Independent Animation, Rotoshop and Communities of Practice: As Seen Through 'A Scanner Darkly'

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2012 7: 59 originally published online 8 December 2011AnimationPaul Ward

A Scanner DarklyIndependent Animation, Rotoshop and Communities of Practice: As Seen Through

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428852 ANM0010.1177/1746847711428852WardAnimation: An Interdisciplinary Journal

2011

Corresponding author:Paul Ward, Arts University College at Bournemouth, Wallisdown, Poole BH12 5HH, UK. Email: [email protected]

Independent Animation, Rotoshop and Communities of Practice: As Seen Through A Scanner Darkly

Paul WardArts University College at Bournemouth, UK

AbstractThe article examines a particular instance of animation practice through a reading of how Bob Sabiston’s Rotoshop software was used in the 2006 film A Scanner Darkly. By discussing the notions of ‘communities of practice’ and ‘legitimate peripheral participation’, and contextualizing the film in relation to different modes of working, the author excavates the ways in which a range of people came to work on the project. Moreover, he outlines some of the production history of the film to argue that certain assumptions and expectations about accepted working practice point to wider perceptions of ‘independent’ and ‘studio’ animation. Questions of division of labour and standardization, and how they relate to creativity, autonomy and animation production will be addressed; Rotoshop’s position in the history of animation forms an interesting case study for interrogating these issues.

KeywordsBob Sabiston, communities of practice, animation, independent, rotoscope, Rotoshop, standardiza-tion, studio

IntroductionThis article examines animation working practices by comparing ‘independent’ and ‘studio’ modes of production and how they interrelate (and clash). Although I shall briefly discuss the broader contexts of animation production for television and film, the main focus is a case study of the 2006 film A Scanner Darkly (dir. Richard Linklater) hereafter referred to as Scanner. The film’s troubled production – and, in particular, how Bob Sabiston’s Rotoshop software was used for its central aesthetic – points to a wider tension between what I identify as different animation ‘communities of practice’. By discussing this concept and the related term ‘legitimate peripheral participation’, and contextualizing the film in relation to different modes of working, I excavate the ways in which



60 Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal 7(1)

a range of people came to work on the project. The initial team of Lead Animators, including Bob Sabiston as Head of Animation, walked out once it became clear that the production schedule and budget were flawed and the demands placed on them were unrealistic. As it turned out, the budget, production schedule and number of personnel working on the animation were all increased once the producers realized what was really required. I use a discussion of the production history of the film to argue that certain assumptions and expectations about accepted working practices point to wider conceptions of ‘independent’ and ‘studio’ animation. I address questions of the division of labour and standardization, and how they relate to creativity, autonomy and animation production; one of the main claims will be that Rotoshop’s position in the history of animation forms an inter-esting case study for interrogating these issues. The discussion draws upon email conversations and interviews with a range of people who worked on Scanner, alongside published sources and freely available behind-the-scenes material.1

As can be seen from the other articles in this themed issue, the ‘uncertainty’ engendered by the liminal status of Rotoshopped material is an intriguing route into discussing Scanner on a number of levels, but I want to talk about this in the specific context of production. After a brief overview of Rotoshop and how it relates to the original form of rotoscoping, followed by an outline of what I mean by the term ‘communities of practice’, I move on to an examination of Scanner. The central argument is that the behind-the-scenes story of this film can be seen as an illuminating conjunction of different orientations towards production, discourses around ‘independent’ and ‘studio’ ways of working, as well as raising questions (as all rotoscoped work does) about the nature of animation and its relationship to live action. However, rather than simply arguing that Scanner is or is not ‘independent’, ‘mainstream’, ‘animated’ or ‘live action’, I want to examine what it means for these communities to come into contact with each other, and what it means for our understanding of the film and the working practices of those who made it. Not only that, but my focus on how different communities of practice overlap, work together, and – on occasion – find themselves opposed is intended to suggest further avenues of research for animation scholars. One of the main points is to suggest that we can only understand specific instances of animation production by attending to the contexts in which they are produced, and this means examining changing notions of studio and independent production, positioning them in broader historical, technological and socio-economic frameworks.

Understanding RotoshopWe first of all need a brief overview of rotoscoping and how Rotoshop relates to it.2 Simply put, the principles of rotoscoping are to take live-action footage and ‘draw over’ it, one frame at a time, thereby producing animation with a very particular naturalistic aesthetic. The fact that the ‘natural-ism’ of rotoscoped animation, based as it is on an obvious live-action source, can seem out of place or unsettling in an animated scene, is something that features in much discourse about the tech-nique (see Bouldin, 2004; Ward, 2004, 2005). The first rotoscope was patented by Max Fleischer in 1917 and the process was famously used to animate Koko the Clown in the Out of the Inkwell cartoons (Max’s brother Dave, dressed in a clown suit, having provided the performances which were filmed in live action), as well as for military training films. Despite (or perhaps because of) its apparent straightforwardness, rotoscoping remains a contentious and controversial technique, often being viewed as a ‘cheat’ or shortcut that is the antithesis of ‘proper’ animation. Rotoscoping’s defining feature, a very specific quality of line that follows the particularities of the live-action performance it is tracing, has, however, been the basis of both positive and negative criticisms. For example, one contemporary critic noted the ‘smooth and graceful’ and ‘easy-limbed’ movement of



