Martin Goodman with Marc Adler, CEO of Atlanta-based Fathom Studios, and Warren Grubb, Fathom's head animation director. 12/08

Martin Goodman: Delgo now has a best feature award at Anima Mundi as well as being in the running for a Best Animated feature nomination at the Oscars. Do you think that this will finally change the minds of reluctant distributors as far as independently produced animated films are concerned?

Marc Adler: Hollywood is known for being creative, but they still have a formula for creating animation. The formula, as most of us know, is talking animals, comedy, a known story, and those animals have to be big-eyed furry creatures that are cute and merchandisable. That's about 90% of the films from the big studios. With our feature we didn't necessarily match that formula, and it's really my hope that other animated films don't, either. Will Delgo change the mind of reluctant distributors? I hope it does. Once there are enough films that prove that you can do something out of the norm and make it commercially successful with wide appeal, it will change everyone's minds.

MG: Let's talk about independent filmmaking. I read a quote by you, Marc, stating that "Independent filmmaking offers freedom to break molds and disregard orthodoxy that places limits on creativity." How was this most true during the making of Delgo?

MA: I always thought that independent film meant doing something different, unique and creative. However, that also makes a project more difficult to distribute. We didn't just want to make a film, and then just hand it off to a distributor and say, "Oh, please do a great job!" and then walk away. But that's where the journey for many independent filmmakers ends. Blood, sweat and tears go into your project, but, in the end, if you're lucky to sell your movie at a film festival, it's picked up by a distributor, and then it's all up to them to find your audience and market your film. Making an independent animated film in the U.S. - I know there are some that were shipped overseas to be done, but this may be the first independent animation production in the U.S. and that's independently distributed theatrically on any kind of scale. When you have a studio that you're attaching your movie to from the beginning, then it's not an independent production. If you get involved with a studio after the movie is made, what does that studio care about a film that they didn't put any money into? If they have a $150 million tentpole film four weeks away, which project are they going to devote their best resources to? They're going to get a fee off your success, but would they put their money in? Even if we went with a studio instead of a direct distribution deal, the studio has its own model, its own formulas, and its own partners. Those might not be the best partners for your particular project. In our case, we have an animated fantasy film that's an action-adventure. It's already out of the box in terms of what people might be used to, so if the studio's PR department or the PR firm they hire, or their media-buying firm, or any number of these disparate groups they have internally or outsource to don't appreciate or understand the film or the audience that it will attract -- they aren't the best people to work with. That wasn't something we were ready for. We wanted to not only create a project independently, we wanted to take the "biz" part of the showbiz and market and release this film on our own. We weren't really driving toward a date; we were driving toward a product. We tested the script and the characters, and we wanted to go at a pace that would let us deliver the quality of product that we would want representing our studio.

MG: That's a great deal of dedication to your plan. You've got a great film, an outstanding voice cast, half a million visitors to your site a month, any number of top-flight animators, but you still waited years in order to do what was right for you and Delgo.

MA: We did have a major studio deal at one time. We had the terms sheet and were working on the contract, and the head of the studio resigned. In the process of that, we learned all those things that I just described to you. So, we decided to go and find our own team. We talked with different consultants, we used a wonderful media-buying company that does all the TV buys for the toy market. They understood the age 8-12 group that is the true target for this movie. So there were a lot of things we garnered from our experiences with the major studio, including how to go out and find the partners that we felt were the best fit. We were able to cherry-pick partners that were experts in their respective fields. We learned that it's not just about getting distribution; it's really about getting the best distribution possible. Getting a big, famous logo in front of the movie doesn't necessarily mean getting an audience in front of the film. It may make you feel good and it might be good for press, but it's not necessarily the best thing for the film. We enjoy the process of show business, and that's not only the "show," but also the "biz." We wanted to be fully exposed to both aspects of it.

MG: Warren, let's talk about how the film was created. You've been described as the "digital handyman" on Delgo. What were some of the challenges you had to overcome in animating this unusual film? What were your prime achievements?

Warren Grubb: The main challenge was the scope of it. We wanted to do something on a very large scale with an epic feel; the story we had was about an entire world. That meant creating a large number of characters and having them perform at the level needed for a feature film. I think my proudest achievement was leading a team in creating and rigging a bunch of characters in such a way that we could have a lot of variations without spending the time that we might have using different processes. Due to our technology, we were able to do not just a few major characters but a dozen of them, along with dozens of secondary and tertiary characters based on those characters. We set up a system where you could make the main characters pretty quickly and then build off of those other characters just as quickly.

MG: Tell me about your collaboration with art director Mark Jackson in creating an entirely novel universe and zoology.

WG: That was a lot of fun for two reasons. Not only was there the fact that we had this unfettered freedom to go and take things that you normally see around the world but also take things from our fantasy experiences and things that we read while growing up. Looking at it from a technical standpoint, you could design anything you wanted, but at the same time we had to decide what would be believable in this world. Some of the ideas didn't work. We had an idea for certain characters that sounded really cool when we described them and Mark designed them. They had an internal gas system that made them lighter than air, but when we animated them and showed them to people, they couldn't grasp it, because they expected to see things behave the way they do on Earth. It wasn't believable and it just looked wrong. Sometimes you design things like that in your mind that look very cool, but when someone comes into the theater, it just doesn't translate. So, designing a whole world was a real challenge. None of the creatures or the plants could look like anything you'd find on Earth. We couldn't even use most of the off-the-shelf systems at the time in creating the background assets because they were based on Earthly vegetation. You'd be surprised at how much there is to make. All the things you would take for granted day-to-day in Delgo's world have to be designed from scratch.

