In 2006,
I conducted an interview with Brian LeMay, one of the Key members of the
Animation staff with
Atkinson Film Arts, who produced
The
Adventures of Teddy Ruxpin. Brian also worked on various other
programmes, including Inspector Gadget. Brian's interview, as
follows, is very informative, humorous and in-depth, and he was great
about answering questions. Brian has said if there are any fan questions
he would be open to answering them in the future, so if you'd like to ask
Mr. LeMay anything, Contact Us and let us know. There are several pages to
the interview, the links to the next page are at the end of each page.
1) First, if you
would like, just tell us a little
about yourself, your duties working
with Atkinson on
the Teddy project, and the other projects
you've
worked on.
I went
to Sheridan College in Oakville, Ontario and
took the Animation program
for two years then dropped
out to get a job in 1980. I was hired
at Nelvana as
an inbetweener on a 1/2 hour special titled "Take
Me
Up To The Ballgame". Nelvana was already in
preproduction
on the feature film, "Rock and Rule" and
were basically hiring for
this. I was an assistant
animator to Tom Sito. We worked on
incidental
characters in the film and most notably the
Beast
sequence at the end of the film.
After
Rock and Rule was completed, everyone was laid
off. I was called
back in January the next year to be
the character designer on the show
"Inspector Gadget".
I was responsible for pretty much every
character in
the show, except Gadget, Penny, Brain, Quimby, and
The
Claw.After
Gadget and another short lay-off where I worked
on some Hanna-Barbera
shows, I went back to work at
Nelvana on "Care Bears" in the layout
department.
They then got the contract to do the "Ewoks"
and
"Droids" shows for George Lucas. After these shows
were
done, they went back to Care Bears again.
Hanna-Barbera opened up a
farm studio just down the
street and I started picking up some
freelance work
from them.
I'd go to work at Nelvana at 9:00 - 12:00 then
run
down the street and pick up some work from
Hanna-Barbera, grab a
quick sandwich on the way back
to Nelvana, work on Carebears from 1:00
- 5:00, drive
home and work on Punky Brewster, Flintstone
Kids,
Smurfs, etc. 'til about 1:00 in the morning, get up
the next
day, drive to Nelvana and do the whole thing
again.I did this for about a month
and noticed the
difference in my paycheques. I decided to
quit
Nelvana and focus all my energy on the
Hanna-Barbera
stuff. This lasted for about 8 months until I went
in
one day and they told me to pack up my stuff because
they were
closing the Toronto studio down.
I went
home kind of dazed as to what to do next when I
got a call from a
friend who had gone up to Ottawa to
work at Atkinson's. He said
they were looking for
Animation Posers for this show called "Teddy
Ruxpin".
I didn't really care what it was called as long as it
meant
work. I phoned the studio the next day and
spoke to the
supervisor of the posing department. It
turned out that it was a
college buddy of mine from
Sheridan that I sat next to in class.
The
conversation kinda went like this:
Brian:
"Hi Mark. Hows it going?"
Mark: "Pretty good."
Brian: "I hear you're
looking for posers."
Mark: "Yeah, you need a job?"
Brian: "Yeah,
when do you need me?"
Mark: "Can you come up tomorrow?"
Brian: "I'll
be there. See you tomorrow."
Mark: "O.k., bye."
So, I
hopped in my car and drove 6 hours up to Ottawa,
Met with Mark and got
the job right on the spot. I
then walked down the street and
found a house with an
apartment to rent, signed the lease, went out
and
bought a T.V. and moved in.
The
posing department was responsible for taking the
layout poses and
putting them "on model" and basically
key animating the scene.
Even though the show was
animated in Taiwan or Korea (I'm not really
sure which
it was) we still had to plan out the actions for
them.
I started in around show 5.
As the
shows came through I was noticing some really
big problems with the
layouts and the overall work
flow from the layout department.
They had never
produced a 64 show series before and weren't
properly
set up for the work involved. Having worked at
both
Nelvana and Hanna-Barbera and using their finely tuned
systems,
I could see the problems quite clearly.
I went
to the owner of the studio and met with him to
discuss the situation
and I proposed a new system to
make things work more efficiently.
He asked me to be
the assistant Layout Supervisor and get things
going.
I shuffled things around a bit and got a library
system
working so that we wouldn't be generating so
many original backgrounds
all the time when we could
re-use the common locations such as
Gimmick's house.
This helped save a lot of time and also cut the
budget
by a bit.
I think
it was somewhere around show 22 that I
formally took over the layout
department as Senior
Supervisor. We had to hire on a bunch of new
layout
artists (some of which we had to retrain from
scratch).
I hired on a few friends that I had worked
with at Nelvana. My
place became their place to sleep
until they could find an apartment of
their own. It
was a lot of fun.
We used
to play ball hockey during the summer and ice
hockey during the winter,
baseball, football. We'd
all go out after work and have a lot of
fun.