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Koko in the early Fleischer shorts (Kanfer, 1997: 46). Conversely, Richard Schickel (1986: 218), writing about the use of rotoscoping in Disney’s first feature-length film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) is of the opinion that rotoscoped figures are ‘jerky and hesitant, lacking… smoothness’. Despite their obvious differences, these two positions do have one thing in common: they recognize that rotoscoped imagery draws attention to itself – either it is noticeably smooth or it is noticeably lacking smoothness.

Rotoshop, as a digital retooling of the rotoscope process, has evolved since it was first developed in 1996. Sabiston wrote the program in order to be able to creatively interpret some interviews he had filmed as part of a channel ‘bumper’ (or interstitial) made for an MTV competition. The simple black lines seen in his first film to use the software, Project Incognito (1997), became more elaborate through a series of short films (e.g. Snack and Drink, 1999) and the feature-length Waking Life (2001, also directed by Richard Linklater). The fundamental principles of rotoscoping were retained in that live action was ‘drawn over’ to produce a striking type of animation. However, the digital basis of the live action meant that the footage could be converted to Quicktime files and worked on in a computer pro-gram using Wacom pads and pens. Sabiston’s innovation was to develop an ‘interpolating’ feature where the software would automatically ‘in-between’ certain lines, removing the need for the artist/animator to trace every line. This interpolation is one of the things that gives Rotoshop its much remarked-upon ‘floating’ aesthetic. As with critical discourses on older forms of rotoscoping, however, there is still a tendency to see this updating of the process as a form of cheating or shortcut, with some people seeing Rotoshop as not animation at all, but rather as a form of digital processing that involves little skill and no real time or effort. As Sabiston puts it in one interview:

I think people are usually shocked when they hear about how long the process takes. I get a lot of emails from people who want to ‘run their video through our software’. They assume it is some kind of filter or image-processing, when it is really mostly a lot of hand-tracing. (Salmons, 2006)

We will see that assumptions like these underpin some of the problems that manifested themselves in the production of Scanner. Clearly, there are other factors involved (to do with budget, manage-ment, personnel) but at its heart was the fundamental misunderstanding, by different communities of practice, of what was involved in the production of such animated imagery.

Animation and ‘communities of practice’Before moving on to the specific analysis of the production of Scanner, I need to lay the founda-tions for my use of the term ‘communities of practice’ and why it is important for the present dis-cussion. I am using the term in the way that Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger (1991) use it, and as has been discussed elsewhere in relation to animation (see Ward, 2006). Lave and Wenger are interested in ‘socially situated learning’ and how different constituencies can productively come into contact with each other. They also use the term ‘legitimate peripheral participation’ which provides

a way to speak about the relations between newcomers and old-timers, and about activities, identities, artifacts and communities of knowledge and practice. It concerns the process by which newcomers become part of the community of practice. (Lave and Wenger, 1991: 29)

Legitimate peripheral participation therefore recognizes that different constituencies will interact with each other in different ways from time to time; in this sense, it is a conceptual frame that




allows us to talk about mobility, flux and change, but to do so within the context of existing institu-tions and social groupings.

For example, an animator may work using traditional (2D/drawn) techniques on one project, but then be asked to do something differently for the next project they work on (e.g. using Flash or some CG animation), and it can be said they move from a peripheral or marginal position in rela-tion to one aspect of practice to one that is perceived to be more central. Taking another example, animators who work in the film industry and those who work in television will be used to different working practices, daily targets and so on. There are certain skills that are more central to one working practice than the other – in particular, one could point to the amount of seconds of footage per day that an animator is expected to produce, with the attendant notions of quality and cost; fac-tors that will become crucially important in the ensuing discussion around Rotoshop.

The most obvious way in which different communities of practice come into contact with one another on any project involving rotoscoping is in terms of ‘live action’ filmmakers and ‘anima-tion’ filmmakers: in order for the film to be ‘animated’, it first had to be shot in ‘live action’. Of course, there is a false distinction here in viewing these sets of practitioners as totally separate communities – a cursory glance at the credits of virtually any major live-action production these days will show animators, compositors and digital effects artists all form part of the crew: in this regard, animation, in all its myriad forms, is part of the wider palette of ‘live action’ filmmaking.3 As Maureen Furniss (1998: 5) usefully suggests, it is more fruitful to think of a spectrum of moving image production with tendencies towards abstraction and mimesis, where we have to position specific instances of production on a case by case basis. This spectrum is also useful where there may be overlaps and intersections between apparently ‘separate’ forms of activity. It assists in being able to offer a more nuanced understanding of how activities and categories such as ‘anima-tion’, ‘visual effects’ and ‘live-action filmmaking’ co-exist and commingle.

