many people don’t know this, but Dr. Tezuka, the creator of classic Japanese comics like Astroboy who revolutionized manga as an art form, was actually a fully trained medical doctor.  He used his professional medical knowledge to inspire one of his first big comic series, Blackjack, about a genius surgeon.  So you’re not only looking into a stable job, you’re looking, potentially, at inspiration for art you’ll make years down the road.

I can tell you that, at least at the jobs I’ve worked at, people really don’t care what school you went to.  I don’t know if that’s the case everywhere; Disney and Pixar have a pretty close relationship with CalArts, so that might give you advantage there.

Most animation studios will just give you a test, like “animate to this audio track with the characters” or “do a 10 page storyboard based on this idea”.  They’ll judge you pretty much just on how well you do on the test.  Where you came from isn’t really important if your work stands out.

The big hurdle, though, is making the connections that let you get sent the test in the first place.  I got my first job as an intern on the first season of Superjail because I had college friends who were doing it and told me about the position.  Thanks to that, I met Christy Karacas, who remembered to send me a test for when Superjail moved to another studio.  At college, I also got to be friends with Rebecca Sugar, who offered the job I have now, boarding on Steven Universe.

So, going to a less known school won’t permanently hamstring your career, but it won’t be as easy to make connections in the industry.  But then again, having those connections is no guarantee you can get a job.

There’s a few different ways to get there.  The number one thing to remember is that, generally speaking, studios aren’t just looking for someone with a good story, they’re looking for someone they can trust to get it done.  Animation is a really risky business - it costs a LOT of money and it’s damn near impossible to predict the return.  Executives are making a huge gamble when they get behind a new TV show or movie; if it doesn’t work out, they can lose their jobs.  I used to have this idea that I could just write an idea and show it to Old Man TV, and he’d go “yeah, you totally deserve a show!” but that doesn’t really happen.  If you pitch an idea they really love, that can help, but the best thing you can do is to build up reasons for them to trust you as a creator.  That’s the best way I can explain the main two roads for getting your own show:

1) Get into the industry, in any capacity, and work your way up through the ranks.  You’ll learn a ton at every job, and working on different stages of the production will make you better at managing those stages.  This is even true on the corporate side - there are lots of creators out there now who started off just managing the business side of animation and wound up in a creative control position, just because they’d shown the studio or their small business’s investors that they could effectively run a project.  If the studio or the network or private investors can see that you can be trusted to get things done, they’re much more likely to take a chance on your vision.

2) Establish your own name.  When people get deals to make shows, and they weren’t hired from within the company, they’re almost always people who’ve been successful creating other things.  And not just within animation - comic artists, authors, even comedians and musicians.  Again, if you just show that you know how to finish a project and make money, it makes that big gamble feel a lot less risky.

It’s hard for me to give specific career advice, because everyone in this industry winds up here through different means.  Some people got here through connections they made in college, some people got here without even finishing high school.

If you’re interested in college, most of our boarders are from CalArts, which has a close connection to the California animation industry.  A lot of the crew on Steven Universe went to SVA in New York; I had a good experience there, but the New York animation industry seems to be having trouble these days.  Both those schools are very expensive, but I wouldn’t say they’re essential, so if you can’t afford them or don’t want to start off life with absurd amounts of debt, don’t feel like you have to go there to get a start.  Also, if you’re considering another college, don’t go to any of those Art Institute franchise schools that advertise themselves on TV, they’re a pretty bad scam.  Smaller art colleges or general universities might help you get a general art education, but they often lack people from the industry that know the specific ins and outs of animation, and they’re often not great for networking.

Whatever you wind up deciding for college, the advice I would give is train your fundamentals.  Go to a ton of model drawing classes.  Practice with online model drawing sites like www.quickposes.com or http://artists.pixelovely.com/practice-tools/figure-drawing/ .  You want to get good at drawing, and not just in your own style, but in as many styles as possible.  If you see an artist you like, try to figure out how they draw.  Read art blogs and learn what you can.  You want to be ready for any opportunity that presents itself.

There’s also networking.  Don’t schmooze, it turns people off, but make friends with people you like, and stay loyal to them.  Help them with their projects and they’ll help you back.  Do your own projects whenever you can, because making your own name and showing you can make stuff on your own is the best way to get offers of work... and more and more it’s seeming like it’s possible for people to get their own projects off the ground without needing help from the big name studios.

Thank you!

On Steven Universe, we draw the boards in a program called Storyboard Pro (part of the Toon Boom suite).  SP is a vector-based program, like Adobe Flash, so it actually doesn’t have a resolution.  You can enlarge the image as much as you want without problems.  Vectors tend to make uglier drawings than bitmaps, but because you can reshape and resize vectors so much more easily, they’re much more useful for storyboarding.

I don’t use blue, but I do rough out the boards before cleaning them up.  It’s actually a mandatory part of the job.  Before we can even think about taking time to make pretty drawings, we first have to create a rough sketch version of the storyboard to pitch to the crew.  At this stage, you don’t want to spend too much time on a drawing, because you’ll have to make changes.  You just want to put down whatever you need to make a stranger understand what’s going on in the scene.

The faster you can do this, the better, because it’s better to redraw a 1 minute rough sketch 10 times than to stick with your first sketch and spend an hour trying to fix it.

After two or three pitches we move on to the cleanup stage, where pretty much all we do is go through our own boards, tracing over our ugly sketches with cleaned up drawings.

Some boards from my section of the latest SU ep, Message Received.  Includes a bunch of spoilers and whole lot of you-know-who, after the jump.

I think all the teams tend to do about 500-600 board panels per episode.  After the storyboarders turn in their boards, the revision team and our animation director will add panels to improve the storyboard or to make the storyboards clearer for the animators, and sometimes Rebecca and the writers will add new segments if the episode isn’t 11 minutes, or if there’s something not working in the story.   This expands the board count up to like 800-900 panels per episode.

We wound up rushing this episode a little while we were boarding it, so I don’t have much in the way of carefully drawn panels this ep.  But I did get to board out the scene with Steven singing.  Have some of those drawings below.

As usual, not the full board, just the few drawings from my half of Nightmare Hospital that don’t keep me up at night as I bemoan my imperfection and auto-flagellate.

It’s gonna get spoooooookyyyyy