Fantastic last Sunday issue, and congratulations on the year's successes! Loved the homage to Charlie Brown, and appreciated the gems of the month, flagged to watch shortly.
I laughed out loud at "*the* greatest Christmas special;" I'm guessing that this is probably an annual tradition for the staff. Surprisingly, while I can immediately recognize a scene from the film, I don't know that I've ever watched it from end to end in a single sitting. Perhaps this is the year to remedy that.
Fascinating to read bout the unique challenges to animating this film, down to the walk cycles and head turns. Yet again I find myself marveling at how hard it is to bring life to moving drawings, but, as your affection for this film attests, and as you so well put it, there's a magic that can happen despite things like flaws in execution. And when it does, the resonance an animation can produce in an audience is outsized. I think that's what's so beautiful about this art form.
Though it seems like you'll continue with member issues through the holidays, hopefully the staff will also find a moment to rest and celebrate.
Thank you, Coleen! This is a wonderful comment. We're all very devoted to A Charlie Brown Christmas around here, for sure. All of us have seen it countless times. What you mentioned about resonance is so true -- sometimes, especially when it's an all-star team like the one for this special, roughness not only doesn't matter but actually adds to the experience.
And we're definitely going to try to relax as much as we can. The newsletter is a big effort, and something unexpected threatens to derail it pretty much every week. This Sunday, Substack ate two hours of work by not saving it -- right as we were down to the wire on our deadline. It wasn't *too* hard to remember what had been lost, luckily. But still, another nerve-wracking moment that we'll be glad to have a bit of a break from!
Oh. My. God. I write my drafts outside of Substack until the penultimate edit because I too have experienced weirdness, but never to that extent. Glad it was salvageable!!
Great article as always. Even when I was very young I did get an inkling that the production for A Charlie Brown Christmas was probably quite messy, its one of those things that you watch and get that feeling about but the overwhelming amount of heart and compassion that the short demonstrates sort of shoots that feeling to the back of your mind. Its interesting to read how the artists behind the short felt before and after it became a success, it can be hard for an artist to see why people love their work when they themselves just see the mistakes behind it.
Its interesting to see EpicGames make bigger and bigger steps into the art and animation industries. With their buy out of ArtStation and subsequently making most of the learning resources on the site free to their Epic MegaGrants program to fund animation and games while allowing the creators full ownership of the product. Its genuinely really cool to see but a pessimistic side of me feels as if its just a huge corporation just trying to find ways to spend money, its kind of hard to distinguish. Even so Yuki 7 was a huge highlight for me this year and it wouldn't have been made with out the Epic MegaGrants program.
Thank you for the kind words and this super, super thoughtful comment! What you said about how artists only see the mistakes -- that's so often the case. A Charlie Brown Christmas is one of the most extreme examples we've come across, probably partly because a lot of what makes it great is exactly what the team disliked.
As for Epic, there are definitely reasons to be suspicious -- it's a massive, ruthless company backed by an even bigger and more ruthless one (Tencent). The MegaGrants program definitely isn't coming from the goodness of its heart, at least not entirely. It seems like it's primarily intended to insert Unreal Engine into a lot of production pipelines, and secondarily to generate good PR and spread the Unreal/Epic name.
At the same time, it doesn't seem like Epic's being super evil with MegaGrants (yet), which makes them a potentially great opportunity for artists. Kind of like how oil barons in the old days funded culture and the arts, in a way. Was it a PR campaign on the part of the ultra-rich? Often, yes. But artists still benefited to a degree. It's a messy situation, but our take is that MegaGrants *seem* like a positive thing for artists -- at least right now. It's so hard for animators to work on their own terms today, and cash like this can be the difference between an artist giving up or making a classic.
Fantastic last Sunday issue, and congratulations on the year's successes! Loved the homage to Charlie Brown, and appreciated the gems of the month, flagged to watch shortly.
I laughed out loud at "*the* greatest Christmas special;" I'm guessing that this is probably an annual tradition for the staff. Surprisingly, while I can immediately recognize a scene from the film, I don't know that I've ever watched it from end to end in a single sitting. Perhaps this is the year to remedy that.
Fascinating to read bout the unique challenges to animating this film, down to the walk cycles and head turns. Yet again I find myself marveling at how hard it is to bring life to moving drawings, but, as your affection for this film attests, and as you so well put it, there's a magic that can happen despite things like flaws in execution. And when it does, the resonance an animation can produce in an audience is outsized. I think that's what's so beautiful about this art form.
Though it seems like you'll continue with member issues through the holidays, hopefully the staff will also find a moment to rest and celebrate.
Thank you, Coleen! This is a wonderful comment. We're all very devoted to A Charlie Brown Christmas around here, for sure. All of us have seen it countless times. What you mentioned about resonance is so true -- sometimes, especially when it's an all-star team like the one for this special, roughness not only doesn't matter but actually adds to the experience.
And we're definitely going to try to relax as much as we can. The newsletter is a big effort, and something unexpected threatens to derail it pretty much every week. This Sunday, Substack ate two hours of work by not saving it -- right as we were down to the wire on our deadline. It wasn't *too* hard to remember what had been lost, luckily. But still, another nerve-wracking moment that we'll be glad to have a bit of a break from!
Oh. My. God. I write my drafts outside of Substack until the penultimate edit because I too have experienced weirdness, but never to that extent. Glad it was salvageable!!
Great article as always. Even when I was very young I did get an inkling that the production for A Charlie Brown Christmas was probably quite messy, its one of those things that you watch and get that feeling about but the overwhelming amount of heart and compassion that the short demonstrates sort of shoots that feeling to the back of your mind. Its interesting to read how the artists behind the short felt before and after it became a success, it can be hard for an artist to see why people love their work when they themselves just see the mistakes behind it.
Its interesting to see EpicGames make bigger and bigger steps into the art and animation industries. With their buy out of ArtStation and subsequently making most of the learning resources on the site free to their Epic MegaGrants program to fund animation and games while allowing the creators full ownership of the product. Its genuinely really cool to see but a pessimistic side of me feels as if its just a huge corporation just trying to find ways to spend money, its kind of hard to distinguish. Even so Yuki 7 was a huge highlight for me this year and it wouldn't have been made with out the Epic MegaGrants program.
As always great newsletter keep it up!
Thank you for the kind words and this super, super thoughtful comment! What you said about how artists only see the mistakes -- that's so often the case. A Charlie Brown Christmas is one of the most extreme examples we've come across, probably partly because a lot of what makes it great is exactly what the team disliked.
As for Epic, there are definitely reasons to be suspicious -- it's a massive, ruthless company backed by an even bigger and more ruthless one (Tencent). The MegaGrants program definitely isn't coming from the goodness of its heart, at least not entirely. It seems like it's primarily intended to insert Unreal Engine into a lot of production pipelines, and secondarily to generate good PR and spread the Unreal/Epic name.
At the same time, it doesn't seem like Epic's being super evil with MegaGrants (yet), which makes them a potentially great opportunity for artists. Kind of like how oil barons in the old days funded culture and the arts, in a way. Was it a PR campaign on the part of the ultra-rich? Often, yes. But artists still benefited to a degree. It's a messy situation, but our take is that MegaGrants *seem* like a positive thing for artists -- at least right now. It's so hard for animators to work on their own terms today, and cash like this can be the difference between an artist giving up or making a classic.