As well as the technological basis of overlapping communities of practice, as seen in relation-ships between ‘animation’ and ‘live action’, one of the main critical frames in which the ‘relational’ (see Kleinhans, 1998) positions between independent practitioners and major studios is discussed is the ‘from the margins to the mainstream’ journey. This has a commonsense ring to it, and is the subtitle and critical armature running through a recent major anthology on the topic, focused on US independent (live action) production (Holmlund and Wyatt, 2005). It is also a longstanding way of looking at the area of ‘independence’. The problem is it tends to situate this as a one-way journey, where independent filmmakers make independent films as ‘calling cards’ in order to then progress to the mainstream. The situation of working practices is of course more messy and complex than that – which is where legitimate peripheral participation and communities of practice come in.

As the terminology of ‘margins’ and ‘mainstream’ tells us, some people are considered to be peripheral (where there may be less money but more artistic freedom) and others more central (how close they are to the vast resources and capital of Hollywood – though this of course may be another oversimplification). What the ideas of communities of practice and legitimate peripheral participation allow us to do is think about what happens when someone makes a journey from one orientation to another and, more to the point, it acknowledges that some practitioners and artists will oscillate back and forth: the mainstream ‘pays the mortgage’ whilst the margins might satisfy one’s artistic and creative impulses. What it also allows us to do is think about how someone who is perceived to be a member of one community of practice (for example, fine art, or graphic design) ‘legitimately participates’ with another community of practice (animation, say, or Hollywood film-making). This is especially important in relation to films made using Sabiston’s Rotoshop software – Scanner and Waking Life in particular – because its ‘painterly’ aesthetic tended to encourage the ‘casting’ of artists from other spheres (or communities of practice) who would then be initiated into



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this specific form of animating. This, of course, will be controversial in the sense that people who are not ‘proper’ animators – have not been through an apprenticeship of whatever kind – might find themselves working on an ‘animated film’. This also connects to debates about the nature of labour on such films, how it is organized and managed, and the way the animators feel about their work. (I return to this discussion later.)

Looking through A Scanner DarklyScanner was produced by Warner Independent Pictures, the now-defunct ‘indie’ arm of Warner Bros, with input and funding from Thousand Words and Section Eight (George Clooney and Stephen Soderberg’s company). It is a convergence of countercultural artefact (an adaptation of Philip K Dick’s famous novel) with ‘indie’ credentials (Richard Linklater as director) and major studio involvement, albeit via an independent ‘specialty division’. The film was shot in its entirety on digital video (using a Panasonic AG-DVX100 digital camera) and edited.4 Then the long and arduous process of computer rotoscoping began, and the production shifted over to Head of Animation Bob Sabiston (inventor of the software and long-time collaborator with producer Tommy Pallotta) and his Lead Animators to process the live action footage. It is worth dwelling in some detail on the problems that arose over budgeting, scheduling and staffing, as these are impor-tant indicators of different communities of practice clashing. As we shall see, there were markedly different conceptions of what constituted a reasonable budget for a project as technically complex as Scanner; indeed, a profound misunderstanding of the techniques involved, and how long they would take, is at the centre of this discussion. It is therefore important to map out some of the tech-nical and budgetary details, before returning to the notion of communities of practice and how they might function in a studio context.

As well as Sabiston, there were initially four other Lead Animators on the production – people who had worked with Sabiston before: Patrick Thornton, Randy Cole, Jennifer Drummond and Katy O’Connor.5 These five were initially responsible for everything to do with the animation in Scanner, and they recruited and trained all of the artists who worked on the film. The ‘casting’ of people with a specific skill set – as opposed to simply hiring ‘animators’ – was fundamental to how things were done from the start on Scanner (following a similar process to the earlier Waking Life). Sabiston describes the recruitment process for Scanner:

[Around August 2004 we] put out ads for artists. We reviewed hundreds of submissions. The people who seemed good we scheduled for interviews. For several weeks we did trial-run interviews, where prospective animators were brought in three or four at a time, for four hours. We showed them how to use the software basics and had them draw a little bit. The people that seemed to take to it, or had a nice style, we brought them back for a second time. After that whole process we sat down and voted on the thirty best people.6

These thirty recruits were then divided into five groups, each with a Lead assigned. According to Sabiston, ‘each of us had five or six new guys under us to train. We also occasionally swapped teams, so the new guys could see the differences between how we Leads did things.’

