Rugrats. © 2002 Viacom International Inc. All rights reserved.

M.S.: Are most of your artists freelance or staff?

R.L.: We hire a lot of freelance artists for our commercials division, but in TV, most of our artists are staff. For features, it’s a different situation, because the artists have contracts, as is typical with feature productions.

M.S.: So you do the keys in-house and ship the rest overseas?

R.L.: Yes. Our storyboard artists, and I know that I may seem prejudiced, but I think they are the strongest in the industry because our boards for a 22-minute show are just fat [many more pages] compared to what other studios might ship. Also, our board artists are great storytellers and actors. They understand the punch line. They put a lot into the storyboard that is just totally coming out of their imagination. Sometimes it’s something that isn’t even mentioned in the script, but it adds a lot to the story.

We record the voice first, and then board it out. Some studios board first then record the voice. I think we would lose so much if we worked that way. We have some amazing voice talent at this studio. I mean we have Tim Curry, this fantastic actor who brings so much to the script. Why in the world would we not record him first? He brings so much to a very simple line of dialogue. It just inspires the board artist to put even more acting and great poses, etc., into the scenes.

M.S.: We’ve run into situations where we were boarding on a project and we read a line with one intonation, but when the actor recorded later it was totally different. The same line could be either shy or cocky, and it needs to be boarded completely different for each reading.

R.L.: Absolutely, because boarding is all about the acting, the posing, and the staging. How can you possibly do that without the actors input? Good actors bring so much to the table with one simple tweaking of the way they’re delivering the line that it can completely change the emotions of the scene.

M.S.: How important is education to you?

Earthlink commercial by Klasky Csupo. © 2002 Earthlink. All rights reserved.

R.L.: It’s important. With education, I know that the person is going be able to communicate with other people. I know that they have done something that they have completed. That they play well with others. But talent really overrides education. I mean, we do have people working at the studio who have no formal art education, but who are just huge natural talents who have come up through the system and just picked it up.

The majority of people working here do come out of art schools. Certainly in my job, 60% of what I do is developing relationships with art schools throughout North America and Europe so that I can bring in the best young artists. But every once in a while you see a portfolio of someone who has no professional training but has incredible talent, and, needless to say, I’m not going to discriminate against that artist because he or she doesn’t have a college degree. That would be absurd.

M.S.: A college degree doesn’t mean they’re going to be any good.

R.L.: Well, we’re talking about art, so there’s a subjective element to what we consider “good” and “bad.” Certainly, if I see that someone has graduated from an art school with a strong animation curriculum, I’m going to assume that they have a higher level of understanding regarding the different aspects and disciplines of animation. However, just because someone graduates from a great art school does not necessarily mean they will be a great artist for Klasky Csupo and the projects we produce. Just because someone graduates with a law degree, that doesn’t mean they’re going to be a great attorney, either.