If I see one more post on the animation blogs about how stupid the animation execs are, I'm going to puke. I'm as frustrated as the rest of you, trying to figure out what it takes to get on the air. But all you dumbfounded blowhards need to take a step back and look at the big picture.
Development execs want to create hit shows as much as you do. Their currency is their track record of making hit shows. If they get it right, they get big fat bonuses. If they get it wrong enough times, they will be fired. And once they have a reputation of developing bad shows at one network, what other network is going to hire them?
Networks are not in this to make art or satisfy your creative ego. They are in it to make money with as little risk as possible. The execs taking pitches are looking at shows to see whether they have the longevity to create enough episodes to sell enough merch and home video to make a profit on the millions of dollars it's going to cost the network to create and market the show.
Have you ever seen how many pitches these development people get? Between the mail and in-person pitches, each development person is getting 10 or more every day. The quality ranges from a little kid's crayon scrawls on notebook paper, to celebrity vanity projects, to the latest hot underground artists, and, yes, even ideas from the best animation talent in the world.
And those thousands of pitches are all competing for the network's 20 or so development slots. And those 20 development projects are all competing for the three timeslots that network will open up. There are only three networks anyone cares about, so that means there are around twenty thousand ideas competing for the nine broadcast slots that become available every year.
I'm not saying that this is how things SHOULD work, only that this is how the system really DOES work. If you want to make groundbreaking, risky, never-before-seen ART, stop bitching about development execs on animation blogs and go spend your own six and a half million dollars to make 26 half-hours of your own shows the way YOU want to make them and put them up on YouTube. This also gives you the added benefit of being able to sell your show to networks around the world as an acquisition rather than going through the development execs!
1 comment:
I feel you man, but i think what you have to see is that (from the perspective of a creative) the execs are killing our artform. There used to be a difference between motion graphics and animation, animation used to be three dimensional. It was designed specially to be able to be drawn that way, and it took advantage of an evolutionary progress that was still in the process of happening. It was made by cartoonists to amuse themselves AND please an audience, because they understood that if it worked for them, it worked. It's also much easier to do a bang up job on something you love to do. Entertainment is primarily about surprising an audience. The creative process is primarily about surprising yourself (by continuing the evolution of an artform, *see Chuck Jones, Walt Disney, Winsor Mckay, John Hubley.) Running most business's is about creating a dependable and lucrative product. Something that can be worked into predictive accounting. Here's the problem, those two things clash. Business is winning, at the cost of originality and surprise. There's basically 4 animated shows on tv, the adult/pop culture referencing one with bad animation, the animae one, the teen action one with heavy animae influences, and the toddler's programing.
Because these shows are pretty lackluster, the emphasis has become about making the cheapest product possible for the most captive audience (toddlers) Which is basically completely eroding the talent pool that is capable of creating animation to start with. That might be fine with your average executive, but it shouldn't be, because as soon as people like John K, or alot of the other really disenfranchised, very experienced cartoonists, many of whom support the current process out of necessity, find a way to go around the current system to get to the audience, they are going to. Wouldn't you?
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