The
designer at IDW is really bearing done on the last chapter's in the
book. And it's getting exciting to see that we're almost done. Here's
another sample.
The
designer at IDW is really bearing done on the last chapter's in the
book. And it's getting exciting to see that we're almost done. Here's
another sample.
Nice that they rock and rolling it, but that text block longs for two columns. haha.
"Mostly I think that people react sensitively because they know you’ve got a point"
THE MAKING OF DO THE EVOLUTION PART 1 Here's the first part of a very long interview on the making of the animated Do the Evolution video that I did with Matt Wardlaw at Ultimate Classic Rock a few months back. Most of the interview never made it into print so I'm going to post in over a series of days in the group. It will give you a bunch of behind the scenes information on the making of the piece.
MATT WARDLAW Let’s start at the top -- this Pearl Jam “Do The Evolution” video -- how did you end up in the mix for this project?
JOE PEARSON Well, I had been working in animation since 1983. Before that, I was a freelance illustrator for about four or five years. My animation career started at DIC Studios and then I went on to Disney, Warner Brothers, Hanna-Barbara, Kushner-Locke and a number of local studios. IN the mid-’90s, I opened up my own studio, Epoch Ink Animation (www.epochinanimation.com). I did a short called "Collet 45", which is very much a Ralph Bakshi kind of R-rated violent science fiction bounty hunter in space piece. It was an action comedy. I did that with my good friend's Kevin Altieri. ("Batman: The Animated Series") and Jeff "Swampy" Marsh ("Phineas and Ferb").
With that short, I had some people approach me about doing a series for them that they had just gotten funded for, called "Captain Simian and the Space Monkeys". It was interesting in that the same day I met with the Space Monkeys creators, I also met with Todd MacFarlane at HBO to discuss possibly directing on "Spawn: the Animated Series". In the end, I went with Space Monkeys and set up a full studio in Santa Monica with about 40 artists and a sister studio in Korea Town (Toon Us In) with another 30 artists. We had about 300 people in Korea working on the series.
When that wrapped up and to keep the crew together, I was just doing lots of independent jobs for shorts, one-off specials, pick-up work from DIC on a show called Mummys Alive. Whatever I could do to keep our team together. But I gradually downsized from 40 to a core group of about seven or eight really top talents that I didn’t want to let go. We had become a family.
At that point, I was approached by Terry Fitzgerald from Todd McFarlane Entertainment about the “Evolution” video. I had been recommended to them by Frank Paur, who was a director on Batman and the producer on Gargoyles. He had taken over on the animated [version of] Spawn for the third season (it's a small world). Todd had asked Frank for recommendations and Frank recommended me and my studio. They called and we worked out a price, we worked out a schedule. It was a very tight schedule, but we were off to the races.
MATT It’s funny hearing you say that it was a tight schedule. I think you know that these days, the budget for a music video has plummeted. If I’m correct, I think you guys spent about 16 weeks or so working on the video. It seems like you guys did have a good amount of time to spend on the project, although I can appreciate that for what you guys were doing, that wasn’t necessarily a huge window to accomplish what you needed to do.
JOE Yeah, and actually, when I went back and looked at my records and the dates and talked with Terry, we had only twelve weeks.
MATT Wow.
JOE And the budget for us was good. For example, another studio up in San Francisco, Colossal Entertainment (they were called Wild Brain at the time), had bid on the piece and they wanted 24 weeks and more than double what we were offered. When Terry came to me, he was like, “Really, this isn’t enough money and time, right, guys? You can’t do it.” I said, “No, no, we can do it. We’ve come out of TV production, we have a really good pipeline, a really good team. We can absolutely do this.” So that’s how it evolved.
MATT It sticks out to me that you guys did all of this by hand. You weren’t relying on a lot of digital technology it seems like. Was that a specific choice? Were there downsides technology-wise to the idea of just doing certain things digitally?
