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Before a show can be animated and filmed, the characters, backgrounds and props need to be designed, scripts need to be written, and voices need to be recorded. When these things are done, a storyboard (kind of like a comic strip, which shows what happens in a episode from start to finish) can be created, and layout drawings are made. These tell the animators exactly where everything is positioned in each shot. On this page, layout director John Stevenson (who we all should thank for being the creator of one of the show's finest characters, Urpgor), describes how the production of season one began in London about thirteen years ago...((note – animation terms that you may not have come across before are explained in a glossary at the end of this page)) "At the time we made The Dreamstone ('89) there were quite a few big American animated movies being made in London and it was very difficult to get people to work for us (the movies paid better and were more glamorous), so our show was definitely a long way down the list for most people. In consequence, Phil [Robinson] and I ended up doing most of the work ourselves in a tiny little studio in less than lovely Dalston Junction. Phil was the animation director, I was the layout director but in practice we did key animation, clean up, inbetweening, whatever was needed. Phil's wife Kaye was production manager, my wife Carol Hughes was the colour stylist, and Trevor Ricketts was all round pencil guy on layout and storyboard. Along with a couple of assistants, that was it for the The Dreamstone production team. Martin Gates, Sue [Radley] and Bengt [Odner] all worked out of Bengt's house near Regents Park, but all the preproduction drawing happened in Dalston Junction." Animating overseas TV animation is routinely done in the Far East (usually somewhere like Korea, or in this case, the Philippines) because of the staggeringly low cost of labour. However, conditions for visiting Western production teams are not exactly ideal, as John recalls... "We then sent the storyboards and key layouts to the Philippines to be animated in a giant 1500 person animation factory that cranked out Saturday morning shows for the US...in stinky old Manila, (which, it must be said, makes Dalston Junction look like Mayfair by comparison...). Ah, the glamour of animation. Phil, Kaye, Carol and I were in the Philippines for about nine months to oversee the production. There were about 10 different shows being made in Manila at that time (with each show having around thirteen 23-minute episodes to be animated) and The Dreamstone was the cheapest show being animated there, so again, we were last in line; in fact, we were so low on the totem pole that Phil and I didn't even qualify for offices, we worked in the corridor! "It was about a million degrees centigrade, the power was always going out (and with it the AC), there were rats the size of Hondas running around, the food in the canteen was inedible and Faster, cheaper, better Although animated films or TV shows are often seen as art, it's worth remembering that animation is a manufactured product which can be badly affected by tight budgets, lack of time, and human error. Here, John gives us an insight into how The Dreamstone came to look so damn fine, given the limited circumstances of its creation. "...If Phil and I hadn't done all that work in London and the Philippines to try and make The Dreamstone good I doubt whether as many people would remember the show so fondly. Consider this: your average Hollywood animated movie runs about 80 minutes and usually takes hundreds of people between three and five years to produce at a cost of between 40-100 million dollars. A typical season of 13 half-hour episodes (or 23 minutes, minus commercials) goes through a big animation factory like the one we used in the Philippines in about nine months. That's almost 5 hours of animation being produced in less than a quarter of the time it takes to do a big animated film, for a fraction of the cost. There is no time to make things look as good as you want, you just have to try to catch the really horrible cock-ups. Often there isn't the time, money or will to do even that. I can honestly say that the only reason The Dreamstone season one looks the way it does is because Phil and I bust a gut to make it look a good as possible, because we cared." In conclusion... Well, what can I say? We all appreciate it, John! Everyone who visits this site knows what a quality piece of work The Dreamstone is, and let's never forget that it didn't end up that way by sheer good fortune, but through an incredible slog. And remember boys and girls, next time you hear someone scoff about how TV animation looks rough around the edges, tell them to go out to Manila and see if they can do it any better! Glossary
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indescribable, there was a devastating earthquake in Manila in the middle of production, and it was a constant fight six days a week from 8am 'till 8pm to try and catch and fix all the mistakes, redraw the horrible animation, make sure the characters looked the way they were supposed to and so on and so on... and yet it was fun. Because we had no money we were left alone, and Phil and I worked to make it as good as possible – even if that meant re-doing the substandard work (and most of it was substandard) ourselves by working overtime in the evenings and weekends. So it is gratifying that all that effort in some way is appreciated by people remembering the show fondly."
Cel - Short for "celluloid" - actually a thin sheet of acetate which characters are drawn on top of, which are then painted on the cel's reverse side. Relatively little animation is done using cels these days, as it's much easier to draw and colour characters using a computer.
