|
Here's More of our interview with
Brian! Keep reading... it's worth every minute! Links to the next section are
at the bottom of the page....
 3) Tell us about
the overall history/timeline of TAoTR
production and any special
moments/memories you think
fans would enjoy hearing
about.
It's funny thinking back
to those times, it was a lot
of fun. It wasn't so much that
we were working on the
show "Teddy Ruxpin" because we had no idea
as to what
it was going to turn out like, it was the people
that
were involved in it that made it so much fun.
Every
production that I've worked on has had a mixture
of
people that either make it fun or
incredibly
unbearable. It's usually always in the fun
zone
though.
While I was in the posing
department for the 20 odd
shows that I key animated, I was
working under Marc
Sevier, my old college buddy. There were
about 12
people in our group; Howy Parkins (who gave me
the
heads up about the job in the first place), Bob
Jaques
(another class mate at Sheridan), Kelly
Armstrong,
Chris Damboise, Daniele Deblois, Jill Halliday,
Wayne
Lee Pack, Dave Parks, Rob Shedlowich, Robert
Waldren,
and Pat McCourt.Howy ended up later going
to work on the Simpson's
show as an assistant director. Bob
Jaques and Kelly
Armstrong worked on the original Ren and Stimpy
Show,
doing some amazing stuff there. Bob is an
amazing
artist. I remember one day he went out to lunch
and
we saw some of his poses on his desk, they were
absolutely
beautiful. We noticed that he was using a
pencil crayon to
do his drawings. After we finished
going through all his
drawings in his shelves, we all
went out and bought pencil
crayons too and it really
improved the quality of our
drawings. Bob has always
been a big inspiration to
me.
I saw Chris Damboise
recently while visiting a fellow
instructor at Sheridan
College. He was taking the
Maya computer course (and doing
a lot of swearing).
I saw a few other people a
few years ago at the Ottawa
Animation Festival and had a chance
to catch up.
I read Jeff's interview
and he mentioned the "beach
party" we had in our room. It
was the middle of
winter and insanely cold. We all decided
to have a
beach party the next day to try and remember what
the
summer was like. We all dressed up in shorts
and
brought beach blankets, danced to summer music
and
generally goofed around.
(I've attached a few
photos I took from the party.)
The production in general
is pretty much a blur now.
I remember a few key moments like
moving from the
posing department into layout. I just
watched a few
of the early episodes that recently came out on DVD
to
try and jog my memory. I only have the first
12
episodes and after watching them I now remember what
the
problems were. Many of the scenes were very
poorly fielded;
characters too high in the frame,
camera angles looking down too
much, awkward shot
selection. Some of this was the
storyboarding
departments errors but they should have been
corrected
in layout before they got into posing. There
were
also lots of really bad cuts from one scene to
the
next.
One of the things that
really stands out watching it
again is the horrendous lip
sync. I guess the Koreans
just couldn't get it.
The show from a story
point of view are still fun to
watch and it's neat to see the
scenes that I worked on
again. It's funny, but I don't have
very much stuff
saved from that show. On all the other
productions
I've worked on, I would keep the model sheet
package
and make copies of my layouts or poses but for
Teddy,
I only have a small handfull of layouts and poses.
I
seem to remember that we were all given swipe cards
for the
photocopiers and were only allowed a certain
number each
week. I guess it was an effort to cut the
budget
overhead.
The studio itself was a
remodeled church with
attachments added onto it. Our group
was on the
second floor that was built into the main
sanctuary.
Dave Parks and I were
taking Tae-Kwon-Do and decided
to do some sparing late one night
in the studio. We
taped off a ring on the floor and put on
all out
equipment then went to it. We were lightly
tapping
each other with kicks and punches then
Dave
accidentally caught me with a perfect cresent kick
right
across the bridge of my nose and smashed it
flat. I knew it
was broken right away and ran into
the bathroom with blood
everywhere. Looking into the
mirror I saw my nose mashed
off to one side and I just
instinctively took my thumb and pushed
it back into
place with this sickening cracking sound. It
looked
o.k. but my girlfriend (later my wife) was a
medical
student and told me to go to the hospital just
in
case. After waiting in emergency for 6 hours I
had
some x-rays taken and the doctor asked, "Who set
your
nose? I said that I did it, and he said, "Nice
job!".
The x-ray showed that my nose was broken in 4
places.
When I got home I accidentally bumped into the
wall
going down the basement stairs and cracked it
again.
When I later went back to
Nelvana as the layout
supervisor I hired Dave because I felt so
bad for him.
He was a nice guy with a great cresent
kick.
When I moved into the
layout department, there was
quite a bit of tension because I was
saying things
were being done wrong and I was basically there to
fix
it. It took a bit of time to convince them to
change
their system. We hired about 25 more layout
artists
and started training them. I wrote a bunch of
notes
on layout that I eventually used at Sheridan
College
when I went back to teach layout. This then
became
the basis for my book titled "Layout and Design
Made
Amazingly Simple".
We got things on track
around show 24 or so and you'll
probably see a differnece in the
general quality of
the episodes from that point on. A lot
of it was just
basic stuff, but the major improvement was
the
implimentation of the background library to save
everyone
from redrawing existing backgrounds from
scratch all the
time. At first they didn't see the
value in it but after
about 5 shows they all went
"Aha! It does work!"
The remainder of the shows
were just a blur. We all
knew the end was coming and when
the last show was
finished, it was very anti-climactic. No
wrap party,
we just moved onto the next production which was
a
French co-production called "Y's the Magnificent" and
after
that was the "Meerkats" 1/2 hour special. After
that ended,
they were working on the "Dennis the
Menace" show. I really
did not want to work on that
one. Luckily, Nelvana called
and asked if I wanted to
work on a production called "Ultra
Cross". I quit
Atkinson's and moved back to
Toronto. | 
