art vs industry
Sometimes I'm having a good day, but then sometimes I think about how industry is actively killing creative fields and that goes away. People no longer go to woodworkers for tables and chairs and cabinets, but instead pick from one of hundreds of mass-produced designs made out of cheap particle board instead of paying a carpenter for furniture that is both made to last generations and leaves room for customization. With the growth of population and international trade, the convenience and low production costs are beneficial in some aspects, but how many local craftsmen across the world were put out of business? How many people witnessed their craft die before their eyes? There is no heart or identity put into mass produced items; be it furniture, ceramics, metalwork, or home decor; and at the end of the day everybody ends up with the same, carbon copy stuff in their homes.
I'm a big fan of animated movies, and I see this same thing happening too. When was the last time western audiences saw a new 2D animated movie hit theatres? I can't speak for other countries, but, at least in America, I believe The Princess and the Frog was the last major 2D movie released and that was back in 2009. Major studios nowadays are unwilling to spend the time and money that it would take to pay traditional animators who have spent years honing their craft to go frame by frame, and to pay painters to create scene backgrounds. We talk a lot about machines replacing jobs, but when the machines come, artistry professions are some of the first to be axed (in part because industry does not see artistry as "valuable" professions). Art, music, and writing are no longer seen as "real" jobs because they belong to the creative field and there's this inane idea that anyone who goes into those fields will be unsuccessful and starving. I'm not saying that 3D animation is bad, it has its own merits and required skills and can be just as impressive as anything 2D, but it has smothered 2D animation and reduced it largely to studios that cannot afford the tech to animate 3D.
And now we have this whole AI thing to deal with, stealing existing artists' work to "train" it to take over those few professions that, until now, required actual people to do them. Internet artists have already been dealing with people complaining about the price of art for years and now have to face their work being stolen to train AI. With AI technology, anyone who undervalues the work of the artist can now get something generated at little or no cost to them, all at the expense of the artists themselves. Why would studios pay script writers when they could just get an algorithm to do it without pay? Why pay actors to bring characters to life or pay models to pose for ads when CGI has progressed enough we could digitally render humans and cut out having to pay people entirely? Why use practical effects or film on location when green screens and adding in-post is faster and so much cheaper? It's no wonder we had the SAG-AFTRA strike. AI has already been trained to write children's books and produce music, continuing down this road will replace authors and musicians too at the convenience of cost. How much longer until the actual, real-life people behind all forms of artistry become completely obsolete?
Industry is just driving the cost of people-made crafts up and up with every mass produced product and every streamlined shortcut to reduce costs, which only makes it harder and harder for artists of all kinds to make a living, as very few people want to pay for the time and skill of artists when they could just pick something off a shelf or feed AI a prompt and get something satisfactory enough, yet not what they actually wanted, for so much cheaper.
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I wrote a movie. Here's some stuff I learnt ~~
As someone moving from the written word to the screen, the number one thing I had to reign in was the urge to OVER DIRECT.
With a book, everything is laid out, you describe it all. From the way a character crosses the room, to what that room looks like, it's all on the page.
With a movie, you need to remember that you aren't the only person bringing it to life. You need to allow the actors, directors, etc. the freedom to make their own choices for the scene and trust in their talent too.
My Heartstopper obsession came in handy here because I remembered Alice Oseman talking about this very thing, and how she had accidentally created two-hour long episodes because she was used to book-length scene descriptions.
I've put up the entire script here so you can go through it and see exactly what I did! (Psst while you're there, leave a vote saying you love the movie and it could even get made!)
Previously thought to have been nothing more than a bedtime story, Jayce and Lott find themselves unwillingly heading to The Crescent of Fools and Forgotten Time, a place where the insane rule sovereign and the sane are grinded to a dust, folded into the ripples of the Crescent.
All to steal The Luminality Paradox, an artifact of untold power, for one of the most dangerous overlords of the criminal world, and to lay even more unchecked power at her feet for her to abuse.
~~ The Crescent of Fools and Forgotten Time
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I just finished a book called The Queens of Animation by Nathalia Holt, about women animators at the Walt Disney Studio. I cannot believe the shit I found out.
(Hopefully I got this all correct, I was listening to an audiobook instead of reading a hard copy, so I can't consult it for name spellings and the like. I'm relying on Google, and well, we know how that goes sometimes.)
Some things I learned from this book.
-Walt Disney became a personal champion of women in the animation department, arguing not just that they were as talented as men but that they could bring something to storytelling that men could not. After his death, the number of women in the animation and story departments plummeted, along with the animation department itself.
-But he also paid women way less. (Except Mary Blair.)
Not just women, but many animators had a hard time getting on-screen credit for their work. This was one of the issues that led to a massive strike in 1941 that tore the department in two, temporarily shut down the studio, and resulted in a lot of people, both union and non-union, losing their jobs when it finally reopened.
On the rare occasion women did get credit, they were sometimes ignored by reviewers.
The second woman to be hired to the animation department, Grace Huntington, was a pilot who held multiple speed and altitude records. She eventually quit the studio with the hopes of getting a full time aviation job, but died young of TB before her career could take off.
Traditional animation is apparently a terrible way to make money. Only a handful of the early animated feature-length films made more at the box office than it took to make them.
Women animators were drawing things for The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast as early as the 1930s.
