Road Running

My morning was spent at Warner Bros. Animation, down the street at the Warner Ranch.

The place is busier than it's been in a couple of years (have I mentioned this previously?) There are so many shows and artists that WBA now occupies four different buildings -- two of them actual multi-story structures, the others collections of double-wide trailers.

I had a long talk with a board artist on one of the super hero shows who admitted:

"I pulled some late nighters on my first two scripts for Blank, but I like to see my wife and my kid, so I'm not doing that now. I've gotten more adjusted and comfortable with the characters and show, and I figured out ways to get more efficient and save time. My director thought the last board I did was my best, but it was the one I spent less time on.

"When you work fourteen-hour days, six or seven days a week, you work a lot slower and the quality of the work goes down. I also work faster by drawing the boards in Photo Shop and importing them into Toon Boom ..."

The high point of my morning was getting a look at the three new Coyote and Road Runner shorts that animation veteran Matt O'Callaghan has directed.

They are each three minutes long, designed as eye candy to be placed in front of three different "family oriented" features. And they are terrific. They are also ...

[Spoiler Ahead]

... well-realized reboots of the old shorts, wherein the coyote chases the bird in new and interesting ways, and meets disaster each time.

(Now you know the plots. Sue me.)

I sat in Mr. Callaghan's office and watched one cartoon in 3-D, and the other cartoons in non 3-D. They are done up in artful CGI and saturated colors, and the updates and high techery decorating the productions work real well. (The cartoons were animated by Reel Effects in Texas.)

I think they are going to compete nicely with, or maybe overshadow, the Warners' features they accompany. We'll see.