The AnimWatch Blog

In Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, he tells a story that resonates with me quite a bit. It’s a story about a little 8-page “book” he made on his home printing press as a boy, his print adaptation of the film version of “The Pit and the Pendulum” which he’d just seen at the movies. He took it in to school and sold copies of it to his friends.Alas, when his teacher discovered the book, King was summoned to the Principal’s office. Oddly, it wasn’t the copyright law violation or the issue of plagiarism his teacher and principal objected to. They just didn’t like the idea of him turning the school into a marketplace, especially not, his teacher added, to sell such trash as “The Pit and the Pendulum”.

“What I don’t understand, Stevie,” she said, “is why you’d write junk like this in the first place. You’re talented. Why do you want to waste your abilities?”

She had rolled up a copy of my book and was brandishing it at me the way a person might brandish a rolled up newspaper at a dog that had piddled on the rug.

She waited for me to answer - to her credit, the question was not entirely rhetorical - but I had no answer to give. I was ashamed. I have spent a good many years since, too many I think, being ashamed about what I write.

I know how he felt. When I was at camp, we used to have Saturday Night Campfire, where the kids would get together and do little skits. Some of them were old standards, reproduced week after week, year after year. Some people would improvise. I used to write my own.

One in particular, based on the Mad magazine cartoons I loved at the time, was a series on “How People are Stupid”. Basically, my friends and I would come out, set up a situation, and then have something horrible happen, stemming from our character’s stupidity.

For instance, one skit involved somebody cleaning his gun in a stupidly careless fashion (we used a toy gun in the skit) and shooting himself in the head. Personally, I thought this was funny, as well as educational. We had riflery lessons at the camp, and one of the things we were taught many times is to make sure the gun was unloaded, including the chamber, before doing anything like cleaning it, looking down the barrel, what have you.

In one skit I was playing a stupid guy hauling water to the garden using a bucket with a hole in it, thus getting to the garden with an empty bucket and having to start again. The character was getting more and more upset, and I believe the ultimate destination of this finely-developed narrative was a hilarious fatal heart attack. However, before it could go that far, a counsellor stood up and stopped the skit.

“I think we’ve all seen enough,” she said. “This isn’t appropriate. Why don’t you do skits about how smart people are?”

I didn’t answer. I took my bucket with the hole in it, and sat down with the rest of the campers in embarrassed silence while we went on to sing some camp song or other. Maybe it was a hymn.

In retrospect, the answer is, “Because doing a skit about how smart people are isn’t funny.” Stupid can be funny, or tragic, or can provide the groundwork for a cautionary tale. Smart and wholesome and heroic is all fine and dandy, but not very interesting. It’s certainly not the stuff of Saturday Night Campfire Skits. But maybe that’s just me.

Someone even came on this blog one time giving me crap about a story I wrote, which had a very violent ending. I got a very nasty note from this random person who posted the comments anonymously at my blog, claiming that based on the story, I was unstable enough that they were scared to even post their name. I felt bad about the reaction this person had, and took the story down. I wish I hadn’t.

Everyone has an opinion, and people are certainly entitled to air theirs. But it’s funny how many people want to tear your work down, or even tear you down. My advice to you aspiring artists and writers out there is just be brave. Do what you do and ignore the self-appointed Art Police. They’re always looking for something to complain about, and if they’re talking about your stuff, it was just your turn this time. They’ll forget you soon and move onto someone else.

I think King is right about this. His final words on the subject sum up my feelings perfectly:

I think I was 40 before I realized that almost every writer of fiction or poetry who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent. If you write, or paint, or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose, someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that’s all.

Well… here we are at the final installment in my series of posts celebrating the 30th Anniversary of the release of the original Star Wars and how it inspired me to become an artist.In this last post, I want to talk about the extraordinary lengths the team went to in order to bring the fantastic world of Star Wars to life. Remember, this was before computer graphics, so all this stuff had to be built, and painted, and photographed. See the image up there… those are the Death Star surface modules I was telling you about yesterday. Here they are, all assembled into a continuous surface, and actually taken outside. The sun, it turns out, is a really good light source for photography.