It is important to note how training in a certain way of doing things (the use of Rotoshop, how the software would be used on this specific production) is integral to the animation stage of Scanner. The different ‘communities of practice’ – artists, graphic designers, illustrators – working on an ‘animation’ project gave Scanner its own peculiar energy, but it also meant that induction into the unique software was a vital part of the process.7 In conjunction with the aforementioned




problems of some people underestimating how long it takes to produce Rotoshop material, even when those doing it are fully trained and experienced, ensuing problems with the schedule and expectations from the producers seem inevitable. Jennifer Drummond points out:

The [producers’] schedule was unrealistic considering that every single animator we hired (except for about three or four) had to be trained to use [the] new software and then hit the ground running producing ready-to-use animation in the first few weeks. [The Leads] felt very uneasy about this, but the show must go on … We (the animators) were thinking ‘well maybe we can do this? We will try. It's going to be tight’. (email interview with author, 5 March 2009)

According to Sabiston, the initial schedule was for the Rotoshop process to begin in late October 2004 and be completed by April 2005, a schedule he refers to as ‘preposterous’ for a feature length film of that complexity and with the image quality required (email to author, 13 November 2009); it became obvious that more time would be needed, and the deadline moved to June 2005. However, by January 2005, having worked through December 2004 in order to produce a trailer for the stu-dio, and with around 10 minutes of footage from the film completed, Sabiston and the other four Leads walked out, having asked for a realistic schedule and budget that reflected the level of work required to complete the project. Sabiston and the others were dismissed, and new Heads of Animation, Jason Archer and Paul Beck, were appointed.

Despite this dramatic-sounding unfolding of events, the problems behind the production for Scanner were rather more prosaic. As Sabiston summarizes:

Many of our difficulties came from that old adage: speed, quality, price – pick two. They couldn't pick two. The funny thing is that they didn't need to, really. The price we were talking about was so low compared to Hollywood standards that I could not believe it was the big issue. But it was and it cost us our jobs, and probably sabotaged the movie as well.

The dilemma facing any producer or studio is balancing the quality and cost of the product against a schedule – not only because labour costs money but also because distribution, exhibition and publicity costs need to be factored in. However, all of these costs must be realistic in the broader context of animation production.

A further complication with Scanner was that around 20 minutes of the film included characters wearing ‘scramble suits’, a shroud-like membrane that disguises the wearer’s identity through a constant shifting and morphing of facial features, hair and clothes. Sabiston, Thornton and Cole went through many iterations of how to produce the effect for the scramble suits. Ultimately, a very tricky and labour-intensive five-pass animation technique was agreed for the scramble-suit scenes (mainly based on designs by Thornton, who then took charge of the scramble-suit team). According to Sabiston, this process was the only one that satisfied the film’s director, Linklater, but was extraordinarily time-consuming. Each frame of film in those scenes, which ordinarily would be drawn over once, was subjected to five ‘passes’ of the process in order to give the unsettlingly mutable look of the characters in their scramble suits; in effect, it multiplied the work for those scenes fivefold. It is worth quoting Sabiston’s description of the process at length:

The person in the scramble suit [was animated] four different ways for each take, making them look like a different person each time. So over the video of Winona [Ryder, who plays Donna], for example, we would animate a fat man, a teenager, a housewife, etc with all different skin tones and clothes … It wasn't exactly making things up ‘from scratch’ but at the same time you could not trace the person [i.e.



Ward 65

actor] too closely because you definitely did not want them recognized … Over this basic form of the actor you had to invent a new person. And you had to do it four different times for each take.

Why four times? Well, once we had the four different made-up characters doing the same dialog in a scene, there was a fifth pass. This was the actual ‘suit’ – it was a special pass done where you covered the person with blobby shapes that crawled over the surface of their body, in four different colours. There were no facial features or anything like that, just sort of this multicoloured envelope.

I wrote a special thing in the software that would take this ‘envelope’ character composed of four different colours and map each colour to one of the previous four animation passes. So, for example, wherever the envelope was blue, you’d see the housewife. Wherever it was red, you’d see the teenager, etc. The end result was this suit-looking thing that looked like four different patchwork people at once.8

It soon became apparent, however, that the studio had underestimated what was involved in the rotoscoping process, the level of detail required, and quite how time-consuming and labour-inten-sive the scramble suit effect would prove to be. The production ran into trouble almost immediately due to unrealistic schedules and budgeting, caused and then compounded by the studio’s ignorance of what was actually involved in the animation treatment of the live-action footage. As Sabiston pointed out to me, there were some obvious differences between Waking Life and Scanner, in terms of the size and scope of the projects. Although the budget for the latter was more, it was still unre-alistic from the outset.

One source quotes the original budget for Scanner as $6.7 million (La Franco, 2006: np), and an interview with director Richard Linklater, gives an original figure of $6 million (see Murray, nd). The Internet Movie Database gives an estimated final budget of $8.5 million, an increase of between $1.8 and $2.5 million.9 Although it is difficult to clearly disaggregate the live-action and animation elements of the production in terms of budget, it is safe to say that the live-action shoot, which used digital video and took only 23 days (see Ashlock, 2006: 43), was very cost effective. La Franco (2006) also notes that the actors on the production, including the major stars, such as Reeves and Ryder, worked for ‘scale’.10 A conclusion we can draw from this is that any increase to the budget was for the animation stage of the production. There is some anecdotal evidence to sug-gest that, after Sabiston and his Lead Animators left, the animation budget doubled and the time scale certainly increased as well.

