Change Your Mind select boards
Some boards I did for the Change Your Mind Steven Universe special, more below the fold, posted here until I figure out a better website for this. Remember to check out my twitter, https://twitter.com/paulvilleco
Leaving Tumblr
Since everyone’s leaving this site, I thought I’d finally get around to making a twitter. Follow me on https://twitter.com/paulvilleco and maybe I’ll actually post some art and answer your questions and stuff.
Monster Reunion select boards
Some of my boards from the ep! There’s monsters, crayons, tears, and stick figure warfare below the fold.
alisatassan-blog asked: Hi Mr. Villeco. Your posts from answering young artists' questions made me feel confident in myself. I was wondering if it's difficult to major in art when you're poor. My mom is against me majoring in art, but accepts my love for art (like cartooning and storyboarding) because she's afraid I won't get a job right after graduating University. So I decided to major in Nursing as my back up plan, save money, and go to art school to get a Bachelors Degree in Arts. What do you think of this idea?
Hey, thanks! I’m glad I can help.
I wish I didn’t have to say this, but unfortunately, I think it really is difficult to major in animation if you don’t have money. The well-known schools cost a *lot* of cash, and the less known, inexpensive schools tend to have teachers that don’t know the industry. They’re also less likely to offer what I think is the most important part of art school, which is being surrounded by other energized, enthusiastic artists planning to make it big. So the cheap animation schools really might not be worth the money.
BUT, the good news is, having a degree is really not necessary. It’s hard, but it’s totally possible to learn the skills to draw and animate without ever going to school for it. I can’t say that it’s *easy* to learn this all on your own, and I can’t even say that I could have done it, but I know people who have. If you can just get your skills up to a high enough level to get your first animation job, you’ll be at the same level of hirability as animators with full degrees.
I also don’t think your plan is bad at all. Many people don’t know this, but Dr. Tezuka, the creator of classic Japanese comics like Astroboy who revolutionized manga as an art form, was actually a fully trained medical doctor. He used his professional medical knowledge to inspire one of his first big comic series, Blackjack, about a genius surgeon. So you’re not only looking into a stable job, you’re looking, potentially, at inspiration for art you’ll make years down the road.
The point is, there are an infinite number of ways to find your path as an artist, and the path you take, however long and difficult, is what will make your art unique.
dragonflame123-blog asked: Hello! I'm in my last year of high school and want to go to an art school in my state so that one day I can be a visual development artist. But I'm worried that because it's not CalArts or Art Center that people wont give me a second glance.
I can tell you that, at least at the jobs I’ve worked at, people really don’t care what school you went to. I don’t know if that’s the case everywhere; Disney and Pixar have a pretty close relationship with CalArts, so that might give you advantage there.
Most animation studios will just give you a test, like “animate to this audio track with the characters” or “do a 10 page storyboard based on this idea”. They’ll judge you pretty much just on how well you do on the test. Where you came from isn’t really important if your work stands out.
The big hurdle, though, is making the connections that let you get sent the test in the first place. I got my first job as an intern on the first season of Superjail because I had college friends who were doing it and told me about the position. Thanks to that, I met Christy Karacas, who remembered to send me a test for when Superjail moved to another studio. At college, I also got to be friends with Rebecca Sugar, who offered the job I have now, boarding on Steven Universe.
So, going to a less known school won’t permanently hamstring your career, but it won’t be as easy to make connections in the industry. But then again, having those connections is no guarantee you can get a job.
If you wind up going to a school in an area where there aren’t a lot of animation jobs, you’ll want to make up for that by following the industry a little more closely; keep track of what new shows are being picked up and what current shows are looking for new blood. The friends you make will help you with that. And even if you’re stuck in the middle of nowhere, working on personal projects like illustrations or comics or short web cartoons can go a long way towards making you known by people looking to hire. A number of people on Steven Universe and Adventure Time had no history in the animation industry prior, but got job offers because they’d made a name for themselves in indie comics or on the internet.
purpleattire-blog1 asked: Hey, I know you're super busy and may not have time to answer let alone see this, but on the small chance you do, do you have any advice for someone who wants to have their own cartoon show one day? I live in a state where there is nothing animation-wise. I know I'd have to move one day, but most Cartoon Creators were already working on cartoons before having their own. I work on my story idea everyday, but as far as having a "foot in the door" I have nothing... Any advice? Thank you for reading
There’s a few different ways to get there. The number one thing to remember is that, generally speaking, studios aren’t just looking for someone with a good story, they’re looking for someone they can trust to get it done. Animation is a really risky business - it costs a LOT of money and it’s damn near impossible to predict the return. Executives are making a huge gamble when they get behind a new TV show or movie; if it doesn’t work out, they can lose their jobs. I used to have this idea that I could just write an idea and show it to Old Man TV, and he’d go “yeah, you totally deserve a show!” but that doesn’t really happen. If you pitch an idea they really love, that can help, but the best thing you can do is to build up reasons for them to trust you as a creator. That’s the best way I can explain the main two roads for getting your own show:
1) Get into the industry, in any capacity, and work your way up through the ranks. You’ll learn a ton at every job, and working on different stages of the production will make you better at managing those stages. This is even true on the corporate side - there are lots of creators out there now who started off just managing the business side of animation and wound up in a creative control position, just because they’d shown the studio or their small business’s investors that they could effectively run a project. If the studio or the network or private investors can see that you can be trusted to get things done, they’re much more likely to take a chance on your vision.