MG: Your co-director, Jason Maurer, said, "The best special effects are the ones you never see," because it's really the story that carries a film. How well do think the special effects complimented the story in Delgo?

WG: Since the whole feature is animated, that gave us the freedom to do things without a second thought that you couldn't do in live action - at least without changing the whole method of production. Whether characters are walking down the street or flying, it's the same technology. Our entire feature is driven by flying creatures and magic. The story and the technology come together so well that you don't even think about them as special effects anymore. When somebody looks at it, they won't think, "Oh, it's really cool they made this character fly," they'll say they either hate or love this character that's flying. The fact that we have all these fantasy things at our fingertips to put in there makes the feature more of an adventure.

MA: I think Delgo is unique on many levels. Just with our color palette alone, we're really taking it to extremes. Kids are used to these bright pastels with no use of pure black shadows, which is more of what video games do. It's not something you do in a kid's film, because it makes it look "older" or "edgier." We don't shy away from that. If you look at our film, the saturation and contrast are so much more vibrant, you'll see how rich it is and how different it feels. That comes from the color palette and the use of heavy, rich textures, the medium that we chose for this epic world.

MG: How many full-time employees finally worked on Delgo?

MA: I'd say we had about 300 over the course of the project.

MG: Back when you were initially recruiting for animators, Animation World Network was able to steer some people to you, isn't that right?

MA: We actually got a lot of people through AWN. You have a great job board. There are only so many "watering holes" for people of any caliber to go and get information, and you're among the top of the list, so with a couple of posts -- and then those people know other people too - we got some incredible talent. And it's not just any particular geographic territory; we're willing to take people from all over the world if they qualify, and that's what AWN can do through the web. Not only that, you've been a great resource for information, because we learn things from other users. Sometimes someone on our crew has posed a question only to have it answered by someone on your job boards. It's an incredible site.

MG: Marc, talk about how the novel concept of having the Digital Dailies - which let anyone and everyone watch the development of Delgo online while it was still a work-in-progress - came about.

MA: We had an internally designed program called Storyline, an incredible online tool that a bunch of us collaborated on developing in order to serve our specific needs in our pipeline management. We have a sister company, Macquarium Intelligent Communications, which is involved in web development. With their aid, we created an online tool so that anyone in the office could collaborate with others both in and outside our office. If you're an animator, you have access to the animation section that's security-based. The directors have different access than the lighters, and so on. Each component of the software allows you to see, in a filmstrip format, every shot in the film relative to the shots before and after it within the sequence along with notes from the directors, time-of-day information, what's happening in the scene, what the motivation is for the characters -- anything and everything is on this particular forum, including file nomenclature and everything else that would go into what we call the "bible."

MG: That was important because so many of your employees were on flextime production schedules.

MA: Correct. They could have been in another country or anywhere with different hours. We didn't just pick people up that were outside of the country or even the city. They actually had to come and work on-site for at least three months first, meet the staff and their manager, become familiar with the system, and work together in order to really understand what they were best at and what we could assign them to.

MG: Who made the decision to let the public see the Digital Dailies?

MA: I did... with much consternation. Nothing like the Digital Dailies had ever been done before. We had a bunch of folks that would come into town and they would want to see what we were doing. When we showed them the Storyline system, everyone was so impressed. Some folks even asked if they could purchase the software! But Storyline was written for our particular needs and workflow, and we're not really software developers, we're animators and filmmakers. We thought that since everyone was so intrigued, what if we took a component of Storyline and put it online for the world to see. That decision was a frustrating one because what you're doing is posting work-in-progress, not necessarily what you want the public to see. But there it is, in real-time. Some people didn't want their names associated with work that wasn't polished, or they didn't want their first revision of something seen, and this led to a lot of discussion about whether we were going to do it at all.
    When we went with the decision, it was with great fanfare; during production we were getting up to a half-million visitors a month. Students, other animators, fantasy buffs, you name it, would come to the site and explore it - see the real process of making a movie, not the "behind-the-scenes" stuff cut up and put on a DVD after the movie is already made. You know, only the stuff the studio wants to show you. We gave them reality - the good, the bad and the ugly. At first, we just opened this little portal, but we didn't give out the keys to the door. People could look in and see the work, but they couldn't comment. We were exposed in the sense that the people who were posting internally, well, people knew who they were because of their names. We actually had a couple of folks that we lost because other studios started calling our guys! We changed all of our names to pseudonyms and put them in Victorian parlance. Other than that, the Digital Dailies were a great success, and I wish more studios would do something similar, just open up their doors and not worry about piracy. If someone's going to take the time to stitch together every frame that we're putting online, I'd assume they'd want to pay seven dollars to see the movie!

MG: I've seen early interviews that Jason Maurer and you refer to characters with different names. When in production were the story and characters finally set?

MA: Well, much of the story was already set, but when we went to get trademarks, some of the names were unavailable. Therefore, Princess Zandra became Princess Kyla, King Fahn became King Zahn - and Surella became Sedessa. Surella was actually confused in a focus group with Cruella DeVille, so we changed it for that reason. Between legal issues and focus groups, you wind up getting something different. In other cases, you end up putting names in the script and hope they stick, but they don't. Originally our two races were called the Lockni and the Nohri, but they sounded too similar, so we added an "n" to Nohrin. We also tried to have every main character's name start with a different letter, each character have a different color palette, so if you saw an orange shirt in the distance you knew it was Filo, for instance. If you saw red armor, it was Raius. Blue armor was Bogardus. We thought through all of these little issues as we tested out things to see what was memorable. We are very proud of what we've done, and it's been many years in the making. No matter how Delgo turns out theatrically, we've accomplished our goals.

Archived 2008 Alex D. Thrawn for www.MalcolmMcDowell.net