In relation to the film’s budget, Sabiston states:

I think [the studio’s] original animation budget for [Scanner] was $2 million. They rationalized this by saying that Waking Life only cost $700,000, and this was more than doubling [that] budget. They kind of ignored the fact that this was three or four times as realistic, with many more people to manage, with twice the frame rate (12 vs 24 fps),11 and frequently with four characters on-screen at once (versus Waking Life which was typically one big talking head). They just didn't take all that into account, and they really didn't like it when I pointed it out. Factor in the scramble suit and you are talking about a much, much larger endeavour than Waking Life12 … They would not realize that … I bought a basic animation production handbook from Amazon and showed [the producers] the typical prices for television animation, and it was all higher than our budget. That just pissed them off.

As well as making clear the differences between the productions of Waking Life and Scanner, Sabiston also offers a sharp contrast between two apparently distinct communities of practice – that of studio (feature film) animation production on the one hand and television animation on the




other. As is also made clear, however, Sabiston was drawing that comparison rhetorically in order to emphasize that the budget for Scanner suffered when contrasted with ‘typical prices for televi-sion animation’. Likewise, it is somewhat misguided to use the Rotoshop animation seen in a project like Waking Life as an accurate yardstick for measuring the costs and timescale (and pro-ducer expectations) for the relatively much more complex Rotoshop animation of Scanner.

Sabiston and the people who have worked closely with him over the years have been active in a number of contexts – short independent films (often animated documentaries like Roadhead,1998, or Snack and Drink,1999), advertising for television, interstitials and channel idents, as well as work for major studios (or, more accurately, their independent specialty divisions, like Fox Searchlight or Warner Independent). The common thread running through all this work is Rotoshop. As Bella Honess Roe argues in her contribution to this themed issue, Rotoshop as software has developed, grown and shifted over the years and with the changes imposed on it by the circum-stances of new challenges from different projects. In many ways, the development of the software has been as mutable as its aesthetics. Caroline Ruddell’s article in this issue is also concerned with the changeability of, and function of, the line in Rotoshop animation – and it is clear that the expec-tations of Rotoshop changed between Roadhead with its simplified lines and curves, and Scanner with its more detailed use of line, colour, shade and so on.

Once Sabiston and his team of Leads had left, a new system was instituted under Archer and Beck, which apparently followed a more ‘streamlined’ production model, using model sheets and other forms of standardization. There was still recognition that Scanner was an ‘indie’ production, but it is equally clear that some of the things that Sabiston and his Leads had been asking for, but were denied (i.e. more time and money), were provided under the new regime. In one published interview, Beck notes:

I think one of the primary concerns [on Scanner] was the budget. It’s an independent film, so we had to figure out how to make the labor necessary to produce this film fit within that budget. That was the major focus. To me, when we were first approached, they had clearly started the process of making the film – it was already shot and edited – but couldn't figure out how to get [the animation] done. They basically told us, ‘Here's the amount of money you have: Now, how are you going to do this?’ And we laid out our plan, fit it into their budget, and made it work. Because it's an independent, the budget is low, and we only had a certain amount of time, and we only had so many [animators] working on it. Right off the bat, we told them, ‘It's going to be close. There's going to be no mistakes allowed, basically.’ (quoted in Savlov, 2006)

In the same interview, Archer then adds:

I was told they originally had a completion date set for June of 2005, but at the end of January, 2005, all they had was a trailer that was less than three minutes long. So, they had roughly four months to complete the other 92 minutes of animation. As soon as we came in, we hired 25 additional people, which brought the total number of animators working on the project to 50. Bottom line, we got the job done, on time and on budget, and that's something we're really proud of.

Beck’s quote states that he and Archer came in and made the project work but is ambiguous about additional resources, whereas Archer is clear that one of the first things they did was almost double the workforce. However, when Archer points out ‘we got the job done, on time and on budget’, it is not entirely clear which schedule and budget he is describing, but it is not the regime under which Sabiston and his team were working. There are contradictions in some of the accounts of



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exactly how long the animation stage of Scanner did take – they range from an ‘approximately year-long process’ (Ashlock, 2006: 44) to Pallotta in ‘The Weight of the Line’ documentary (an extra ‘making of’ feature on the Scanner DVD) who states that the animation took eighteen months, adding ‘originally we thought it would be about nine months, so it was twice as long as we thought it would be.’13

Historical antecedents: division of labour and the Standard Production ReferenceThe question I would like to ask is: how might we understand what happened during the production of Scanner in terms of animation history? It is fascinating to examine the production context of such a film and link it to earlier films, where studios and executives worked out how they could exercise their power over their production system. The Standard Production Reference, as devised and used by Fleischer Studios from the 1940s onwards, offers an instructive comparison. This was an in-house document, written by two animation supervisors, Seymour Kneitel and Isidore Sparber. As Mark Langer (1991: 5) points out ‘[the Standard Production Reference’s] original meaning was not primarily the establishment of production norms. Instead, it was written in an attempt to assert power within the firm's hierarchy.’ It is clear from Langer’s research that ‘Taylorized’ scientific management – arriving in the animation industry when cel animation production became the norm – divided up the production process and allowed the swifter production of animated product, but it also raised potential issues in terms of co-ordination and control. Simply put, once you have a large team of people, with each person (or small groups of people) working on small elements of an animated production, part of the emphasis moves from production pure and simple to co-ordina-tion and ‘management’. This inevitably also means a shift towards standardized ways of working that will allow targets to be measured, deadlines met, and a consistency of production throughout (and across) individual animated films.