JOE Yeah, there’s a lot of downsides. On a video with that kind of schedule, you just don’t have the time needed to build your models digitally. CG requires really extensive models to be drawn and then they have to be built, rigged and modeled in the computer. And budget-wise, well, we were a 2D studio. Space Monkeys was completely non-digital. All of the other work that we had done was non-digital at that point. The studios in Korea that we were going to use to do the actual heavy animation lifting, were pretty much non-digital.
This was ‘98, so digital technology was slowly creeping into TV animation, but it really wasn’t full-throated like it is now. It was really just getting started. So going digital was never an issue with us. We liked the traditional medium a lot. I think it’s very expressive. To get the same kind of expressiveness in digital animation costs about 30-40% more. It’s not cheaper. People have a misapprehension that “Oh, because of computers it’s somehow less expensive.” There’s a reason why Pixar and Disney animated films are running 150 to 200 million dollars.
MATT The animation on this video is pretty incredible. You mentioned the team overseas that did some of the heavy lifting. But with where technology was at the time, how complex was the process of doing something like this video 20 years ago.
JOE Well, the production itself wasn’t complex. When I brought Kevin Altieri on board as the director, I knew that Kevin was a master at doing idiot-proof animated storyboards in the sense that they’re very clear, very clean, while at the same time, they kicked ass. They don’t require a lot of full-throated transformational animation. It’s very cut and dried. On our schedule and budget, we couldn’t afford to do rotating camera angles and characters just morphing from one thing into the next. It had to be a series of simple, clean scene setups that could quickly cut from one to the other.
Kevin grew up in his animation career studying Hayao Miyazaki’s TV work and learning and understanding those techniques, which they brought into the Batman series, which he was a director on. While there’s nice animation and some really strong moments in Batman, not a lot is wasted. There’s not a lot of motion just for the sake of motion.
In “Do The Evolution,” if you look at it carefully, you’ll see that a lot of the strongest scenes involve almost no animation at all. For example, the scene of the concentration camp IN the “Nazi sequence” that Jim Mitchell designed and storyboarded there’s no animation at all. It’s just a series of five levels of drawings that the camera is moving along and over while each of those levels is moving at a slightly different speed to give you a really deep illusion of depth and motion. But there’s no animation. It’s basically a still image that the camera is traveling over. TO BE CONTINUED.
I didn't even read interview, just send me my damm book. Get it finished!
Post edited by BLACK35 on
2005 - London
2009 - Toronto
2010 - Buffalo
2011 - Toronto 1&2
2013 - London, Pittsburgh, Buffalo
2014 - Cincinnati, St. Louis, Detroit
2016 - Ft. Lauderdale, Miami, Ottawa, Toronto 1 2018 - Fenway 1&2 2022 - Hamilton, Toronto 2023 - Chicago 1&2 2024 - Las Vegas 1&2
Holy crap! I've waited this long, ain't giving up now.
2005 - London
2009 - Toronto
2010 - Buffalo
2011 - Toronto 1&2
2013 - London, Pittsburgh, Buffalo
2014 - Cincinnati, St. Louis, Detroit
2016 - Ft. Lauderdale, Miami, Ottawa, Toronto 1 2018 - Fenway 1&2 2022 - Hamilton, Toronto 2023 - Chicago 1&2 2024 - Las Vegas 1&2
Not holding my breath on this any longer. Original release date was August of 2016!
Osaka, Japan (2/21/95), San Diego (7/10/98), Las Vegas (10/22/00), San Diego (10/25/00), Las Vegas (6/6/03), Las Vegas (7/6/06), Los Angeles (7/9/06), VH1 Rock Honors (7/12/08), Ed Solo (7/8/11), Ed Solo (11/1/12), Los Angeles (11/23/13)
Happy
Saturday all. I'm still awaiting word from IDW on the release of the
"Do the Evolution" book. I'm supposed to hear from them next week and
will keep you all posted. In the meantime, here's a fantastic art book
that just came out. It features the stunning and edgy art of Jaime
Hewlett, the visual and conceptual artist behind Gorillez and Tank Girl.
