A Conversation With Mark Cappello

I had a chance to chat this morning with Mark Cappello, of Nova Scotia’s Invisible Entertainment. Mark is known for being a straight shooter, and some of you may remember him from his open letter to Nova Scotia Animators. Here’s what followed:

Michael: Hey Mark.
Mark: Hi Michael, how are you?
Michael: Busy, which is good. You?
Mark: Only a little busy, but I'm okay. What are you working on these days?
Michael: Mainly the blogsite. It's becoming my full-time job and I got some short-term money from the province for a bit to get it up and running.
Mark: Well that's awesome. It's funny I had tried to jumpstart a professional association a few years back. Basically a central online place with all the features you want to build, plus some more standard benefits as well. People were not terribly interested, of course times were better then...
Michael: Yeah, there is still a hesitation from people in the industry when it comes to committing to anything. ASIFA Cananda, for example, currently has no members.
Mark: I know, it's nuts. Especially when you consider the amount of people in this industry across the country AND the amount of graduates colleges pump out across the country every year.
We've really devalued our professional status, and no one seems to care or want to communicate.
Michael: It's getting a little better, but you have to practically trick people into it. I think the way to go, and I've been talking to a few people about this, is smaller, loosely-organized groups. Once they're up and running, tie them together for some actual industry representation.
Mark: What's funny to me is that every other profession that touches animation is represented. Writers with the guild, producers with the CFTPA, Directors with the guild, Voice actors with Actra, post and sound guys with their association... right down to the janitors that come in and clean the studio. But the artists are not represented. Is it any wonder that only our work gets sent overseas?
Michael: We're strange beasts.
Mark: I'm not a 'union' guy, I don't think a union would work at all, but a professional association? I agree with you, it may be best to form a template and start locally with the idea that these groups will eventually coalesce.
Michael: Toronto has a few different groups already: TAIS, Alexis Victor runs something called Industry Night and always draws a crowd, and now here's a new group started by Barry Sanders: Animatic TO. There's also been talk of something out in Vancouver, just an opportunity for industry folks to socialize semi-regularly. And I'm going to be getting a seasonal get together started here. Start it as event-based, a screening, a lecture, plus something social. No dues, no memberships. Just getting people into a room together every few months, then a year down the road, create a membership, but no dues. Raise some sponsorship to cover the events, then you tie the groups together.
Mark: That sounds great, but it will be amazing how few people show up in a large animation community for free! I think you're right, we're strange creatures.
Michael: Well, it helps to have an open bar, or at least free drink tickets!
Mark: Agreed, but the studios are very fearful when it comes to labour organizing. Booze would work though!
Michael: Yeah, but what you do is make sure they have representation on your advisory board, so the studio interest is represented. You're there to be their voice, as much as the individual. But you have to have the worker bees represented as well. Put them at the same table
Mark: I could see that, but what things would you eventually be going for, other than strengthening the community? What benefits come out?
Michael: A unified voice that can bring issues like the provincial tax credit situation to our policy makers, but for now, I'd be happy with just having more communication in the community, that would be a victory unto itself.
Mark: That's a major one. We need to strike down the laws that make it difficult for us to go where the work is, each province could have it's own rate knowing that when a worker is there his money and taxes are dropping right in the province.
Michael: Agreed. We're competing with ourselves.
Mark: I think we need to talk seriously about group health benefits, seeing as how so few companies offer them.
Michael: Also very important. Without treading into union territory, it wouldn’t be too hard to arrange a group benefits program that members would have access to. I have friend in the insurance business that I've been talking to about this very thing.
Mark: I think we really need every 6 months a wage survey, so people know what the 'going rate' is for services. No one forces you to abide by this, but you can see for every region what the standard rate of pay is and you will feel obligated to follow that.
Mark: We are competing against ourselves, but companies prey on the ignorance of the newbies.
Michael: That's always been the case, that's why all the seasoned talent ends up working in their guest rooms and basements doing boards or sheet direction. There's always someone who will do the job cheaper.
Mark: Haha, it's true.
Michael: Not necessarily better, but cheaper rules the day. The real tragedy is that the current studio model is actually incredibly inefficient. An older model, with the emphasis on a strong director who is also the show runner and experienced talent is much cheaper to run. You pay more for fewer people.