Men thought drawing fairies was unmanly, so the fairy sequence set to Nutcracker music in Fantasia was drawn and directed entirely by women.
While the women animators were doing that, the men drew super gross racist and sexist centaurs to Beethoven music, and the reviewers all hated it. (Essentially they were like HOW COULD YOU DO THAT TO BEETHOVEN.)
- Generally, male animators tended to like slapstick comedy in their cartoons, while women tended to be more about storytelling and character development.
Obviously there were exceptions to that rule, like Walt Disney and Mark Davis.
Disney hired an LSU professor to write Song of the South. When everyone pointed out to him this was a terrible idea, he hired a Communist Jew from New York as co-writer for "balance."
This went about as well as you'd expect.
When the LSU professor demanded his co-writer get taken off the script, Disney replaced him with another "progressive" white guy.
Apparently he never considered hiring an African-American writer.
Literally everyone, including the studio's legal team, told him not to make this movie, much less hire a white guy from Baton Rouge to write it.
The lead actor James Baskett, who won an Honorary Academy Award for the role, couldn't go to the premiere because it was held in Atlanta.
Meanwhile, the Communist got put on Cinderella. He interpreted the story as a worker rising up against her oppressors.
This is also known as the correct way to interpret Cinderella.
Apparently the writer (so sorry, I'm forgetting his name) included a "violent" scene in which Cinderella goes after her stepmother and stepsisters.
I have no more details than that, but apparently the other animators made him take it out.
I'm now just picturing Cinderella stalking around her house with a raised butcher knife in her hand like in "Psycho."
Artist Mary Blair was art director for many of the classic Disney movies, including Cinderella and Alice in Wonderland. Disney loved her work so much that when she had to move to Long Island for her husband's job, Disney let her work remotely and fly back and forth from New York to Los Angeles.
She was responsible for the rich colors and design choices in the princess movies. She resigned part way through "Sleeping Beauty" but the art director after her used her designs for Maleficent.
Her husband, Lee Blair, was also an animator for the studio before he left to fight in World War II. He was apparently extremely jealous of Mary's artistic talent, and when he returned from Europe, he moved the family to Long Island, became an alcoholic, and started abusing her and later their children. Mary didn't feel she could go to Walt, or any of her other friends at the studio like Retta Scott and Mark and Alice Davis, because domestic violence and divorce were so taboo back then.
Even after the move, Disney let her work remotely, and she spent a lot of time flying between New York and Los Angeles. She eventually resigned hoping to work on her marriage (this didn't really work, though her husband did eventually start going to AA meetings after spending a year in jail for drunk driving) but was later rehired to help design the It's A Small World ride.
Everyone who worked on that ride hated the song btw.
The men apparently got over the idea of drawing fairies making their balls fall off or something by the time they were making Peter Pan, but one of them still asked why Tinker Bell "had to be so naughty".
101 Dalmations was the first animated film to be made using Xerox technology, which decimated the studio's female-dominated ink and paint department (their job was to trace over the animators' work). The Xerox machines could only make black and white at first, which is why so much of that movie is so colorless compared to the earlier Disney films Mary Blair worked on.
The silver lining was everyone got to play with puppies while they were making it because Disney ordered a whole bunch of them to just be there in the studio for the animators to draw.
Speaking of cute animals, the Burbank lot was home to a bunch of stray cats. Disney liked them being there because they hunted mice, so he didn't like when employees fed them.
Disney hated 101 Dalmations, because of the Xerox machines, but it made more of a profit than any of his previous films, because of the Xerox machines.
Julie Andrews originally turned down the role of Mary Poppins because she was pregnant, and Disney promised to wait on her. (Joss Whedon, take notes.)
After Walt died of lung cancer, the animation department was nearly killed and pretty much stopped hiring women. Mary Blair, who had been almost as influential to Disney's art as Walt, was edged out and by the time new animators started working on the Disney Renaissance films, they didn't even know who she was.
Many of the women who left the studio went on to work for Little Golden Books and other children's book publishing companies.
One of the few women animators at the company at this time, Heidi Guedel, who drew Tigger, left with Don Bluth when he departed to form his own company in 1979.
When The Little Mermaid was in production, there was only one woman animator--she may have been the only woman in the entire story department, I don't remember.
Disney then began hiring more women animators at the directive of then-Disney CEO Mike Eisner and head of animation Jeffrey Katzenberg.
One of the women screenwriters working on Beauty and the Beast (I think Linda Woolverton, but it may have been Brenda Chapman) wrote a scene in which Belle puts pins on a map showing where all she hopes to travel.
The animators changed the scene in the storyboards so that Belle is in the kitchen making a cake instead. When the screenwriter saw it, she apparently raged BELLE DOES NOT MAKE CAKES!
Pixar at this time had no women in its animation department.
Brenda Chapman became the first woman to win an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature Film for Brave. During her acceptance speech, she talked about her daughter Emma.
When making Frozen, Disney held a "sister summit" of women discussing their relationships with their sisters and other women. Men at the summit were not allowed to speak.
btw Brenda Chapman also worked on The Prince of Egypt. (I did not learn this from the book, I learned it just now while looking her up on imdb.)
If I have had a very bad day, and am very tired, then the mere mention of Howard Ashman's name will make me break down in tears.
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