It's worth checking out.
Joe Pearson Hi
Joe. Sorry for the belated reply. The book is still pending. The design
team at IDW has been MIA for about 6 months now so I'm just waiting for
them to finish up the design on the last two chapters. Any day now...
Comments
(Also think they should use the Yield-font and not something really close, but off.
Joe Pearson
The designer at IDW is really bearing done on the last chapter's in the book. And it's getting exciting to see that we're almost done. Here's another sample.
https://www.amazon.ca/Pearl-Jam-Art-Do-Evolution-ebook/dp/B072FS16KM
https://www.amazon.ca/Pearl-Jam-Art-Do-Evolution/dp/1631407414/
Joe Pearson
THE MAKING OF DO THE EVOLUTION PART 1 Here's the first part of a very long interview on the making of the animated Do the Evolution video that I did with Matt Wardlaw at Ultimate Classic Rock a few months back. Most of the interview never made it into print so I'm going to post in over a series of days in the group. It will give you a bunch of behind the scenes information on the making of the piece.
MATT WARDLAW
Let’s start at the top -- this Pearl Jam “Do The Evolution” video -- how did you end up in the mix for this project?
JOE PEARSON
Well, I had been working in animation since 1983. Before that, I was a freelance illustrator for about four or five years. My animation career started at DIC Studios and then I went on to Disney, Warner Brothers, Hanna-Barbara, Kushner-Locke and a number of local studios. IN the mid-’90s, I opened up my own studio, Epoch Ink Animation (www.epochinanimation.com). I did a short called "Collet 45", which is very much a Ralph Bakshi kind of R-rated violent science fiction bounty hunter in space piece. It was an action comedy. I did that with my good friend's Kevin Altieri. ("Batman: The Animated Series") and Jeff "Swampy" Marsh ("Phineas and Ferb").
With that short, I had some people approach me about doing a series for them that they had just gotten funded for, called "Captain Simian and the Space Monkeys". It was interesting in that the same day I met with the Space Monkeys creators, I also met with Todd MacFarlane at HBO to discuss possibly directing on "Spawn: the Animated Series". In the end, I went with Space Monkeys and set up a full studio in Santa Monica with about 40 artists and a sister studio in Korea Town (Toon Us In) with another 30 artists. We had about 300 people in Korea working on the series.
When that wrapped up and to keep the crew together, I was just doing lots of independent jobs for shorts, one-off specials, pick-up work from DIC on a show called Mummys Alive. Whatever I could do to keep our team together. But I gradually downsized from 40 to a core group of about seven or eight really top talents that I didn’t want to let go. We had become a family.
At that point, I was approached by Terry Fitzgerald from Todd McFarlane Entertainment about the “Evolution” video. I had been recommended to them by Frank Paur, who was a director on Batman and the producer on Gargoyles. He had taken over on the animated [version of] Spawn for the third season (it's a small world). Todd had asked Frank for recommendations and Frank recommended me and my studio. They called and we worked out a price, we worked out a schedule. It was a very tight schedule, but we were off to the races.
MATT
It’s funny hearing you say that it was a tight schedule. I think you know that these days, the budget for a music video has plummeted. If I’m correct, I think you guys spent about 16 weeks or so working on the video. It seems like you guys did have a good amount of time to spend on the project, although I can appreciate that for what you guys were doing, that wasn’t necessarily a huge window to accomplish what you needed to do.
JOE
Yeah, and actually, when I went back and looked at my records and the dates and talked with Terry, we had only twelve weeks.
MATT
Wow.
JOE
And the budget for us was good. For example, another studio up in San Francisco, Colossal Entertainment (they were called Wild Brain at the time), had bid on the piece and they wanted 24 weeks and more than double what we were offered. When Terry came to me, he was like, “Really, this isn’t enough money and time, right, guys? You can’t do it.” I said, “No, no, we can do it. We’ve come out of TV production, we have a really good pipeline, a really good team. We can absolutely do this.” So that’s how it evolved.
