![]() ![]() And that was for NutraSweet, the sugar thing – and also Trivial Pursuit – and with the money for those two commercials, I finished the picture. I got halfway through the toon and I started running out of money and that’s when I got my first commercial. It was really fairly easy and I financed it through sales of my short films to MTV and other places. ![]() I said, “Maureen, let’s do a Yellow Submarine, only an American version, American music or country Western Delta blues, rockabilly, surfing music, jazz, that kind of stuff.” And she thought it was a great idea and we just started writing and recording music and it took about two years to make it. We were in a band together back in the ’70s. I called Maureen McElheron who did the music for Your Face. I could actually make an animated feature film by myself – doing my own drawings and stories and everything. Over the last five years I’ve done almost a feature film.”īill Plympton: And that’s when it hit me that making a feature was attainable. And I realized I had, I think, 58 minutes, which is almost an hour. And that included a lot of the MTV stuff, like 25 Ways to Quit Smoking, How to Kiss etc. Were you thinking, “I want to do something long form?”īill Plympton: The impetus for The Tune was when I put together a video cassette of all of my shorts up until, I believe 1990, maybe ’89, something like that. What led you to do a feature in the first place? You are and were super-successful doing shorts. Jerry Beck: What I want to get it some comments on all of the features that you’ve done. It just speeds everything up amazingly faster. It’s really made my life in animation so much easier.Īlso, we can manipulate the color and the shading and I can add a correction real quickly digitally. That saves us so much time and money and heartache and headache. I mean, instead of having to go back to the big huge camera, 35 millimeter camera and we’re shooting something together to move right, we can adjust it in a matter of seconds. And the great thing about that is we can manipulate it like crazy. Then they are composited and on the background. But tell me about your transition to going that way, how exactly you do one of your films?īill Plympton: I still do pencil on paper, whether it’s a colored pencil or sometimes ball point pen or sometimes Sharpie and those are scanned on our scanner and then we scan the backgrounds separately. We associate your style with drawing on paper and that paper look, which you still retain. Jerry Beck: Bill, you’re the King of the independent animators. That’s where the creativity comes in so they should get paid more than the lab technicians and all the tape houses and stuff like that. The other percentage goes to the artists, which is where it should be. Once I went digital, thank God… now I think 5% are our digital costs are on the mechanical, technical side. About 80% of all my expenses were on the technical side. ![]() This is great.” Before that I was working on film and doing the, working with negatives and prints – and the sound was also done on tape and that was a big headache. One of my assistants said, “Bill, if you scan this on a scanner, you could do it all digitally and composite the foreground and the background.” I went, “Holy cow. Jerry Beck: For the record, when did you start going digital? When did you stop using celluloid film?īill Plympton: Yeah, that was in 2005 with Guard Dog, actually. The deal with Shout! includes a lot of my shorts too. You made seven features, is that correct?īill Plympton: Yeah. Jerry Beck: Let’s just talk about your movies. In honor of this, I sat down to chat with Bill about each his features, his filmmaking process – and his transition from drawing on paper to going all-out digital. Shout! Factory has acquired the film library of independent animator Bill Plympton in a deal that encompasses all seven of the Plympton feature films ( The Tune, I Married a Strange Person!, Mutant Aliens, Hair High, Idiots and Angels, Cheatin’, and his latest feature, Revengeance) – as well as over 50 of his shorts, including the Academy Award-nominated shorts Your Face and Guard Dog. ![]()
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