Editor's Note: Due to the sensitive nature of the material in development, Warner Bros. was unable to provide artwork from The Iron Giant or photos of the studio. So, readers: use your imaginations and wait for the release in 1999!

Many years ago, I had an argument with a fellow animator (now a Disney director) about the way animated features were storyboarded. This artist had been trained in the Disney method, as I had, and was convinced that it was the most effective way to plan an animated film. Simply put, the Disney method is to develop the "business" of the story (gags, situations, emotions, etc.) completely before dealing with how the business is to be presented. To consider the staging of a scene at this early point was seen as a straight jacket; a restriction of possibilities and a liability to the healthy growth of a story.

While I believed in the effectiveness of the Disney method (it's hard to argue with Walt's results), my insatiable appetite for well-directed movies had begun to have an effect on my own thought process. It became increasingly harder for me to have an idea without simultaneously imagining how the idea was staged. "Why separate it?" I challenged. "If someone comes up with a better way to do a scene, you can always change it!"

While staging is no substitute for story, I felt then, as I do now, that the camera is an unseen character, the eyes of the audience. It can assume a million different natures: a restless child, a cold killer, a fly on the wall...

Developing Story and Scene
I had no idea at the time that my impatience with the process would save my hide a few years later when working on The Simpsons, with its demanding mixture of priceless material and merciless schedules. In almost every episode there was a gag that was difficult to stage as written, plus, the comedy was more complex and the show's pace more accelerated than any other comedy, live-action or otherwise, on television.

At the time, all animated shows were staged in the same boring way: a wide establishing shot every time a location was introduced, medium shots anytime someone was moving around, close-ups whenever the characters were talking -- all rendered at a consistent, and dull, eye-level.

It quickly became clear that the ambitious nature of The Simpsons scripts, where the average half-hour contained an hour's worth of twists and turns, demanded more elaborate staging than the delightful "one-minutes" for The Tracy Ullman Show from which they sprang. The script's wild veerings between the lowest butt-crack jokes and Noel Coward references demanded a visual equivalent, and I started pushing the storyboard artists, many of whom had trained on "Saturday morning animation," to think of each episode as a movie, and to look toward Hitchcock, Welles, Kubrick and Scorcese for inspiration rather than other animation.

Many of the techniques these master filmmakers used to heighten drama could also be used to heighten comedy. We also tried to push the pace; doing long takes (a tremendous hassle when one is filming one frame at a time) one minute and then, going into a rapid series of jump cuts (also a hassle) the next.

Camera movement is always kept to a minimum in TV animation (pans are discouraged, except to follow a character in a walk or run cycle), but I felt camera moves were an important story-telling tool, especially because we had to keep our drawing count down. I pushed the use of short pans to get more movement into the shows, and as a way to reveal information in a comedic way. We had no time to ponder how a show was to be depicted, we had to get it out now because another episode was coming down the conveyer belt.