Maybe now you'll find time for work like THE WHITE HAT...I liked that one.
All Things Come To An End
- Thread starter sablebrush52
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I'll celebrate by watching "Something Wicked Comes This Way"! Congratulations!
Wow! What a resume!
So accomplished.
Well done.
Have a wonderful retirement.
So accomplished.
Well done.
Have a wonderful retirement.
Congratulations, Jesse. You are in a wonderful place to enjoy retirement in Ashland. I've read bits and pieces on the forum about things that you've worked on and it is an incredibly impressive resume.
Here's to many more quiet nights with blue wisps of smoke lazily rising up from a Barling as you stare off into the snow-capped Siskiyou Mountains.
Here's to many more quiet nights with blue wisps of smoke lazily rising up from a Barling as you stare off into the snow-capped Siskiyou Mountains.
Congratulations on your retirement! You seem like a guy who will have to decide what to do first rather than what to do. I hope you enjoy your retirement and that you are able to do some of the things you always wanted to do but couldn’t find the time for.
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Title made me think for a moment this was a suicide note or something. Glad to see it's not. Enjoy your retirement with your pipes in the forest far away from Burbank!
Jesse's de-facto "explanation" for his retirement is a load of proper BS, of course.
The real reason is Satchel sat him down the other day and said, " I need more petting, human. So, it's them or me. And I'll get very mad if you say 'them'. [pause] You won't like it when I'm mad. [longer pause] Do ... you .... understand?"
The real reason is Satchel sat him down the other day and said, " I need more petting, human. So, it's them or me. And I'll get very mad if you say 'them'. [pause] You won't like it when I'm mad. [longer pause] Do ... you .... understand?"
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Hate to tell you creatives don't retire they just slow down enough to not give themselves an ulcer.
Retirement - You are either really good at it or you get in line and wait to check out. I have a feeling you will be the former. I know I am. I never lack for anything to do and still never seem to have enough time to do the things I really want to. If I were gifted a younger body, yes, I would start a different career in a field that is miles away from education. But the reality is I still have enough time to thoroughly enjoy doing all the things I would like to do for myself. I am sure you will as well.
Just as Youtube gave everyone who wanted a chance to be their own producer - good or bad - AI and everything that comes with it will do the same for the movie industry. On top of that, the way people consume entertainment has changed as well. Making a blockbuster or even a moderately priced film these days will make less and less sense. We've seen this with the book industry. Poof. As it is, I just assume every picture or clip I see on social media is a clever AI fake made by someone in their underwear in their parent's basement - or a disinformation center in one of the "Stan" countries. Twenty years from now who knows what film making will look like. One thing is for sure - it won't be like it is today and it won't be whatever you think it might be. If I had to guess, it will allow for the viewer to be a participant and it will be highly interactive with an infinite amount of story lines and possibilities and the story line won't be decided by the creator of the project. I am not even sure individuals will even have the ability to create their own creative projects with the idea of total control from start to finish. The best storylines will allow participants "consumers" to monetize their participation - that would be my guess.
It's complicated. There is a mixture of elements that contribute to the mess. There are corporate purchases of studios and management failures tied to those purchases, resulting in losses and sales to other entities, who take on massive amounts of debt. There was the pandemic and the ways that it affected production. And there are the streaming wars, as well as other online media for viewing content that has negatively affected cable networks otherwise termed legacy media.
Essentially there is a lot of debt, and a lot of uncertainty, and the high rollers are going to squeeze as much out of the industry as they can, regardless.
From what I've read in the trades, and for reasons I don't understand I get the analytical reports that are not part of the regular trade periodical copy, all of these issues, combined with political myopia, have extensively hurt the LA based production scene.
So, lets look at a few things. AT&T bought Time Warner in 2018. At that time the acquisition was valued at $85 billion. Their motivation was to have a content creation source for their cable channel business. The problem was that AT&T's corporate culture did not mesh with Time Warner's. AT&T's management did not understand the business that they acquired and they absolutely fucked the pooch. To their credit, they finally realized and admitted that this was not a business that they could understand, and they started looking for someone to buy it from them.
During the period that AT&T owned what the rechristened as WarnerMedia, the company went through a reorganization to reduce overhead. Production was reduced, including animation. AT&T were such sweethearts that they shut down Wacky Racers just before the Christmas break so that they wouldn't have to pay the crew a week's vacation. And they threw away nearly completed episodes that could have been finished and syndicated to cable markets outside of the US. They really were clueless.