Mark: I find the 'veterans' are often the toughest to reach with this stuff because they have carved a comfy little niche for themselves. They don't see the next generation being taken advantage of as their problem.
Michael: True in many cases. They've been burned, so now it's someone else's turn.
Mark: I agree the current model sucks, there is so much waste.
Michael: And they're usually only too happy to see the snotty, cocky punk straight outta school get the entitlement knocked out of them
Mark: It's true, I just wish they saw those people as themselves when they were full of naive hope and animation industry ignorance.
Michael: Well, the current attitude coming out of the schools, and I'm saying this in the broadest sense, is a lack of respect and level of entitlement the likes of which I've never seen before. No one feels they have to prove themselves.
Mark: It's so true. I've hired at Sheridan for 8 of the last 13 years and it's worse EVERY year. They're talented, but every one of them wants a directing job, or a development design job. It's brutal!
Michael: Well, since animation became a "hot job" (and that's a direct quote from an issue of Entertainment Weekly circa 1994) it began attracting people who are essentially lazy, people who can draw, and think it would be an easy way to make a living. And there are so many schools out there, every one of them will get in somewhere, and be pumped back out into the industry , 10 months later in some cases, thinking they are animators.
Mark: The schools are a big part of the problem. There is one here in Halifax that charges $17,000 a head per year for two years, and I can't even think about hiring them. I've spoken to some of the instructors and they're told not to fail anyone. It's borderline criminal.
Michael: Nick Cross recently said to me that he's only just become comfortable calling himself an animator. And Nick has been making his own films for 10 years.
Mark: Nick is awesome.
Michael: Yeah, arguably the best independent animator working in the industry, and he only just started calling himself an animator. The school situation got bad 10 years ago. In some areas it settled down, but there's always some where else that opens and cranks out kids. I was in Vancouver when it happened there. Fly by night outfits that opened, took your money, and were sometimes out of business before they graduated their first class.
Mark: This is the kind of 'reporting' I would like to see for our industry. Articles about tax credit law, and where you're eligible (because most people don't know), articles about the education problem, articles about successful individuals who have maintained humility and respect for the industry like Nick Cross. Not fluff like Animation Magazine.
Maybe we can start an online news source and build the community and interest that way?
Michael: Hmm… You think?
This is the direction I'm trying to take the blogsite. It's tough. People don't talk too much, so getting those opinions can be tricky.
Mark: I don't know, we all have our routine on the computer, check CHF, check your site, check facebook, then get to work. It can be part of the ritual.
Michael: I hope so. I haven't really pushed the content on the site too much yet, but that's where it’s headed. This would be a great thing to post, this conversation. See if we can get people talking. There are rarely comments on the blog, which I find surprising.
Mark: It will be difficult, in fact it will be tough to keep it from sliding to mudslinging and conjecture. But real reporting is difficult. I think if you had some regional people that got a lot of this info together... you're essentially editing it at that point.
Michael: Yeah, it has to have teeth, and I don't mind REPORTING on mudslinging, but you have to be respectful of all the players in the community. People have to be willing to sit down and speak frankly
and stand by what they say though. It can be done without being offensive. Speaking your mind and being disrespectful are two very different things.
Mark: There are a lot of stories out there that need to be told. Reporting could be cool, going into a studio and asking why the decision was made to send a project overseas, pros, cons, etc. And report that unbiased to give everyone the reasons from that company's perspective. Approach Teletoon and ask why they only put a fraction of shows together last year. The editorializing can come when we discuss why the greatest and most fertile animation country in the world has 'Teletoon' as our official cartoon network. We can ask why the real creatives are not getting opportunity.
Mark: As far as the studios, it allows for them to advertise jobs AND proudly represent any awards, or production deals, or news that they have DIRECTLY to the animation artist community.
Michael: Sadly the reality is more likely just a place to fire off press releases.
Mark: For some. Others may take the opportunity to talk directly to the artists.
Mark: I don't know how to brew more commentary. You would think that if this thread was posted there would be lots of people who agree, disagree, and have ideas of their own, but very few people would comment I think.

