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Interview With Brian LeMay PAGE TWO
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Editor's Note:
Please keep in mind this Interview is (C) 1999-2008 Teddy Ruxpin Online.
Please do not publish it elsewhere without permission of either this
website or Mr. LeMay. Thank you.
This interview is rather
large and I split it up into a couple of different pages.... when you get
to the bottom
of this page you'll see a link to the next... and so
on. Happy Viewing!
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The crew of
"The Adventures of Teddy Ruxpin"
having some fun on the job,
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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.
CLICK
HERE TO GO TO PAGE THREE
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