Although it appears obvious that a larger team of people working on a ‘division of labour’ model will require more careful management, it does raise interesting questions about the ways that roles are organized, defined and contested. The way that a production pipeline is managed is also vital for notions of ownership and authorship – something I will argue was especially the case with the production of Scanner. Matt Stahl (2005: 88) has coined the phrase ‘nonproprietary authorship’ to describe the kinds of investment that certain creative people will have in an industri-alized process like studio-produced animation. For Stahl, ‘nonproprietary authorship’ ‘denote[s] the activities of artistic workers whose job descriptions and modes of coordination and compensa-tion both require the performance of autonomous artistic work and constitute the products of their labor as alienated’.

Stahl’s argument therefore hinges on the (paradoxical) fact that labour in a system such as Hollywood (and animation production in particular within it) has a specific quality, in the sense that the labourers (animators) are accorded some artistic autonomy, but that the product of their labour is ‘alienated’ – which is to say, they do not have ownership of it. Hence ‘nonproprietary’ authorship: rather than the straightforward understanding of authorship as the creative work of individuals who, most importantly, are recognized for their work, in a sense own it, and are remu-nerated accordingly (and ongoingly), this ‘nonproprietary’ form of authorship is predicated on the ‘unrecognized’ aspects of work, routinely given by so-called ‘below the line’ workers. Stahl offers case-study examples drawn from storyboard artists, and the ways in which they contribute over and above the basics of their job description. They routinely contribute ‘above and beyond’ their spe-cific elements (contributing gags and honing story elements are the most-cited examples by Stahl’s




interviewees, things that are strictly speaking the job of the scriptwriters), yet it is the relative autonomy that these ‘additional’ contributions represent that makes their actual job of real value to them. As Stahl says:

Storyboard artists are engaged in authorial work but are denied the moral and proprietary relation enjoyed by officially recognized and more visible creative personnel. Yet the solution is not to avoid this ‘extra’ work; it is precisely this authorial work of storyboard artists (over and above what they are ‘supposed’ to do, that ‘should’ be the province of more highly paid writers) that allows them to experience some control and autonomy, that makes the job satisfying to them. (p. 100)

Conversely, a number of Stahl’s respondents complain that they feel undervalued if not asked to perform such ‘uncompensated authorship’ (p. 101): to use their term, they feel like ‘a wrist’ (i.e. they are being asked just to do the drawings with no creative input to speak of).

In the context of such a discussion of creativity, autonomy and animation production, a telling comparison with Scanner is of course the working practices on other films that have used Rotoshop – Sabiston’s short films and the feature-length Waking Life. The shorts, made by Sabiston and pro-duced by Pallotta, are playful and ‘open’ in their style, allowing for more experimentation. As noted elsewhere (Ward, 2004, 2005), these productions even utilized non-animators – Waking Life’s protagonist Wiley Wiggins describes himself as ‘one of the animators’ on the commentary track of the Region 1 version of the DVD, and the aunt and mother of Ryan Power, the boy who appears in Snack and Drink, contributed to the animation of one sequence in that film. Such inclu-sivity in approach suggests an openness that is borne out by the aesthetic variations embraced in these films, an independence of spirit that is lacking in studio-run productions. Although we should be wary of placing too much emphasis on the notion of there being a self-conscious ‘battle’ between the ‘independents’ and the ‘studio’ in the particular case of Scanner, it certainly seems true that entrenched behaviour – the understood and acknowledged behaviour of specific communities of practice – contributed to what happened behind the scenes on the production. Although Sabiston appears to have shouldered most of the blame, it is interesting to note that many of the animators who stayed behind and saw the project to completion after Sabiston and his team of Lead Animators had left talk of Sabiston with nothing but the highest regard. Sabiston, for his part, has some admi-ration for the fact that these animators got the film completed at all.

