Accidents Will Happen: Animators Talk Technical Failures, Bad Clients, And Creative Collapse

We often see the magical results and hear about the extraordinary efforts behind a creative process, but what about the stumbles, frustrations, and fuck-ups? Surely there’s much to be learned from an animator’s technical or creative miscues. Let’s find out.

Case Study #1: Bavel’s Book, Koji Yamamura

What went wrong?

The original deadline was tight (it’s a five-minute short and it took a month to produce, including drawing, auditioning voice actors, recording music, and post-production), so I couldn’t create the images as I had envisioned them during the storyboard stage. Also, this was the first time I’d used an animation app, and I still wasn’t very good at using it.

How did you deal with this?

In the end, I reduced the number of drawings and lowered the quality of the movement. Also, I didn’t have enough time for editing, and I was unsatisfied with building the structure.

What did you learn from this experience?

Especially with TV, where you can’t control the deadline, I wanted to work independently and produce by myself as much as possible.

Case Study #2: Luminaris, Juan Pablo Zaramella

It started as a project based on a traditional Argentine tango called “Lluvia de Estrellas,” whose structure seemed to reveal a narrative progression, with its own dramatic tension. My plan was to write a story inspired by the expression of the music, following the flow of its melodies and harmonies, which felt like the soundtrack of a film that didn’t exist yet.

I originally wanted to follow the most obvious path: setting the story in 1940s Buenos Aires, during the period when the song was composed. The storyline was planned to follow “one day in the city,” from dawn to deep night, a choral narrative following different typical characters from Buenos Aires during that period, with its distinctive atmosphere and culture. I was also very determined to make the film in stop motion, using clay puppets.

What went wrong?

I applied to this project to the Fontevraud Residence in order to write the story there. I was selected, and I traveled there with great enthusiasm, as I would finally have the time to focus on this project.

However, once in Fontevraud, I found the place overwhelming, with a powerful historical weight that could be felt in every wall. The presence of the location could not be ignored. Layers of history: built as an abbey in the 11th century, then turned into a prison after the Revolution for centuries, and finally transformed into a cultural center. (In South America, compared with Europe, buildings are relatively new.)

This setting affected me in such a way that I could no longer connect with the sunny atmosphere of Buenos Aires or with tango music. I felt like I was in a different dimension, and I couldn’t avoid experiencing it. After a couple of days, I found myself creatively blocked in relation to my original project, spending hours walking in circles.

How did you deal with it?

I decided to discard the original idea and start developing new concepts from scratch. I spent about one week writing a completely new story every day, and all of them seemed silly or sterile the next day.

Since my previous film was Lapsus, in which I put a nun and her faith in ridiculous situations, I find it amusing to think that Fontevraud was a divine punishment.

In parallel, and simply to relax and relieve the pressure I was putting on myself regarding the outcome of the residency, I started walking around this vast place and taking photographs. One day, I decided to experiment with pixilation in different spaces, using myself as an actor.

I didn’t have a specific plan. I was simply exploring the location through pixilation. One day, my admired colleague Gianluigi Toccafondo, who was also there with his own project, suggested that I use these pixilation results as part of the tango project. He noticed certain familiar “textures” between the spirit of tango and the pixilation experiments.

I wasn’t completely convinced at first, but a few days later, I realized he was right when I had my next idea involving pixilation. One afternoon, from the window of my workspace, I observed how the shadows of the building gradually grew and shifted over the course of the day. I had the idea of combining them, in time-lapse, with a pixilation sequence. I imagined these shadows as a physical force, like a shoreline dragging objects along with the tide.

This was the beginning of the concept for Luminaris. I returned to Buenos Aires, having left behind the idea of stop motion and puppets. I then wrote the story together with Gustavo Cornillon, the film’s main actor. He helped a lot in finding new perspectives for my ideas. We did numerous tests around the concept of light: natural light in contrast with artificial, human-made light, which promises greater freedom but, ironically, ends up enslaving us to our own invention. We finally used Buenos Aires as the setting, and the idea of “a day in the city” came back unconsciously, but reinterpreted, creating a new universe with its own logic.

What did you learn from this experience?