Also, it allowed the team to get really unusual perspectives. By turning the model up on end like this, they could put the camera on rails and push it forward for the impression you were dive-bombing the Death Star.

Plus, someone figured out that explosions filmed like this would scatter sparks and debris in unexpected directions, giving the impression it had been filmed in space and not on Earth.

For the sequences of the fighters zooming down the Death Star trench, the model shop built an actual trench out of Johnston’s modules. To get the point of view of the fighters zooming through that trench, they strapped a camera to a boom, strapped the boom onto a truck, and drove along with the camera in the center. I wish I had a picture of that. It’s one of my favorite images from the making of Star Wars.

I think it’s the scale of the operation that impresses me. I think of the parking lot behind the initial ILM facility, littered with these mammoth Death Star surface models, and the trench. Think about working outside because you get different effects than working in a nice, sterile studio environment. Isn’t this such a cool, gritty feel? Isn’t just so garage-development?

Today, you’d just do it by computer. An to prove the point, look at this screen capture of the Death Star surface from the original Star Wars:

And now, look at a CG recreation, composed of modules faithfully replicated off of Johnston’s original designs. That’s pretty neat. Makes me want to model a few ships and animate them flying off down the trench. (The Death Star greebles are available at our friends over at

Scifi Meshes)

The CG model is undoubtedly crisper, and undoubtedly cheaper to create. But I sure miss the artifacts. I mean that both in terms of a physical artifact, a memento of shooting, but also artifacts in terms of imperfections. Something about the edges being imperfect, not sharp, not crisp. The physical models just have so much charm.

Of course when the camera is zipping past them at a zillion miles an hour, who cares about that anyway.

But the guys in the model shop cared. There are gun turrets on the Death Star. They could have just been tossed together out of junk plastic. But they weren’t. They were designed:

And built:

See what I mean about all that junk and artifacting? Look at the amount of detail on that thing. Just phenomenal.

Well, that’s about all I have to say about Star Wars for now. Since I began running this series, I’ve had many artists contact me to tell me they had the same books, and the same reactions to some of the same pictures. Funny to think how much this film has inspired an entire generation of artists.

And now, I guess it’s our turn, we who are lucky enough to be working in TV, film, computer games, comics. We should spend that extra bit of effort on that drawing, that model, that design. Just think… some kid might be inspired by your work.

Isn’t that an interesting thought?

The one last thing I got from Star Wars and Joe Johnston was the notion of managing the impossible. How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. When you’re faced with a seemingly insurmountable task, figuring out what you want to do is only half of the problem. In preproduction, and on through production, you need to decide, and occasionally review in light of new information, HOW you’re going to do it.Take scale:

That drawing is classic Joe Johnston. Simple, quick little technical jot, but it sets the scale for the ships, so that everyone involved in the production can see at a glance, without having to go ask or look it up, exactly how big the ships are in relation to one another. That’s very important.

But equally important is how you break up the Impossible Task. Take the surface of the Death Star, for instance. It’s a nightmare of chunky detail, what the special effects guys call “greeble”. Look at this scene from the movie:

Bad enough you’ve got to create acres of this stuff, you’re going to fly a camera RIGHT DOWN IN AMONG IT! Sure, the camera will be whipping by, and there will be fighter ships and lasers to distract the viewer, but no matter what, it all has to be made (this is in the days before CG, when stuff was actually built and painted by hand) and it has to hold up reasonably well at close range.

Well, Johnston and his boys came up with a solution: a modular approach. They designed a series of modules that could be broken into sections and reattached, or turned 90 degrees to get different effects. These were then modeled, and mass produced out of a sort of high density styrofoam. Brilliant! But it all started with this series of drawings by Joe Johnston:

This ingenious approach has served me well when I’ve had to model stuff, even in the computer, that needed the appearance of detail and variety, but time or resource was short. Think of the “forest” in Channelwood in realMYST. They are all one tree, scaled and rotated to try to give the impression of more:

Next time, I want to talk about how this approach worked on Star Wars, the strange things they wound up doing to make it work, and discuss a little bit about the power of detail.