Of course, with any long-drawn-out production process involving lots of people – and major studio animation is certainly one of those – the idea of ‘progress’ and schedules can be vital. How quickly or slowly something is perceived to be progressing is also a key indicator of incommensu-rable communities of practice – as characterized by ‘independent’ and ‘studio’ production – clash-ing. Jennifer Drummond emphasizes such different working practices when she says:

I think a big problem [during the animation process for Scanner] besides scheduling was trying to fit the studio/producers’ measure of progress onto the animation rather than our own measure of progress. We had been working as a team for several years and had completed several projects on budget and on schedule, including Waking Life. The producers of Scanner would ask us to fill out charts each week on how much we had completed. This was fine but they would ask us to determine the percentage of ‘completeness’ of each ‘element’ of the animation … The producers would want to know what percentage of the face was done or the body was done. I felt like it messed up the flow of our work and actually slowed things down … They wanted us to build our animation in the way maybe Disney would … working on individual elements to completion with a very consistent/uniform look or design. (email interview with author, 5 March 2009)



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One of the key methods for studio-produced animation is the use of standardization (e.g. model sheets); in other words, the attempt to make consistent the expressive lines of animation across a longer production.14 As noted earlier, however, such measures are not purely for aesthetic reasons. They are also part of the division of labour model of mass production, which both relies on ‘non-proprietary authorship’ and paradoxically attempts to control and streamline it. Despite rotoscop-ing’s obvious and direct connection to a live-action referent, there is still considerable latitude for individual interpretation in the way that the lines might undulate or seem out of control (this can also be seen in non-rotoscoped drawn animation with so-called ‘boiling’).15 The problems inherent in the animation stage of the production of Scanner can be seen in this clash of working practices. The loose and expressive style seen in Waking Life could not be countenanced by a major studio (albeit one making an ‘indie’ film) because the studio required clear and measurable ‘progress’ against definite criteria, including model sheets and standardized production schedules. After Sabiston and his team left the production, Pallotta instituted a more streamlined animation process with specific instructions on how to do things.

Such measures can clearly be read as being analogous with the introduction of the Standard Production Reference by Fleischer Studios, and other similar examples (style guides and model sheets in general). The function of these artefacts in the production process is to standardize and make consistent; however, it is also clear that a major secondary function of such measures is to exert control in a more simple and straightforward manner. This is certainly borne out by the com-ments of a number of people who worked on Scanner after Sabiston and the others had left. For example, talking about the style guide brought in by the producers, one animator (who wishes to remain anonymous) says:

It was a half-hearted effort to please the studio and wasn't tightly followed. We were under too much pressure of time to really follow a strict guide. So much of that production was by the seat of our pants. The purpose of the style guide was the studio's attempt to get a hold of something they felt was out of their control. (email to author, 11 November 2009)

This comment captures the contradictions and complexities of major animation production and, in particular, how style guides and other such measures can sometimes (always?) be about more than just standardizing the images and sounds produced: they are about standardizing behaviour across different communities of practice.

Acknowledgments

I should like to thank Maureen Furniss, Suzanne Buchan and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful com-ments on earlier drafts of this article. My thanks also go to Bob Sabiston, Jennifer Drummond and my anony-mized respondents for sharing their experiences of working on A Scanner Darkly and other projects.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors. The author acknowledges support from the Arts University College at Bournemouth Research Committee which allowed time to complete this article.

Notes

1. Bob Sabiston and Jennifer Deutrom (née Drummond – I refer to her as Jennifer Drummond throughout) talked to me about their experiences during the making of Scanner – or, at least, the period when they




worked on the project. The people I spoke to who worked on Scanner to completion wished to remain anonymous.

2. See Ward (2004) for further detailed discussion, as I provide only the briefest of overviews here. 3. An alternative view is, of course, that live-action filmmaking is merely a sub-category of a much larger

and widely conceived notion of animation – but that is another essay entirely (see Cholodenko, 1991, 2007; Manovich, 2002). Donald Crafton (2011) challenges what he sees as this ‘widely held view’.

4. As can be seen from the behind-the-scenes documentary ‘One Summer In Austin: The Story of Filming A Scanner Darkly’ (a special feature on the DVD of Scanner) the film was shot in live action, though the actors were often not in ‘full’ costume, or certain elements of the set were ‘added in’ afterwards via the Rotoshop process or digital compositing. This made the shooting stage relatively much quicker, but deferred certain elements to the (post-production) Rotoshop stage, where a considerable amount of visual detail needed to be dealt with.

5. Sabiston is in the final credits of the film as ‘Head of Animation’ (followed by a separate credit for Jason Archer and Paul Beck as ‘Head of Animation’); as the inventor of Rotoshop, and writer of all the code, the studio were compelled to retain Sabiston as an (off-set) advisor and troubleshooter. The four earlier Lead Animators who left with Sabiston are also in the final credits, but only for ‘Additional Animation’ – the work they had done on the film before departing. Earlier in the process, Cole and Thornton also did some concept design and visited the (live action) set as advisors (this is uncredited). Cole did all the necessary work on 3D modelling and compositing for the film – also uncredited, though the entry for Scanner in the Internet Movie Database notes his input, and that it was ‘uncredited’, under ‘Visual Effects’. There is also a moment in ‘The Weight of the Line’ when one of the animators mentions ‘Randy the compositor’ – an obvious reference to Cole.

6. Email interview with author, 8 February 2009. All further unattributed quotes from Sabiston are from this source.

7. As Robert La Franco (2006) points out, the recruits included ‘a glassblower and a photo lab technician, a comic book illustrator and a sculptor. Only a few of the original 30 or so animators had moviemaking experience.’

