(note: this guy is Gregg Vanzo, founder of Rough Draft Korea/Rough Draft Studios Los Angeles)
Yes, RDKorea/RDS-Los Angeles has got to be if not the best animation production house out there, at least *one* of the best. Your undeniable tour-de-force was "MTV Oddities: The Maxx."
I have a question about how you guys did "Daria" the second season. Did you do the entire 13 episodes in one big batch, or did they send episodes to you guys in several different batch-lets?
The reason why I'm interested in this is that MTV seems to want to air "Daria" in two batches: one starting in February and running through March, the other starting in late June-early July and running through August. I am just curious about the feasability of MTV trying a different schedule: 1 new episode a month plus one extra new episode on a month of MTV's choosing.
We who are fans of "Daria" are tired of waiting for these "batches" and would rather have the episodes roll out slower to spread the new material around some.
Thank you for poking your head into Usenet. Say hi to Scott and Claudia for me! ;-)
Michelle Klein-Hass <[email] t> of The Underground Bummer Culture writes:
I wouldn't like that. I think you need an episode a week to maintain momentum. If Daria was only on once a month I'd probably forget to watch it, and padding the slot out with repeats during the intervening weeks wouldn't make it any better, as I'm not interested in watching repeats unless they're episodes I didn't catch first time round. This is why I stopped watching Sabrina - ITV started showing reruns so I stopped watching. Then I suddenly discovered that they were showing new episodes so I started watching again, but after a couple of weeks they went back into reruns at which point I gave up watching Sabrina altogether and have never watched it since. I just couldn't be bothered to tune in on the off chance that it would be a new episode. OK so Daria's worth making more of an effort for, but I just know I'd lose interest if it was being shown in dribs and drabs. I think makes much more sense to have a whole season of a show in one go, and then a whole season of a different show, and so on, rather than to interleave them.
I know it's tough to cope when Daria's not on, but I think we just have to be brave and face up to those desolate periods without her - spreading Daria more thinly isn't the answer.
I'd rather have one new episode every week for about 15 weeks in a row. I don't care if you have to chain the animators to their chairs and feed them intravenously. :-)
Although, come to think of it... what would be really nice is a new episode, say, every other week all year... that's 26 eps. in all, which would be doable, right? Of course MTV would never do something as regular as that... scheduled programming? Perish the thought!
Regarding your "Daria" question... (I'm sorry to say that we are no longer working on that series due to our current studio work load mostly but I'll attempt to answer your question ).
MTV is of course not malecious in their scheduling. Of course they would love to produce the show so that there's a new one every week, forever.... however there are many reasons that they can not.
As you can see from some of the other responses to your post, most viewers would not be able to remember to tune in just once a month for the new episode and this is where the "business" of animation/TV programming gets quite complicated....
If MTV shows just one new episode ( refered to as "first run") a month and only a portion of the audience tunes in for that day, the viewer share (number of viewers) will most likely be lower than if they run a block of "first run" episodes week after week. If the viewer share is down then the advertisers won't pay as much for their commercial time. (Advertisers, in general, pay more for "first run" episodes as the viewership is generally guarenteed to be larger). This is why most networks choose to run "first run" episodes in blocks. As animation is expensive to produce this is important in animation programming. We could say that MTV is being greedy but considering that they make alot more money off their live action productions that cost only a fraction of what their animation programs cost, we should feel lucky that MTV is supporting animation programming at all. Why animation is so expensive to produce is another subject that I will not attempt to go into here.)
I'm personally sorry to say that money makes most of the decisions in animation today, but if there wasn't money to be made in this business many of the opportunities that are available for animation creatives today, would not be available at all. That is a reality that exsists, however if we use this to our advantage instead of seeing this as a weakness, we (the animation creatives/lovers) can take some remarkable strides forward.
As to why MTV has split the season into two batches, I couldn't say. One theory could be that it was an internal choice at MTV Animation inorder to juggle crews amoung different projects (good crews are hard to come by these days due to the large amount of work out there and the limited number of talented people). They could have needed the crew to work on the next B&B feature that's in production or something else.
Anyway... sorry to ramble on. This is just a brief explanation of some possibilites, the actual decision process, I'm sure, is much more involved and complicated. Many other issues could also be involved but the bottom line most of the time is that they know what they are doing even though it might not appear that way to the general public.