Steven: I'm on the phone with Brian Oliver, who was the director of animation at Kids' WB
back in the day, and just so you know what that means, he didn't necessarily
work on any particular show, but what he did actually is he produced a lot of the
bumpers and interstitials that you would see during commercial breaks on the
network, as well as a few other things that we'll talk about possibly. In any
case Brian, why don't you start? Where are you from, and how did you get
into video production as a job? Brian: Well I'm originally from Kentucky-I grew up in
Northern Kentucky. [I] went to college in a small Catholic college back in Northern
Kentucky, studying computer science and art. They didn't have a computer
animation degree at that time, because frankly in the 80s computer animation
was so nascent that it just didn't exist. It was too expensive.
You had to have a supercomputer to do it. I was very much interested in effects-
visual effects-Star Wars changed my life. You know, like every kid on the planet I
wanted to move to Hollywood and do special effects, and ultimately somehow
managed to kind of pull it off. [I] moved to Los Angeles in 1989 right out of college,
and started doing work for Disney. I did restoration work on three movies for
Disney: Cinderella, Pinocchio, and Bambi. I was doing court cases-I recreated auto
accidents for a while. Learning 3D, then in '96 I was contacted by a friend who
said, "oh, you know Kids' WB-Warner Brothers Network-they they need people that can
do compositing and animation. You should look into it."
So, I hit up a couple of people and got an interview and suddenly I was
freelancing and then building logos and whatnot. Moved all the way up to
director, and I've been here for 20 years now. Steven: Yeah, we'll get into some of
your more modern work in a little bit, but let's talk about some of those...
those bumpers and other segments. First of all, there were a ton of
these, and they usually involve various characters from the various shows.
Sometimes they would even have different characters from different shows or even
new audio that had to be recorded. Can you sort of briefly describe what
the process was going from initial idea to a produced segment?
Brian: Normally, back in those days we had three main people on the development, which
would be a writer/producer, who was the same person, and his or her
editor, and then somebody like me on the graphic side where we would have to
figure out, you know, if we could accomplish what they were asking for.
They'd come up with some wacky idea where they wanted Ash or, you know, a
character from Batman or something interacting together, and we'd have to
find that footage in the existing animations of the shows. We'd digitize it
and then we'd trace the characters frame by frame to isolate them and put them
into different environments so we could get them to talk to each other. Then we had
people like Rob Paulsen and Maurice [LaMarche] and Sherri Stoner-all the Animaniacs, the
different voices-Mark Hamill came in a couple of times to do Joker voiceovers
for us. They'd come in, they'd record the audio [from] the scripts. We'd marry it up with
the video, and there you go. Steven: How many people-hours do you think one of these
would take on average? Obviously it would depend on the level of production, but on
average what do you think? Brian: Well, the Pokemon master song that we're gonna get
into in a bit, like I said on my YouTube channel, that's about 80 hours of
me all by myself just cranking, and then adding on to that the amount of time it
took for a designer to do the front-end and the back-end. On an average spot, though,
like the average what we would call a campaign, there might be between probably
four or five people on the managerial side of it-you know, producer/executive
producer types-and then anywhere from one to ten different animators
dealing with it, just depending. I mean, I had some campaigns where we'd spent
thousands of hours on it, and then other campaigns where you just kind of crank
it out really fast. So, just depending on the [???]. Steven: What are some of the more
interesting or some of your favorite ones that you worked on? Brian: Well, anything
with the sock-the Kids' WB Sock. I don't know if you guys remember that, but I
actually-I didn't create the character-a really talented writer named Bryant Sage [?]
created the character. I created the design of the character and then all the
animation. So he... the sock had a summer party at one point
on the beach. I think it was called "Surfs' Up with the Sock", and then we had a
couple of Christmas parties, and it was just a filthy tube sock that would
interact with all of our characters. It was really funny. I mean people got a
kick out of it, and some of the spots I actually...my kids
were between like five and ten at that time, so I was actually able to
incorporate my own children into some of our spots, which was a lot of fun, and
some of their friends too for that matter. We'd a round up a bunch of
kids and have them come in, and we'd shoot [video of] them like either for their mouth motions or
to get their voices and then integrate that into the cartoons as well. Steven: Really
awesome when you can do stuff like that. Brian: Yeah it was great.
Steven: And it seems like...we discussed earlier-before the interview-that some
of the Pokemon stuff was actually a little bit easier to work with than some
of the other shows might have been. Why was that? Brian: Well, as anybody who watches
Pokemon probably realizes, there's not a lot of animation going on there most the
time. A normal second of animation-for cartoon animation I should say-is 24
frames a second. For television, it's 30 frames a second, meaning that there's 30
individual frames that comprise one second of what you're viewing. With
Pokemon, they often would only give you one or two unique frames for every
second. So instead of having to trace 15 frames of animation, we would only
have to trace one, which was awesome because it was a huge time saver, and
then we would go back and replace the mouths and stuff to get the lip-sync to
look right. Steven: Okay, well, let's talk about one of these in particular. You mentioned
it earlier it's "Master Pokemon", not to be confused with anything from the 2.B.A.