2018 was the year that I intended to retire.
I had just completed several Scooby Doo Direct To Video feature length films and had agreed to do one last one, a Scooby story based on A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court. The project was delayed, owing to problems with casting the voices, so the studio kept me busy with other projects including one that was to have ramifications that would delay my retirement until today.
That project was an episode of Supernatural entitled Scoobynatural that featured an animated Scooby episode in the middle of the otherwise live action episode. The project was in deep trouble and I was brought on for a few days a week to try to steer it away from the iceberg.
When I transitioned out of Visual Effects and into animation I took care to hide my experience at trouble shooting, managing departments, and art directing. I just wanted to paint background paintings and avoid all of the administrative stuff that I was very good at, but didn't especially enjoy. Unfortunately, I had to bring that experience to bear on Scoobynatural which brought my abilities to the attention of people well above me in the studio food chain. Scoobynatural was finished on time and budget and proved to be a huge success.
The delayed Scooby DTV got green lit and I went on it as a background painter. I figured that I'd retire at the end of the show, but that was not to be. Because the voice talent issues was still not fixed, the Scooby King Arthur project was taken as far as it could go, which takes us up to spring of 2019, when AT&T got busy reorganizing departments and firing a ton of HBO staff. They were downsizing staff in preparation for possibly selling WarnerMedia to another company.
I got a call from the show runner on Harley Quinn, a creative powerhouse name Jennifer Coyle, with whom I'd worked on DC Superhero Girls and then on those Scooby Do DTV's. She asked if I could swing by the Harley Quinn offices to see if I could help out with some production issues related to their Color Department. I also got a call that same evening from Susan Ward, the Director of Warner Brothers Television Animation, who had witnessed what I'd done on Scoobynatural, asking the same thing.
Doomed.
More to follow:
Here's the continuation:
Jen and I are friends, so I felt obligated to swing by, even though the King Arthur project wasn't yet finished. Needless to say, I got shanghaied off of King Arthur and parachuted onto Harley with the promise that I would return to it afterward to finish it. All Scooby King Arthur knew was that I said I was visitng the Harley office for a meeting and I would be back in a couple of hours. Instead, a crew showed up and dismantled my office and I disappearred from the show.
Instead of retiring as planned, I went to work fixing Harley Quinn's Color Department and completely reorganizing the pipeline, file naming conventions, and Color Lead Sheet, which contains all of the color assets and all of the lighting directions for the overseas company to follow.
We got through seasons 1 and 2, which were done back to back. I went back to work on King Arthur, supervising color and finishing up unfinished background paintings, while completing fixes on Harley and prepping for Outta Nowhere, a Courage The Cowardly Dog/Scooby Doo mash up that I was asked to art direct. To keep me happy Warners gave me a pay raise, and after finishing up Outta Nowhere, I was put on a retainer to keep me from wandering off before Harley season 3 got approved. Warner doesn't do retainers, except in very rare instances. It meant that I got a weekly paycheck whether I worked or not. That was kind of hard to ignore. Retirement could wait.
While I was working on Outta Nowhere the Pandemic hit, and we were ordered to do a bug out, gather up all of our equipment and work from home. I finished the show remotely and then worked on other projects that the studio needed me to do. Frankly, I loved working remotely. I'd done it for years as a freelance matte painter, working in my home studio and driving my paintings to the various studios for them to be photographed. This time, no commute. No people pestering me while I was trying to think.
About this time, the "merger" between WarnerMedia and Discovery took place, one where Discovery took on $49 Billion in debt to "merge" with WarnerMedia. For Discovery, this was a staggering amount of debt and they set about slashing it any way that they could, including writing off a number of "unfinished" projects to use as a tax loss. One friend of min had put 4 years of his life into directing an animated feature that was all but completed when it was scrapped.
Live action production was on the ropes for the first half of 2020 and only picked up in a small way by the middle of the year. Animated content exploded. We could work from home. Live action could not. So employment in animation boomed in 2020 and 2021.
