Don Bluth's Garage Band
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Don Bluth's Garage Band
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Re: Don Bluth's Garage Band
#2> much had already been lost since the studio’s best years.
There was that awesome video, that someone shared here, a few days ago, that talked about recreating Disney's Oscar-winning sodium lamp process.
Re: Don Bluth's Garage Band
#3I was a child in the 1970s and loved Disney animation. Even at the time I could tell there was a decline the level of sophistation of the new films, although I still enjoyed them
So many interesting angles to this story, that directly apply to software development:
* document your Processes
* investing in training.
* creating space for people to follow thier passion
.
Re: Don Bluth's Garage Band
#4Bluth's "garage band" was re-learning skills that had been off-shored. That's a piece of cont4ext that's sort of missing.
Anyone interested in what happened when Disney's off-shored Italian animation team revolted should check out Allegro non troppo - a sendup of Fantasia.
Re: Don Bluth's Garage Band
#5I was a child in the 1970s and loved Disney animation. Even at the time I could tell there was a decline the level of sophistation of the new films, although I still enjoyed them So many interesting angles to this story, that directly apply to software development: * document your Processes * investing in training. * creating space for people to follow thier passion .
> I could tell there was a decline the level of sophistation of the new films
Cost has a lot to do with that. Compare 101 Dalmatians ('61) with Snow White ('37) and the newer one looks cheaper because it's cheaply made - copy machine tech instead of artists for part of the process.
Re: Don Bluth's Garage Band
#6> much had already been lost since the studio’s best years. There was that awesome video, that someone shared here, a few days ago, that talked about recreating Disney's Oscar-winning sodium lamp process.
Yes, I had that [1] in mind too when I saw this entry
Re: Don Bluth's Garage Band
#7This helps to answer some of the questions surrounding the decline of Disney animation after Walt died. In some ways you could blame the decline on him because he built an organization that depended too much on his judgment and guidance.
The fact that so many core competencies were lost over the years is mostly on him. But then he started CalArts too.
Re: Don Bluth's Garage Band
#8Bluth's "garage band" was re-learning skills that had been off-shored. That's a piece of cont4ext that's sort of missing. Anyone interested in what happened when Disney's off-shored Italian animation team revolted should check out Allegro non troppo - a sendup of Fantasia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegro_non_troppo
Is there a longer story somewhere about this decline ?
This piece is not really clear about the reasons _why_ younger talent wasn't being trained on those techniques. If you read the story it seems that everybody was looking forward at people learning and helping them doing so... so why was it not being done at Disney ?
The link only mentions issues with the union, but it doesn't seem to me reasonable to think that it was the only reason.
Re: Don Bluth's Garage Band
#9>As Bluth remembered, older technical tricks like the “shadows or the reflections or the double passes through the camera” were “evaporating before our very eyes.”1 The problem was bigger than that, too. Bluth and many of the other young trainees didn’t know how to make a movie, and they weren’t sure how to learn. According to Bluth’s colleague Gary Goldman, “We didn’t even know what questions to ask.”
>“We were learning to animate,” Goldman explained. “We were learning to in-between, clean up … and we said, ‘Wait, there’s so much more we need to know.’ ”
>That included writing, scene planning, editing and more. Even the Nine Old Men had “forgotten” much of what went into Disney’s older films, said animator John Pomeroy.
IME, this is an incredibly widespread problem in the Age of the Retiring Baby Boomer. Many of them jealously guarded their professional knowledge, for fear of replacement, or simply never documented it. When it comes time to pass it along to juniors, they either can't or won't; then, with little official notice, they're out the door, and you're left building from first principles or trying to make sense of process spaghetti. I'm not sure if this is better or worse than the Boomers who stay on into their 70s and 80s - still refusing to train their juniors, but also preventing the advancement that would allow younger workers to even attempt to learn the position. ...No, I suppose retirement is better. At least there's some runway, instead of the incumbent simply dying one day and leaving everyone scrambling.
EDIT: >and there was a sense among the garage artists that Disney’s management didn’t care to implement most of the lessons from Banjo.
“All of our learning is only going to do us any good,” Pomeroy remembered thinking, “if the higher-ups will accept what we’re trying to make happen.”
And there's the other side of the deal. When you make people go off and learn things on their own, they often learn... that they can go off and do things on their own. Disney sort of won in the end, but Bluth was a thorn in their side for quite a while.
Re: Don Bluth's Garage Band
#10>As Bluth remembered, older technical tricks like the “shadows or the reflections or the double passes through the camera” were “evaporating before our very eyes.”1 The problem was bigger than that, too. Bluth and many of the other young trainees didn’t know how to make a movie, and they weren’t sure how to learn. According to Bluth’s colleague Gary Goldman, “We didn’t even know what questions to ask.” >“We were lear…
In my field (databases), the boomers I’ve worked with (a handful, to be honest) were all keen on sharing their knowledge. They also seemed happy that someone younger was actually listening and not just telling them that their knowledge from the 70s is outdated.