I learned that a true creative process is usually chaotic, and that it is important to relax in the face of this chaos, not to escape from conflict, but to experience it, and even suffer through it if necessary. I was and still am an anxious person, but I have learned to set these feelings aside, knowing that the best way to discover something meaningful in our creative approaches is to explore the things that emerge in us repeatedly and unconsciously.

Case Study #3: The Girl in the Hallway, Valerie Barnhardt

What went wrong?

When I tried exporting my finished film, the export technically worked, but it compressed three frames into a tiny file. That threw the entire film off by three frames, right as I was trying to export for festival applications. It was really stressful.

How did you deal with it?

My issue was escalated to Dragonframe’s engineers, who worked with me to troubleshoot. In the end, the problem was my workflow: I animated one continuous 10-minute take over three years, and that essentially broke the software. Don’t do that.

They actually used the situation to inform an update in version 4, because the engineers never expected someone to animate that way: one take, no compositing.

What did you learn from this experience?

It’s okay to freak out and cry. But also: pay for your software license, because when something goes wrong at the last minute, the people behind the software can actually help you. We managed to export the film in time for festival applications, with those three frames restored to their normal size. And: back up your files in multiple locations.

Case Study #4: “Creature Comforts”-Inspired Commercials, Elliot Cowan

In the summer of 2010, the now-defunct Curious Pictures brought four well-known New York animators (you’ll have heard of them) and me on board to animate a series of commercials for a bank in Wisconsin or Minnesota. Somewhere Midwestern. I forget where.

The commercials were a riff on Aardman’s Creature Comforts, with a main character talking to the camera while a secondary character did some business in the background.

All of us, including myself, had been in the industry for a very long time and had done all kinds of stuff, and we were all decent, nice people interested in doing a good job on time.

We had done mountains of work all over the industry: TV, commercials, series work, boarding, animation, and design.

What went wrong?

We were faced with two major issues.

1. Our producer, Nurse Ratched, was working in animation for the first time and assumed we were a bunch of naughty animation boys who needed reining in, which was not the case.
2. Our director left for India a week after production started and gave most of his feedback via a crappy phone connection.

I cannot speak to the shenanigans that the rest of the guys had to put up with, but I’m sure it was not much different from mine.

Highlights included:

• A daily finger-wagging from Nurse Ratched.
• Animating my commercial from scratch three times over.
• The main direction I received was, “Make the fish like Rachel from Friends,” and then, when I was able to ask, “What the hell does this mean?” he sent me a clip of Rachel from Friends doing nothing remarkable or interesting.
• Being asked the classic “Who wants pizza?” by Nurse Ratched on a Friday afternoon. Veterans will know that means they’re going to ask you to work late. We all said, “No thanks,” to her confusion and frustration.
• Nurse Ratched scrubbing through each commercial and noting where single pixels had not been filled by the fill tool, then actually saying, “It’s interesting you don’t see these mistakes when the commercial is playing normally.”

One of our number bailed. He had a million better things to do. Someone else finished his work. My last day was on a Friday afternoon. We had a Montauk vacation planned, and I had told them I couldn’t stay, but Nurse Ratched was not happy at all that I left.

After animating my commercial three times, I felt I had produced enough.

Like everyone in animation, we all went on to bigger and smaller things.

The dumbest thing about this whole enterprise was that if Nurse Ratched had started the project by asking us, “We have X amount of time to finish this. How do we get it done?” the five of us would have laid it out simply and honestly and done everything in our abilities to make that happen. Instead, we were treated like naughty boys who were deliberately trying to upend this important artistic endeavor.

How did you deal with it?

Well, for the most part, we went to lunch, drank beers, kvetched about Nurse Ratched and Absent Director, and laughed about how clever we were and how stupid she and the idiot director were. Nothing new. What else were we to do?

We all had bills and wanted to be paid, but had been in the business a long time and didn’t like being treated like assholes. There was some pushback, mostly from me, I think. It was such a long time ago that I barely remember, but in a group of people, it’s easy to assume that I’m the worst behaved.

What did you learn from the experience?

Well, I’d been doing this for a long time. I’d done a bit of everything and dealt with a bit of everyone, so none of this was new, but it was a very intense and distilled version of so much of what I’d been through in my career. Mostly, I was reminded, again, that working as an artist and working as a commercial artist are two very different adventures, and that one is good for me and the other frequently is not.