Master album-this has nothing to do with that. This was part of a
series called "Top Toons Tunes". First of all, how did that that series
sort of get started? There were a couple other ones, right? Brian: Yeah, we had a couple of
Jackie Chan [songs], we had a The Mummy....I'm trying to think of what...I guess it was The Mummy.
But one of our writer/producers-and I'm trying to think of who was actually
doing this stuff at that time-forgive me for
forgetting. We had like ten people and they're all really talented,
and so they've have somebody write a song for one of the shows, and then we would
cut together animation to make a music video out of it, and those were...some
times they were packaged and sent off as "Top Toons Tunes", but they were also
repackaged as "Toonami Tunes" I think it was. So, in the later days of
Kids' WB, when we were doing a lot of Toonami stuff with Cartoon Network, there
was a crossover where we repackaged all that stuff, but that particular one we were
getting ready to launch-our launch is in the fall-always like the first week
of September. So, they wanted something big and wanted something special. Allison [Koi Howard]
the singer of that particular song, had come up with the music for it and the
lyrics and all that, and they said well we need it, we want it for launch, and I
basically had a week to produce it. It was crazy, it was a long week,
but they wanted something-the thing that was fun about it for me was every
frame from when that ball leaves Ash's hand...as soon as it leaves his hands it
actually becomes a computer generated 3D ball that you open up and fly into. We
wanted to have like, you know, this interior universe of the ball and what
did that look like, so we found...I had help finding all these different
arenas that were in the shows themselves. I tried to build environments
where the arena-which was a two-dimensional cutout
basically from the animation for the show-and try to put it into this 3D
world so that it didn't look like it was just a piece of flat artwork. Then we
had all those characters-you know there were probably...I don't know how many-30
or 40 different characters that had to be roted [rotoscoped] and traced and then dropped
into that three-dimensional universe. It was quite a project, but it was one it's
one of my favorite projects of all time simply because it just went down so fast
it just had to be there, had to be done, and I think people like it.
Steven: Oh, definitely. It is obviously somewhat obscure because it's never been like a
DVD extra or anything like that, so it's been kind of hard to track down until
somewhat recently, but definitely impressive and a great piece
of work there. Brian: Thank you. Steven: All right, well, you know you're still actually in the bumper
production or animation production business, and people may be wondering,
"well gee, what happened after the WB and UPN merged together into the
CW?" Why don't you give us a little bit of an idea of what's happened since then?
Brian: Well, Kids' WB actually turned into-I think it was 4Kids
CW-we maintained Kids' WB for about a year or two into the CW, and then
they decided they weren't going to keep that property anymore, so they ended up
shutting it all down, which for me was a very massive letdown
because I love cartoon animation- I love working on that kind of stuff.
These days, though, I'm still doing similar work-it's just it's more special
effects driven. I do a lot of stuff like taking out wires, you know
removing cables and stuff from shows like The Flash and Arrow and iZOMBiE,
Supernatural and anything that's on the CW at this point at some point comes
through my office for something. Generally it's cleaning up footage,
removing wrinkles from people's faces, things like that and it's it's gotten
more challenging because we're starting to do a lot more effects-type stuff,
whereas it used to be more just graphics-you know, motion graphics. Steven: Well,
yeah it never ends, so I would say that you're probably going to keep having
things to do there, but if folks want to know more about you or some of your
other work, where can they look for that? Brian: Well, they can find me in two places. My
YouTube channel is xandad, and I noticed when you guys were talking
about it on the on your music broadcast- you're kinda like [imitates Steven having difficulty pronouncing it].
The background is my son's name is Alexander. When he was born
and I needed a video game character [name], I just needed to name one of my characters
and I like, "well, I'm Alexander's dad," and that's how my
YouTube [channel] came into being, but then I also have my website
which is the same thing- xandad.com-and you can see all kinds of
stuff that I'm working on there. I've got animation, I've got a lot of 3D
printing, I've got music, I've got writing, I've got photography. I do a lot of stuff.
Steven: Awesome. Love hearing these stories-this is no exception.
Alright, well, thank you very much Brian. Been great having you on. Brian: Thank you for
...thanks for looking me up. I'm glad that people are paying attention. Steven: Not a problem.
This has been Steven Reich from the Poke Press Studios in Madison,
Wisconsin, talking to Brian Oliver who worked on many of the bumpers of Kids' WB
back in the day.
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