From there the conversation devolved into mutual masturbation and appreciation. But I’m going to make this a regular feature and open the door to other members of the community to have some frank conversation, share their feelings about the industry, the larger animation community, and the blog itself. I’m not putting forth that Mark or myself have any answers to the questions of the day, but maybe these types of conversations can at least give us the questions.
Please feel free to chime in: tell us what know-it-all bastards we are, offer alternatives, opinions or links to get rich quick schemes.
Communication furthers our community and benefits us all.
mv

Trapeze Animation struggles to fill positions

I had this brought to my attention a while back, should have posted it sooner. I wanted to get a comment form Trapeze but didn't hear back from them. Either way, the gist of the story over at cbc.ca is this: Trapeze Animation, of Charlottetown, PEI, can't find enough animators locally to produce their show, Razberry Jazzberry Jam.
This is a problem I had to deal with while recruiting a few years back for Fatkat in Miramichi. Running a studio in a small centre like these guys do has some real challenges. Here in Ottawa, or Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal, you have a talent pool to draw from. When work dries up somewhere, there's often another gig available down the street. Not so for these little shops. Fatkat was able to land enough wok to offer their people long term contracts, and even they had to make some cutbacks a while back. Financing through tax credits puts limitations on the amount of non-local talent you can use, but quite frankly, for the geographically expanding industry, information technology and the freelance community is the answer. The same way we once shipped work overseas and ran small prepoduction crews ten years ago, perhaps small, remote shops like this should focus on maintaining a small creative hub and farm out the grunt work to the freelance community. It's a solid model, but you have to adjust your pipeline to accomodate it.
Best of luck to Trapeze.

Why Cartoons Suck, by Frank Zappa

One of the best damned posts about cartoons I've read in a while, by Amid Amidi, from Cartoon Brew. I'm just going to cut and paste the whole friggin thing here, hope he doesn't mind.

Frank Zappa Explains Why Cartoons Today Suck

January 8, 2009 2:05 am

Want to understand why entertaining cartoons are all but impossible to produce nowadays? You can have the answer in just two short minutes by watching the first part of this interview with Frank Zappa. Though Zappa is explaining the decline of the music business, everything he says is applicable to the animation world as well.

His words were important enough that I made a transcript for my own reference. Here is what Frank says:

“One thing that did happen during the Sixties was some music of an unusual or experimental nature did get recorded or did get released. Now look at who the executives were in those companies at those times. Not hip young guys. These were cigar-chomping old guys who looked at the product that came and said, ‘I don’t know. Who knows what it is. Record it. Stick it out. If it sells, alright.’ We were better off with those guys than we are now with the supposedly hip young executives who are making the decisions of what people should see and hear in the marketplace. The young guys are more conservative and more dangerous to the art form than the old guys with the cigars ever were. …Next thing you know [the hip young executive has] got his feet on the desk and he’s saying, ‘Well we can’t take a chance on this because that’s not what the kids really want and I know.’ And they got that attitude. And the day you get rid of that attitude and get back to ‘Who knows. Take a chance.’ That entrepreneurial spirit where even if you don’t like or understand what the record is that’s coming in the door, the person who is in the executive chair may not be the final arbiter of taste of the entire population.”

His ideas about how old-school execs were better for the music industry than younger “hip” execs directly mirror my own beliefs about why the animation industry’s output nowadays is so creatively spineless and lacking in point of view. Back in 2005, I wrote a piece called “Animation’s Greatest Executives” in which I sung the praises of the Golden Age animation execs like Leon Schlesinger, Eddie Selzer and Fred Quimby. These guys don’t receive much praise in history books, but it’s no accident that the most entertaining industry cartoons were produced under their watch.

In that earlier post, I offered this quote from Tex Avery discussing his relationship with the exec Leon Schlesinger at Warners:

“We worked every night — [Chuck] Jones, [Bob] Clampett, and I were all young and full of ambition. My gosh, nothing stopped us! We encouraged each other, and we really had a good ball rolling. I guess Schlesinger saw the light; he said, ‘Well, I’ll take you boys away from the main plant.’ He put us in our own little shack over on the [Warner Bros.] Sunset lot, completely separated from the Schlesinger studio, in some old dressing room or toilet or something, a little cottage sort of thing. We called it Termite Terrace. And he was smart; he didn’t disturb us. We were all alone out there, and he knew nothing of what went on.”

It should come as little surprise that Avery’s endorsement of Schlesinger so closely mirrors Zappa’s praise for the “cigar-chomping old” music execs. Leaving great artists alone to create great work is common sense. Execs in animation’s earlier days understood their roles. They were the money men and that’s all. It was their job to create an environment where cartoons could be created most efficiently, not to dictate the content of the animation. Today, execs want to noodle with every part of the process, even those aspects about which they are clueless like entertainment and humor. They have gone so far as to give themselves oxymoronic job titles like “creative exec” and “development exec” to justify their interference in the creative process. There are those rare exceptions when something good makes it to air, but look at the history of those projects and in every instance it is in spite of the current system, not because of it.

The secret to creating memorable cartoon characters and successful series is not so much a secret as it is common sense. If any studio ever figures it out, they’ll be laughing all the way to the bank.

Director Tex Avery and exec Fred Quimby at MGM

(Thanks, Seamus Walsh, for the Zappa link)

Amid's not saying anything all that new here, but he's saying it really well. This isn't just another "Cartoons were better in the old days!" rants, he makes damn good sense.

Thanks Amid.