Joseph Gilland

The very first animated film I made was scribbled on some clear 35-millimeter film, and some unexposed 35-millimeter film, with a marker, some grease pencil and a scratching tool out of my father's toolbox. It was a school project. I was studying animation at the Montreal Museum of Fine arts School of Art and Design, where the academic leanings of the animation program were decidedly artsy. But what a great way to learn about the way a second is spread out across 24 frames! And what a low cost, quick, and simple way to actually create something that moves and is fun to watch.

When our whole class had turned in their little strips of naïve animation art, our teacher spliced them all together, and then we screened them while listening to various different types of music. It was truly magic. Truly inspiring. The images worked so well with the sound, it was as if it was all 'meant to be'!

From those humble beginnings, began a lifelong obsession with all things animated. Not content to simply scribble on film, I quickly devised a little drawing board with pins pushed through the back that held the film in place. With perfect little frames drawn underneath the film, I could draw on it with much more control, and actually animate frame by frame, seeing clearly what I had drawn on the previous frame. I managed a walk and run cycle and then jumped the character into some water, back out of the water, and then I set the character on fire... and so on, and so forth! I was so thrilled to have a little filmmaking studio, right there on my little desk in my childhood bedroom.

Check out American Pop to witness the sad state of animation in the eighties.

From there, it was on to the animation table, the disk and the peg bars, the paper and pencil, storyboards and layouts, rough animation and in-betweens, clean-up and tracing, cels and cel paint, the background paintings, the dope sheets -- ahh the process, the romantic old animation process. Good God, it took a long time to make a really insignificant and poorly made cartoon! Why did I keep going? If you're reading this, you probably know the answer. Animation is magic. Pure and simple. And so, we keep on going.

But through the years, as I moved on to bigger and better projects, the painfully work-intensive nature of making animated films in the classical technique took its toll on my patience, not to mention my peace of mind from time to time. No matter how much I love animation, it is an insanely painstaking process -- let's face it. And even with the technological advances that were opening new doors, the process wasn't exactly becoming more streamlined. On the contrary, as the biggest studios introduced more and more technology, the process became mired in 'pipeline' problems, old meets new politics and highly polarized departments responsible for different aspects of putting an animated film together fighting for resources and elbowroom.

The idea of course, is always to "collaborate," and there are studios and projects which have developed admirably smooth pipelines, but anyone who has worked in a big, well-heeled animation establishment can tell you (if they are honest) that there is an amazing amount of time wasted just trying to get all the vastly variable disciplines to come together and simply make a film. Animation studio politics get pretty crazy, whether it's a local yokel studio churning out a television series, or a major motion picture company with a budget in the tens of millions, making films that cost... A MILLION DOLLARS A MINUTE or MORE!! Yes, that's right. When we think of an animated film costing $100 million to produce, how often do we stop and think, "My God, that's $500,000 dollars for 30 seconds, the length of a television commercial!"

Which brings me back to my homespun yarn about making films in my bedroom for a couple of dollars worth of materials. And a little story about my career, directing and producing television commercials, for just a tad less than $500,000.

During the eighties, the animation business wasn't exactly booming. Television animation was creating some of its very worst Saturday morning cartoons, (sorry eighties cartoon fans) and the feature animation business? Well, check out Bakshi's American Pop if you want to see some of the worst rotoscoping ever done, or Disney's The Black Cauldron if you want to see just how poorly animation was really doing at that time. The television commercial business was still humming right along though, in spite of the economic recession, but, sometimes, even that was very slow. I stuck out the eighties in the animation business, mostly picking up local, relatively small-time television commercial work. I refused to work for any of the big Saturday morning outfits, as it just wasn't something that I aspired to do. Ever. So I got work here and there in local animation studios, boarding, pitching, animating and eventually directing television commercials.