Rough Draft Studios: Drawing Inspiration
You can’t talk animation without mentioning Rough Draft Studios. The shop is, in one way or another, behind nearly every major American animated series in the last two decades. The creative powerhouse helped drive the cartoon boom of the late ‘90s, churning out work for colossally successful toons like The Simpsons, Futurama, Beavis and Butt-head Do America, and Looney Tunes. They also pioneered cutting-edge animation techniques for The Maxx, Star Wars: Clone Wars, Baby Blues, and Spy vs. Spy.
And Rough Draft is still going strong: The studio produced half the animation for The Simpsons Movie, the soon-to-be-released final installments of Futurama, and Comedy Central’s Drawn Together. Rough Draft Studios produces a staggering amount of animation — and its assembly line is 100% Mac.
“Macs are extremely flexible, and that’s key,” says Scott Vanzo, Director of CGI and Chief Technology Officer at Rough Draft. “The work we do involves everything from traditional 2D animation to 3D CGI to video editing. An iMac can be an office machine one day, and the next day it can be put into production. Every Mac in the studio can do what we need it to do. There simply isn’t another platform out there that can do as much as the Mac.”
Breaking Ground
Gregg Vanzo founded Rough Draft in a Van Nuys garage in 1991; he and his wife Nikki established Rough Draft Korea in Seoul shortly thereafter. Claudia Katz joined Rough Draft in 1994 to produce The Maxx, and later became a partner. Rich Moore, former director on The Simpsons and supervisor for The Critic, completed the core team in 1995. The studios quickly earned maverick reputations for their work on edgy shows like The Ren and Stimpy Show and Beavis and Butt-head, as the staff perfected cutting-edge techniques like non-photorealistic 3D rendering.
Gregg’s brother Scott Vanzo joined the studio in 1993 to set up digital ink-and-paint and camera production facilities. Soon after, he became the head of all things technological, and oversaw the studio’s transition from early Silicon Graphics machines to Windows-based PCs to Macs. Today the studio uses Macs in every aspect of production: office work, storyboarding, film editing, and 3D animation.
“We’ve always used Macs, and we have tried to include them in as much of our production as possible,” says Vanzo. “But since the release of OS X, and more recently the incorporation of Intel processors, they’ve represented great flexibility for us. We love Final Cut Studio — we use it for storyboard and layout animatics. QuickTime is the de facto delivery and review medium for our facility. We run Maya on the Mac for our 3D work, and if we need to, we can use Boot Camp to run any Windows-based app.”
This flexibility lets Rough Draft take on virtually any animation project. “We strive to deliver what the client needs and wants,” says Producer and Senior Vice President Claudia Katz. “With some studios, you can recognize their work. The only stamp we want is great quality. To us, Macs are the best way to deliver that quality, because they give us so much freedom.”
Rough Draft has come a long way from that Van Nuys garage. The studio occupies prime real estate in Glendale, CA, and works with a team of highly trained, efficient 2D animators at Rough Draft Korea. Now the studio can take on full-length animated films even while producing weekly series. To get it all done, Rough Draft has developed a slick workflow to crank out project after project without hiccups.
Drafting Workflows
At Rough Draft, the typical animation project starts with an audio file. The studio receives voice tracks from the actors — basically radio plays of the episode or scene. Artists then hash out storyboards, which are scanned and sent back to the directors and writers. Nothing resembling animation appears until the Rough Draft crew cuts animatics — stills set to audio in a video track. To cut the animatics together, they use Final Cut Studio.
“We’ve been using Final Cut to put together animatics for years now,” says Vanzo. “In layout animatics, you have a lot of individual pieces of art that you have to put together in a single frame, but on many different layers. Final Cut is good at editing monolithic pieces of QuickTime, but it can also handle multiple layers of artwork really well. When we have something put together, we export a QuickTime file for the client to review. It couldn’t be easier.”
The approved layout is shipped to Rough Draft Korea, where animators hand-draw every frame, the old fashioned way, on paper. Then they scan and paint each drawing and send the data back to Rough Draft, where it’s composited and edited into a finished product.
