Ren and Stimpy question

[Frank]

Why did Games Animation outsource the layout department on the Ren and Stimpy Show? Was it a way to speed up production? I notice the draftsmanship dropped after Season 3. The characters looked so much better in Season 3. The animation in Season 4 gets more inconsistent.

 

[Classic Speedy]

From what I understand, the crew tried to keep up the same attention to detail in layouts after John K. was fired, but it was too time consuming on a TV production schedule, hence the need to outsource layouts on some episodes.

You'll also notice season 4 is when they started using studios other than Rough Draft as well (technically they started doing this in season 3 with a couple shorts), probably for the same reason, to spread the work around to get the episodes out.

 

[AllenJ]

Part of the problem was that Nick ordered 20 episodes for season 4 because they wanted to wrap up the show as quickly as possible, which resulted in many episodes being rushed through production or farmed out to other studios, often with no real director to speak of (in many cases, the director credit simply went to whoever was doing the heaviest lifting). Bob Camp and Bill Wray have even admitted that this caused the quality to suffer, and that many of the show's final episodes were essentially "headless chickens."

 

[Leviathan]

Layout was director-by-director at the end. Mike Kim, Chris Reccardi and Tom McGrath were willing to take on layout by themselves as basically unpaid overtime, and Steve Loter used his clout as the show's layout supervisor to have layouts for his cartoons done in-house.

Others weren't afforded that luxury.

Even with a lot of cartoons that had in-house layouts, there was corner-cutting. I saw a layout for "The Scotsman in Space" that was an enlarged storyboard thumbnail with Post-It note corrections pasted on.