Tuesday, September 19, 2006
Media: Ren & Stimpy Big House Blues Seq. 01
This post is just the tip of the iceberg... see The Top Ten Reasons To Support The A-HAA for more amazing animation related articles.
In his liner notes to The Flintstones laserdisc set, John Kricfalusi writes...
In the natural lifespan of a series, there is a pattern of development. First, a period of experiment and rapid change. The work during this time has rough edges and imperfections. This is the most exciting time for the creators and the audience. Then there is a gradual refining period as the creators become more assured and confident in their creations. They may even start to standardize their work and define creative limits... The last period, and this seems to happen to every series, even the best of them, whether it be cartoons, comic strips, novels or live action, is the sad decline... The decline happens for a number of reasons. Boredom sets in. The artists get older and more conservative... The quickest, surest way to decline happens when the original creators leave the project and somebody else takes over.
ASIFA-Hollywood was fortunate to be the recipient of John Kricfalusi's personal archives, which he donated earlier this year. Among the material were all the storyboards for the original Ren & Stimpy Show. The storyboard we scanned today is the beginning of the beginning... the pilot episode, "Big House Blues". This storyboard has all the rough edges... and all of the brilliant innovation that comes with top artists set loose to create something entirely new. I hope it inspires you to create something truly great yourself.
If you would like to see more of this storyboard, let me know in the comments below. I'd be happy to pick up the board where I left off in a week or two.
For the next section of this storyboard, see... Big House Blues Seq. 2 and Seq. 3
For more Ren & Stimpy stuff, see... John K's Stimpy's Invention and our profile of Vincent Waller
Thanks
Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive
Stumble It!
posted by Stephen Worth @ 8:18 PM
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15 Comments:
Wooow... this material is excellent!
Thank you for sharing! =D
I'd love to see the rest, especially the Tweety walk Stimpy does near the end.
Or how about the effeminate pose the guard strikes behind the desk right after this sequence.
It appears so quickly it was always difficult for me to pause on my VCR - but it cracked me up every time.
– Corbett
THANKS!!!
AND PLEASE MORE!!!!!
Oh. My. God!
Thank you SO much for posting this!! It's gold. Wow!!!
I look forward to even more although this is just incredible by itself.
Thanks to the archive (Steve?) for posting this and John for donating it!
So, I'm exposing my ignorance here but I'm seriously curious: what does "dial" mean exactly?
DIAL is short for dialogue
i have a question too, what does "arm in 6x tap 4x 4x 4x hold 8x, head turn up in 4x hold to the end of dialog" and that kind of stuff means?
thanks!
Thank you Steve :)
Julian, I believe the numbers refer to the number of frames for a given action- it's timing instructions :)
So "hold 12x" means hold the frame for half a second, and "tap 4x" means 4 frames to do the tap action, make sense?
I'm sure someone can correct me if I've not got it quite right or explain it better, but that's what I was guessing :)
x means frames... so the arm would enter the scene in 6 frames, tap every four frames three times, freeze for 8 frames, then the head turn would take 4 frames and the pose would be held.
and the animator must do it as a rule in those amount of frames or can he do it in some more if he feel the action need it to? i should ask this in johns blog about how many liberty did he give to the animation about timming but if you know the answer thanks steve and also thanks to brett!
In this case, the scene would probably be on a 12 frame beat. 12 is divisible into 6 and 4 frames. This is a "slugged board", meaning the director has indicated the basic timing. A timing guy would take this and expand it out onto exposure sheets and flesh out the details. Once that's done, the animator would have to stick to the timing as it's written on the sheets.
The best Ren&Stimpy Episode EVER!!!
Glad to see the boards ... Thanks Steve.
More please! and THANKS A LOT!
awesome! and i'd REALLY love to see some boards from the adult party Ren and Stimpy too, like maybe when Stimpy trys smoking in the Ralph Bakshi episode?
thanks again you're awesome!
This is absolutley fantastic. Great stuff. Please show more of these boards. What better way to learn than through example.
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