After I spent all my allowance on model kits to bash, Plaster of Paris to make landscapes, and countless bottles of modelling glue and paint, and then filled cannisters of 8mm film on my little special effects and stop-motion animated shenanigans, I found myself out of money. This is when I discovered, as many art departments before me, that pen-and-paper is much cheaper than Building Stuff Willy Nilly. (Side note: if your last name is NILLY and you are looking for names for your soon-to-arrive son, think twice about William.)This is when the other book found its way into my hands: The Star Wars Sketchbook, featuring the pre-production drawings of Joe Johnston. The designs this guy came up with set the look and feel for pretty much every sci-fi production for the next 20 or so years. But his line quality is to die for! It is at the same time precise and effortless.I love the attention to detail. All those Greebles on the ships, senseless visual noise, while at the same time suggesting utility and scale. The main thing that impressed me is that Johnston’s designs actually look like things humans would build. They’re not all round and smooth and shiny and bright. They look like artifacts from a used, lived-in universe, which is what George Lucas wanted.

It is safe to say that Joe Johnston taught me how to draw vehicles. I began by tracing the drawings in that book, and then I graduated to copying them by eye. Finally, I let go of that comfortable artistic embrace and wobbled out into the deep water on my own, but I don’t think I ever truly let go. Johnston’s influence shows in my work today, although I never did truly get his line work down. Here are some examples of his fine, fine work.

Joe’s gone on to become a director, where he’s achieved notable success with films such as Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, Jumanji, October Sky, and Hidalgo. But it’s fun to think that his drawings as a lowly designer on a small film in the mid-seventies inspired me way back when.

But he also taught me a bit about managing production. More on that tomorrow…

Well, it’s almost been 30 years since the original Star Wars came out. I suppose the readers of this BLOG can be effectively broken into three camps:Some, like my former Art Director, will only shrug, and perhaps yawn. No Star Wars fan, he. Some, who were not born when the movie came out, will perhaps wonder if I am speaking of one of the Prequels released this century. (I am not). The rest of you, who were old enough to remember when the movie came out, will think, “Dear God. Can it already have been 30 years?”

Yup, you old fart. It’s been 30 years.

So much of what made me want to draw, made me want to make movies, made me want to write, was in that original movie. No matter how schlocky and melodramatic the film may seem to you now, it was magical. Sure I was only 11 when I first saw it, but it really hooked me, as it did an entire generation.

And where I was concerned, the film actually had a lot to overcome. First, I didn’t like sci fi as a kid. Found it dreadfully boring. Second, it had the word WAR in it, and I didn’t want to see a bunch of soldiers running around shooting at each other. (I also found war movies boring.)

But mostly, even as an 11 year old, I had a cynical voice in the back of my mind asking whether Star Wars was just a piece of government sponsored propoganda designed to show young kids that War was Cool. (Yes, I was a strange little kid, but remember that the Vietnam War had just ended poorly, a conflict my older brother and his friends narrowly escaped. It was a scary time and I had no desire to be a soldier.)

But the colors, the effects, the spaceships, the music, and the characters all added up to something special that I don’t think has been duplicated. Like I said, it was magical, and by the time the smoke of the first battle had cleared, I didn’t care about whether it was sci-fi or not, about whether it was war or not. My jaw was on the floor and I wanted to know what happened next.

There was a book that came out not long after Star Wars became a phenomenon. I saw it on the bus on the way to school when I was 12. That’s the cover in the header of this article, and of course it uses the art from the Hildebrandt brothers’ great Star Wars movie poster. Believe me, for years, everything I drew looked like that poster. (A shame the title blocks out all but “BRANDT” from their name…)

Anyway, the kid next to me on the bus let me look through it on the way to school, and I saw something that would wind up having a huge impact on me, perhaps even leading to my current career.

More on that tomorrow.

I wonder. Aardman says they have distribution plans. I hope whatever plans they have leave them free to do what they do best. But I wonder if any distributor in these days of continuous sequels and Sure-Bet economics can be trusted to just let the creatives be creative. Let them do their job, as slow and “backward” and non-Hollywood as they want to, and then just put the film out. I hope there’s a distributor like this out there, because that’s what I think Aardman needs. For that matter, I think we could all use a little of that. I think it’s how you wind up with good movies.