8. Sabiston’s description of the originally agreed-upon scramble-suit process is from an email to the author, 3 August 2011.The scramble suit in the final film, though based on the design work of Cole, Sabiston and Thornton, apparently does not use this ‘five pass’ technique. Nick Derington, who took over as the Lead Animator in charge of the scramble suit states (in ‘The Weight of the Line’ documentary): ‘You’re basically layering three different characters on – well we’re calling them “threads” – and they [the characters] basically fade in and out of one another throughout these threads, throughout each shot.’ The conclusion we can draw is that the scramble-suit animation was made less complex after Sabiston left, to save time and money.

9. In one interview, Linklater estimates that the budget would have been in the region of $20–30 million if it had been shot as a live-action film, which is still a modest sum by Hollywood standards (see Murray, nd).

10. ‘Both celebrities agreed to work at the Screen Actors Guild scale rate, which for Scanner came to about $72,000, plus a portion of any backend profits – an extremely unusual arrangement for top-tier actors. Reeves, for example, pulled in more than $15 million and 15 percent of the gross for each of the Matrix sequels’ (La Franco, 2006).

11. That is, Waking Life was animated at 12 frames per second and Scanner at 24 frames per second. For each second of film, Waking Life required 12 Rotoshopped images which were then exposed twice, with 12 fps giving a less smooth aesthetic, but one that ultimately suited the project. Needless to say, the requirement for 24 fps on Scanner would have meant double the workload even before the additional levels of detail and other factors (character interaction, scramble suits and so on) Sabiston mentions are taken into account (both films are approximately 100 minutes in duration).

12. One source notes: ‘Of [Scanner’s overall] $7 million budget, $5 million was spent in post-production [i.e. the Rotoshop process]’ (see Della Cava, 2006). Although the figure of $7 million differs again from the other budget totals I have cited, it is the post-production figure that is interesting here: $5 million is



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over two thirds of the overall budget this source quotes, and 2.5 times the $2 million originally budgeted for animation, according to Sabiston.

13. No doubt some of these ambiguities arise from a lack of clarity over whether people are talking about the entire animation process (i.e. the period that included when Sabiston et al. worked on the film) or just the time period from when Archer and Beck took over as Heads of Animation. Scanner had previously been ‘tentatively scheduled to release in Spring 2006’ (Kernion, 2005) before the release date was moved (Kernion, 2006). As the main text makes abundantly clear, there had been a number of other schedule changes prior to this one. The bottom line is that animation production began at the end of October 2004 and the film was released on the 9 July 2006 – a period of roughly 20 months, including (approximately) the first 3 months when Sabiston and his team were involved. Sabiston has recently noted to me: ‘Think-ing about it now, in hindsight, I think we really ought to have been given two years to do it [i.e. the animation process in Scanner] and that would have been a bargain for them’ [email to author, 12 August 2011]. The 20 months it eventually took is not so far from this two-year schedule.

14. An alternative way of understanding the differences in approach between ‘studio’ and ‘independent’ communities of practice (and, indeed, Rotoshop’s position within them) is Paul Wells’s (1998: 35–67) tri-partite model of ‘orthodox’, ‘developmental’ and ‘experimental’ animation. Viewed in the light of this model, one can see many (if not all) of Sabiston’s earlier shorts using Rotoshop as ‘experimental’; Waking Life, with its deliberate multiple styles, discontinuities and foregrounding of different aesthetics from scene-to-scene, falls into this category as well. The producers of Scanner, on the other hand, sought to impose unity and continuity, with the individual artists working towards a coherent whole, and a more orthodox production. The fact that this does not entirely work is what makes the film such an interesting example; it also points to the usefulness of ‘developmental’ as a category.

15. ‘Boiling’ is the undulating or ‘wobbling’ effect seen in some drawn animation, where the lines or use of colour or cross-hatching are slightly mismatched from one image to the next. Some animators deliber-ately embrace this ‘flaw’ as part of their aesthetic, for example Bob Godfrey’s Roobarb (BBC, 1974), or some of the films of Joanna Quinn (e.g. Girls Night Out,1986; Body Beautiful, 1990).

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Paul Ward is a Principal Lecturer in the School of Media at the Arts University College at Bournemouth (AUCB), UK. He teaches on the BA (Hons) Animation Production course and contributes to a cross-disci-plinary MA course. His research interests are in the fields of animation and documentary film and television. Published work includes articles for the journals animation: an interdisciplinary journal, Animation Journal and the Historical Journal for Film, Radio and Television, as well as numerous anthology essays. Paul is also the author of Documentary: The Margins of Reality (Wallflower Press, 2005) and TV Genres: Animation (Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming; co-authored with Nichola Dobson). He serves on the Editorial Boards of animation: an interdisciplinary journal, Animation: Practice, Production & Process and Animation Studies and is a member of the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council Peer Review College with special interest in animation and documentary research proposals. Paul is also the current President of the interna-tional Society for Animation Studies.



Independent Animation, Rotoshop and Communities of Practice: As Seen Through 'A Scanner Darkly'

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