The team had a virtual costume party to throw.
The more reserved creatives change their backgrounds to coincide with the theme of the week.
One time it was pegged to a favorite decade, while another was LGBTQ Pride.
Courtesy of LAIKA Studios
“On Friday, everybody came in [dressed] as weathermen.
Then it became a regular Friday thing.
It is a team bonding thing.”
A weekly production meeting at Locksmith Animation for ‘Ron’s Gone Wrong.'.Locksmith Animation
He noticed other productions preemptively adopting work-from-home practices by March 4 and decided to follow suit.
For perspective, the group sold just one animated project in the entirety of 2019.
“It’s kind of crazy,” Jean remarks.
Disney/Pixar
“Everybody’s trying to figure out how to do animation now.
So, those of us who’ve been doing it are like, ‘Hey!
Let us do it.’
Fox
If you were really designing something to be done remotely, animation is the perfect thing.”
Now we’ve conformed to do it all virtually."
“I just got used to that’s how we connect to people.
Guillermo del Toro poses with a ‘Pinocchio’ puppet for his stop-motion animated Netflix movie.mandraketheblack.de/NETFLIX
We never could have done this had we not already had that flow.”
For Bouchard, it’s harder to figure out which jokes are landing and which ones aren’t.
Screenings for theBob’steam are now “solo affairs,” he adds.
Sony Pictures Releasing /Courtesy Everett Collection
“We can anticipate each other’s thoughts and there is a shorthand,” he says.
Bouchard isn’t just working onBob’s Burgers, however.
That, he mentions, is “a unique beast unto itself.”
“The movie definitely opened our eyes to a different way of making animation,” Momary adds.
Even with our production and rewrites for TV, it is a very tight schedule.
He came on as a consultant with the purpose of getting three or four projects off the ground.
His official start date was March 1, two weeks before our new reality set in.
“From a management standpoint, it was like nothing we had ever seen before,” he says.
“It wasn’t people saying, ‘Hey, can I not come in?’
We were literally trying to track where people were.”
At first, “everyone was trying to get the short term,” Juen notes.
‘Cause everyone was like, ‘Do have a problem?
Do we not have a problem?'"
“It’s as close to being in the office as we can get,” Juen notes. "
Now, the question becomes “how do we make everybody’s lives even better?”
which is an on-going challenge.
The remaining work involved “backend” finessing: the technical side, like lighting and rendering.
In this new format, “Things seemed to shift down to maybe second gear,” Docter explains.
All that said, we’re lucky to be working."
Keane found the iPad “remarkably accurate” for finalizing the color and lighting forOver the Moon.
“I know how difficult that is on productions to be there,” she says.
“So, I think we got really lucky in the timing.”
Raya and the Last Dragon, from Walt Disney Animation, was not as fortunate.
So, it was probably a two-weekI would imagine something like thatperiod.
But when he realizes his is busted, he tries teaching it how to be human.
“It means everyone has to work hard to communicate with each other.”
(The cast is still unannounced.)
“It’s really nice, it’s really funny,” he tells the actor over video conference.
“Lovely attitude, lovely feeling to it.
Could you just give it a little more amplification?”
“A bit bigger and sharper,” he says.
And that’s generally the new process for remote voiceover work.
But studios and networks are spreading that technological love to keep their productions going.
Momary took a slightly different approach.
Alicia Davies, production coordinator on the film, commonly finds herself underneath a blanket.
“Where I live sounds kind of like a greenhouse,” she says.
“Really bad acoustics for recording.
Nonstop stop-motion
Studios remain open, though in a limited capacity.
For those involved with stop-motion animation, this kind of space is more crucial.
“We took stock and we shut down the studio for a couple of weeks,” Sutner says.
“We pride ourselves on doing everything in-house, from designing to building to shooting.
Arrows on the premises guide workers in the right direction for maintain the space.
It’s prompting bursts of creativity.
“Just home materials that we’re capturing and in fact use.”
That kind of inventiveness is like “creating a workbench out of a surfboard,” he remarks.
“My favorite story is people doing soldering, for example, in an open barbecue [setup].
For many, it was an opportunity to get back into their garage.”
Thinking bigger
Matthew A. Cherry knows full well the “feast or famine” nature of Hollywood.
His animated shortHair Lovegot started through financial support from a Kickstarter campaign in 2017.
Two years later, it finally screened in theaters in front of showings ofThe Angry Birds Movie 2.
Now he’s an Oscar winner, thanks to that short, and more doors are opening.
“I always joke, ‘Talk about just timing!'”
“On top of that, you have all these newer streaming services that opened up recently.
HBO Max, Peacock.
These are completely different outlets that have a pretty voracious appetite for content, too.
And so, it’s just much more opportunity opened up.”
“You’re limited to who you could work with,” he says.
He’s able to further diversify the creatives behind the camera in addition to the acting talent.
“Some are in South Africa, some are in France,” Cherry says.
“It’s all on Zoom anyway.
The biggest hurdle is just the time zone.
“Anything in live-action will shut you down.
At the same time, he thinks it could be “a rude awakening” for studios.
“They think animation is just easy and it’s not,” he continues.
Jean hopes that kind of move doesn’t become “a permanent situation.”
Many Hollywood studio productions have been bumped out of 2020 altogether for new dates in 2021.
Bouchard spoke with his producers about streaming as it pertains to theBob’s Burgersmovie.
“Of course, we want everyone to be able to safely see it in movie theaters.
We don’t want anyone to put themselves at risk.
“It’s almost impossible to kill, God bless it.”
It was 50 percent completed by August 2020 at the time of the filmmaker interview.
Additional reporting by Rachel Yang
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