Harley was a huge hit, so Discovery decided not to kill it, but they moved it to HBO MAX and off of DC Universe, which they did partially kill. Zaslav had stated that he didn't see animation as important to his plans and that he wanted people back in theaters. But for now, animation was needed to provide entertainment
In 2021 Discovery decided to order a return to office, based on their "expert medical advice". My expert medical advice came from Stanford and the NIH, both through family connections. I was aware of things the press was avoiding printing and I wanted no part of Discovery's half assed approach. I told my producer that I would not be willing to return to the office and that I would regretfully have to resign, with no hard feelings, as it's Discovery's decision on how they want to run their company. Discovery backed down.
As live action production began to pick up under careful protocols, and with vaccines available, less work was needed from Animation, and more people began to lose their jobs. The shit really began to hit the spinning blades in the fall of 2022, as Disney made its first deep cuts in staffing. Warners followed suit to a much smaller extent. Discovery began cost cutting after Harley season 3. Staffing dropped by 30% on projects, and schedules got tightened. Less projects were approved.
I was busier than a three legged dog with fleas, but I was also beginning to feel the stress of covering so much. And the thing of it was, if those bases didn't get covered, the studio would let the staff go and ship the whole project to the overseas studio to do. Local jobs were at stake. These were people I knew, people I had mentored, some of them friends. So I worked my ass off to see that no one lost their job.
Final bit:
In 2023 I moved to Oregon to my little house, while still working remotely. I was out of contact for three days, and then back up, living in a sea of unpacked boxes while keeping the show on schedule.
The writers' strike was in full swing, and the studios were in a panic. But they also saw this as a way to get out from underneath expensive contractural obligations to one hit wonders. Stretch out the negotiations until contract riders came into play and contracts could be nullified or renegotiated lower. In a way, there was no urgency to end the strike and it could be used later as an excuse for all of the ensuing ills.
Animation jobs were continuing to disappear. Live action jobs also began to dry up. Studios did the untinkable. They cut executives! They never cut executives. Too scary.
Streaming was unprofitable, then began to make some small profits. Cable was unprofitable. A lot of money was servicing debt, top executive pay or top talent. The solution was to promote cheap entertainment, ie reality TV. Cheap and the audience loves it. Why try to do quality? With reality TV you don't need big crews.
But, eventually crap wears thin, and you have to provide something that appeals to people with an IQ above 30.
So MAX is being returned to HBO MAX, and more quality TV will be made. It just may not be made in California. Another thing that happened was the siren call of Tax Credits by other states, like Georgia and New York, to lure productions away from LA. Canada had done the same thing in the 90's. Studios are happy to take government money. Sometimes they even hire local crews. But inevitably the government take it in the shorts on these deals, just like they take it in the shorts on tax breaks with an Amazon.
I finished Kiteman: Hell Yeah! after the move, and then reluctantly agreed to do the final season of Harley, season 5. That final season was the straw that broke this camel's back. Practically no staff, very little time. I was given veto power over the show runner by the studio. There was no fucking way that I would exercise it. But I figured out ways to get the thing done and keep the peace. And then, I was done.
The wreckage continues in LA. Warner Animation is still going, but it's a fraction of what it was a few years ago. Zaslav still doesn't see television animation as a valuable part of the whole, but he's interested in Feature Animation, so we'll see where that goes.
Fortunately, there are other studios still producing animation. I just don't know how much or under what kinds of budgets nor conditions. At this point, I don't much care.
Add to that all of the buzz about AI, most of which is bull shit.
Add to all of this these additional channels for selling entertainment, such as YouTube, and you have a perfect shit storm.
At some point it will sort itself out, but I have no clue what will emerge from it all.
Well, boy, I didn't intend to write a book, but you asked.
I collaborated with Ray Bradbury on the opening exterior shots. That was amazing.
That's a good guess. I've been consulted on "interactive" projects like what you describe. Think of it as an environmental extension of playing a video game, where you're in the game.
Ever read Dream Park?
Congratulations, friend Sable. A new stage to enjoy all the time in the world.
Congratulations ! I have been retired 23 years and begin my 24th year this Friday, July 4th, Independence Day.
I have been blessed with good health and hope that you are also.
Enjoy many years ahead dong whatever you want or don’t want to do. I might add that on July 3rd, 2002, I took off my watch and put it in my bureau and I have never worn a watch since.
I have been blessed with good health and hope that you are also.
Enjoy many years ahead dong whatever you want or don’t want to do. I might add that on July 3rd, 2002, I took off my watch and put it in my bureau and I have never worn a watch since.