The "You know what?" thread

[D'Snowth]

Oh yeah, and all you little springtails and book lice that are still scurrying around on my ceilings and walls? Again, it's September, you can go away already.

 

[fuzzygobo]

Lice don’t read calendars.

 

[D'Snowth]

TRUTH!!!

 

[fuzzygobo]

I saw a short documentary on Bill Plympton.
He’s been making animated cartoons since the 70s. You might recognize some of his Geico ads from the late 90s.

Narration: “We all do dumb things. Paying too much for car insurance doesn’t have to be one of them.”

For visuals, you have a guy who sees a cannon, with a button next to it. He pushes the button, and gets a cannon ball in his face.

He gave three criteria for making a successful cartoon.
1) Make it short (five minutes maximum)
2) Make it cheap (his films usually cost around five thousand)
3) Make it funny.

To keep costs down, he doesn’t hire expensive voice actors. He only has eight people on his staff, but the idea of keeping his studio going is to make a profit. He can’t afford the overhead of Disney ior Pixar, but he still manages to produce one film a year.

He says you can hire the best voice actors around, but that can eat up your project’s whole budget.

I got to meet Bill Plympton back in 1988. He gave us a preview of his yet-to-be released film “One of Those Days” which won several awards for him.
Great guy. His trademarks found in many of his films-very little dialogue, morphing faces, and abundant violent slapstick. And funny as anything.

 

[D'Snowth]

But, is that to say that A-list Hollywood celebrities, flavor-of-the-month pop stars and stand-up comedians, or even SNL castmembers are more cost efficient that actual industry voice actors?

 

[fuzzygobo]

Bill was giving his lecture to film school students, many of whom don’t have the luxury of hiring the likes of Morgan Freeman or someone of his caliber.
Terry Gilliam comes to mind too. His cartoons for Monty Python’s Flying Circus were fantastic, and made on a shoestring budget.

I think the point Plympton was making, he knows how expensive producing a five minute animated short can be. Without the support of a big studio, costs can easily rack up, especially with hiring voiceovers.

One major exception, Plympton did a two-minute film of Homer Simpson singing, and Dan Castellaneta did him the favor of voicing for him. The results were amazing, and not exactly like anything you’d see on the series.
It actually looks more like something you might see on Tracey Ullman’s show. Still impressive, but for a novice, having Dan’s voice would cost a small fortune.

 

[fuzzygobo]

One last thing. Bull Plympton went to art school in Portland, Oregon with Matt Groening. Groening found his fortune with the Simpsons. Even though Plympton didn’t reach the same stellar heights, his Plymptoons have won dozens of awards and the respect of animators worldwide. He seems satisfied with the niche he found.
And it was my good fortune to meet him during my one filmmaking class. Not at all stuck up. All he wanted was to have people laugh at his cartoons. The fact he’s been able to make a living doing that sounds like success to me.

 

[CoolGuy1013]

As much as I like both songs, I’ve pretty much realized that Men at Work’s “Who Can it Be Now?” and Rockwell’s “Somebody’s Watching Me” are essentially the same song.

 

[D'Snowth]

It continues to baffle me how so many movies and shows out there (particularly those being touted by the Disney brand) can have such huge followings and fanbases long before they're even officially released! I remember FROZEN was like this years ago, and now it seems to be their new show THE GHOST AND MOLLY McGEE. How do you even know you're absolutely in love with these movies or shows before you even see it and judge it for yourself?

Granted, once upon a time, I used to just blindly dive into whatever new shows Cartoon Network had to offer, and even I can remember when they just started promoting EEE, and how we all were already having such deep, philosophical discussions over which Ed was who, why Eddy had such a green tongue, what was up with the way Ed ran, etc. Of course, we were kids then, so we easily got excited over new things like this.

 

[D'Snowth]

Twitter (and pretty much the entire left) in a nutshell, according to Jerry. . . .