New Regime in Animation

“If what you’re asking is ‘who is the new Dan,’” Celia Mercer says, “the answer is that it’s kind of both of us, Chuck Sheetz and myself. To be honest, I don’t think any one person could replace Dan McLaughlin. So what Chuck and I have done is divide up the things Dan used to do. I was co-chair with Dan and a few months before he left in December, I became chair. Chuck has taken over Dan’s signature work of teaching the first year students, the A, B and C classes. “

As former students of McLaughlin who later became teaching colleagues in the Workshop, Mercer and Sheetz share a determination to honor their mentor’s core principle of one person, one film—no matter what the future may have to offer in this explosively evolving form of cinema.

What Happens Between the Frames

Joining Mercer for a conversation about the future of the program in the picturesque analog animation studio in Melnitz, Sheetz agrees that what matters most to the new team leaders is adhering to the core philosophy of the almost 60-year-old program that shaped their own lives: “Despite the many technological changes the field has gone through in recent years,” he says, “animation is still the same process. It requires you to learn the same fundamentals, basically drawing and timing.”

Timing is a subject that fires up an intense discussion. You get the feeling that for these adepts its one of the central mysteries of their art form. Great timing is one of the attributes that separates the master animators from the plodders, an almost occult ability not only to create movement out of a series of still images but to create movement that has the rhythm and energy of life, the kind of next-level effect makes the jokes in a Chuck Jones Road Runner cartoon pay off so perfectly. Sheetz quotes the great Canadian animator Norman McLaren: “The important part is what happens between the frames.”

“One of the reasons we still teach animation using some old techniques,” Mercer says, “is that these have proven to be the best ways to explain very difficult qualities like timing. You get a sense of it from handling a series of drawings or looking at frames of film that is much harder to get from time code on a digital file, perhaps because each of those frames is one of the still images from which we create motion.”

“We talk about footage,” Sheetz adds, “to kids who find the whole concept puzzling, because they’ve used only video cameras and have never seen actual, physical pieces of film. It’s important for them to have that experience.”

“And we’re still doing storyboards on paper,” Mercer says, “rather than going straight to the animatic on the computer, as the students are eager to do. We’ve found that the storyboard stage is a way to pause and take stock and think about the story rather than about action. You can put the whole film up on the wall and look at it as a whole.”

The “one person, one film” approach,” Mercer says, “fosters vision, creativity and a sense of responsibility.” The filmmaking process isn’t divided up into separate craft specialties. Every student writes, storyboards, directs draws, photographs and edits his or her own films. As a result they learn the entire filmmaking process, and see how each of the component crafts contribute to the end product.

A Tradition of Great Storytelling

As many veterans of the program have observed, Dan and his cohorts taught them not just animation but the entire process of filmmaking. Course requirements survey the whole sweep of the history of film, and says what is done in the Workshop is rooted in a tradition of great storytelling—although Mercer adds that the Workshop’s emphasis on “putting polished technique to work on good ideas, good stories and good content” doesn’t indicate a prejudice against non-narrative experiments, “which would describe most of the films I make myself! I always try to give my work structural elements, so that I can let my ideas play within that structure.”

Limitless Imagination

While endorsing Dan McLaughlin’s assertion that the latest technologies are simply more tools for artists, Mercer and Sheetz acknowledge that the central tension in the field in the computer age is between, as Mercer says, “the potential for photo-realism in CGI and the great advantage of animation, which is limitless imagination. The best new work, like Gil Kenan’s in Monster House, is the work that finds a balancing point between the two.”

Related Program

Keywords

"chuck sheetz" "celia mercer" 

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