2) Establish your own name. When people get deals to make shows, and they weren’t hired from within the company, they’re almost always people who’ve been successful creating other things. And not just within animation - comic artists, authors, even comedians and musicians. Again, if you just show that you know how to finish a project and make money, it makes that big gamble feel a lot less risky.
In your situation, if there’s really no animation work in your area, I’d recommend just creating something for yourself. You won’t be able to make a full TV show just by yourself, but there’s other ways to tell stories on your own. You can do a comic book, you can write a novel, you can film home-made movies. You can get together with other creators and make something collaboratively. At the very least, it’s all very important experience for getting to a place where you can direct others to work on your ideas, but if you make something that’s successful, that will make pitching an idea to a studio much much easier. It doesn’t even have to make money; even just having a dedicated online fanbase is something a studio will take interest in.
funny-leg asked: im in high school right now and am very interested in storyboarding as a career for when i go and adult. how do i get there? and any advice?
It’s hard for me to give specific career advice, because everyone in this industry winds up here through different means. Some people got here through connections they made in college, some people got here without even finishing high school.
If you’re interested in college, most of our boarders are from CalArts, which has a close connection to the California animation industry. A lot of the crew on Steven Universe went to SVA in New York; I had a good experience there, but the New York animation industry seems to be having trouble these days. Both those schools are very expensive, but I wouldn’t say they’re essential, so if you can’t afford them or don’t want to start off life with absurd amounts of debt, don’t feel like you have to go there to get a start. Also, if you’re considering another college, don’t go to any of those Art Institute franchise schools that advertise themselves on TV, they’re a pretty bad scam. Smaller art colleges or general universities might help you get a general art education, but they often lack people from the industry that know the specific ins and outs of animation, and they’re often not great for networking.
Whatever you wind up deciding for college, the advice I would give is train your fundamentals. Go to a ton of model drawing classes. Practice with online model drawing sites like www.quickposes.com or http://artists.pixelovely.com/practice-tools/figure-drawing/ . You want to get good at drawing, and not just in your own style, but in as many styles as possible. If you see an artist you like, try to figure out how they draw. Read art blogs and learn what you can. You want to be ready for any opportunity that presents itself.
There’s also networking. Don’t schmooze, it turns people off, but make friends with people you like, and stay loyal to them. Help them with their projects and they’ll help you back. Do your own projects whenever you can, because making your own name and showing you can make stuff on your own is the best way to get offers of work… and more and more it’s seeming like it’s possible for people to get their own projects off the ground without needing help from the big name studios.
Pretty much any art job requires a LOT of work to break into, so be ready to suffer for it. But someone once told me that if you can work hard even when nobody’s watching you, nobody’s praising you, nobody’s even paying you - if you can still put in the real effort not just to make something, but to make something great, then you’ll do just fine when someone in a position of power finally discovers you.
prinjestle asked: When storyboarding, what does 5/9 or s/q (The text in board 17 where peridot makes the diamond sign with her hands) or when YD turns in board 20) mean?
It’s actually s/a, short for “same as”. We mostly use it for when we don’t feel like putting in the same background over and over in the shot. It tells the animators that, if we stop drawing the background in a shot, it’s not because they need to animate the background suddenly disappearing.
malkathius asked: When you're drawing the boards, do you rough out the boards blue then clean them or are you just that familiar with the sheets to be on model with minor cleaning? Also are the boards you share with us drawn at that resolution? Finally, kudos to you.
Thank you!
On Steven Universe, we draw the boards in a program called Storyboard Pro (part of the Toon Boom suite). SP is a vector-based program, like Adobe Flash, so it actually doesn’t have a resolution. You can enlarge the image as much as you want without problems. Vectors tend to make uglier drawings than bitmaps, but because you can reshape and resize vectors so much more easily, they’re much more useful for storyboarding.
I don’t use blue, but I do rough out the boards before cleaning them up. It’s actually a mandatory part of the job. Before we can even think about taking time to make pretty drawings, we first have to create a rough sketch version of the storyboard to pitch to the crew. At this stage, you don’t want to spend too much time on a drawing, because you’ll have to make changes. You just want to put down whatever you need to make a stranger understand what’s going on in the scene.
The faster you can do this, the better, because it’s better to redraw a 1 minute rough sketch 10 times than to stick with your first sketch and spend an hour trying to fix it.
After two or three pitches we move on to the cleanup stage, where pretty much all we do is go through our own boards, tracing over our ugly sketches with cleaned up drawings.
At this point, everyone on the crew can draw the characters pretty easily without needing to do a rough draft, but doing roughs is still very important for figuring out cool poses and how the shot is going to be laid out so that you can see everything that’s going on. This gets very important the more characters in a scene you have, because if you don’t plan ahead with sketches, you’re gonna have a bad time.
Message Received select boards
Some boards from my section of the latest SU ep, Message Received. Includes a bunch of spoilers and whole lot of you-know-who, after the jump.