MATT
It sticks out to me that you guys did all of this by hand. You weren’t relying on a lot of digital technology it seems like. Was that a specific choice? Were there downsides technology-wise to the idea of just doing certain things digitally?
JOE
Yeah, there’s a lot of downsides. On a video with that kind of schedule, you just don’t have the time needed to build your models digitally. CG requires really extensive models to be drawn and then they have to be built, rigged and modeled in the computer. And budget-wise, well, we were a 2D studio. Space Monkeys was completely non-digital. All of the other work that we had done was non-digital at that point. The studios in Korea that we were going to use to do the actual heavy animation lifting, were pretty much non-digital.
This was ‘98, so digital technology was slowly creeping into TV animation, but it really wasn’t full-throated like it is now. It was really just getting started. So going digital was never an issue with us. We liked the traditional medium a lot. I think it’s very expressive. To get the same kind of expressiveness in digital animation costs about 30-40% more. It’s not cheaper. People have a misapprehension that “Oh, because of computers it’s somehow less expensive.” There’s a reason why Pixar and Disney animated films are running 150 to 200 million dollars.
MATT
The animation on this video is pretty incredible. You mentioned the team overseas that did some of the heavy lifting. But with where technology was at the time, how complex was the process of doing something like this video 20 years ago.
JOE
Well, the production itself wasn’t complex. When I brought Kevin Altieri on board as the director, I knew that Kevin was a master at doing idiot-proof animated storyboards in the sense that they’re very clear, very clean, while at the same time, they kicked ass. They don’t require a lot of full-throated transformational animation. It’s very cut and dried. On our schedule and budget, we couldn’t afford to do rotating camera angles and characters just morphing from one thing into the next. It had to be a series of simple, clean scene setups that could quickly cut from one to the other.
Kevin grew up in his animation career studying Hayao Miyazaki’s TV work and learning and understanding those techniques, which they brought into the Batman series, which he was a director on. While there’s nice animation and some really strong moments in Batman, not a lot is wasted. There’s not a lot of motion just for the sake of motion.
In “Do The Evolution,” if you look at it carefully, you’ll see that a lot of the strongest scenes involve almost no animation at all. For example, the scene of the concentration camp IN the “Nazi sequence” that Jim Mitchell designed and storyboarded there’s no animation at all. It’s just a series of five levels of drawings that the camera is moving along and over while each of those levels is moving at a slightly different speed to give you a really deep illusion of depth and motion. But there’s no animation. It’s basically a still image that the camera is traveling over. TO BE CONTINUED.
2009 - Toronto
2010 - Buffalo
2011 - Toronto 1&2
2013 - London, Pittsburgh, Buffalo
2014 - Cincinnati, St. Louis, Detroit
2016 - Ft. Lauderdale, Miami, Ottawa, Toronto 1
2018 - Fenway 1&2
2022 - Hamilton, Toronto
2023 - Chicago 1&2
2024 - Las Vegas 1&2
CDN $45.36
http://a.co/d/fj7v4Mo
Hoping Joe & Todd will release some signed copies online in the day's ahead.
2009 - Toronto
2010 - Buffalo
2011 - Toronto 1&2
2013 - London, Pittsburgh, Buffalo
2014 - Cincinnati, St. Louis, Detroit
2016 - Ft. Lauderdale, Miami, Ottawa, Toronto 1
2018 - Fenway 1&2
2022 - Hamilton, Toronto
2023 - Chicago 1&2
2024 - Las Vegas 1&2
collectionzz
#Collectionzz.com is packing up some mystery boxes with original #storyboards, #animationcells and #sketches from #pearljam’s #musicvideo #dotheevolution for only $65.00 each! Sale begins tomorrow (10/17) at 2pm EST, and the preview is up now at reserve.collectionzz.com! #grunge #grungemusic #toddmcfarlane #mtv #animation #illustration #art #comicbooksJoe Pearson