Informed Art - Comic-Con Revealed

Shannon Muir, Stephanie Graziano, Greg Weisman, Tad Stones (image courtesy Kevin Paul Shaw Broden using my camera)

I had the pleasurable experience of moderating a panel at Comic-Con called the ANIMATION PRODUCTION PROCESS.  The panelists with me were Greg Weisman (THE SPECTACULAR SPIDER-MAN, GARGOYLES), Tad Stones (HELLBOY: SWORD OF STORMS, DARKWING DUCK) and Stephanie Graziano (THE TICK, X-MEN: THE ANIMATED SERIES). Greg, Tad, and Stephanie made my job really easy as they were willing to speak at length on the four questions presented to them.

The first of the four questions involved what makes a good producer.  First we broke down for the audience how there are different flavors of producers, from the business to the creative kind, and made it clear all the guests came from a creative producer background.

 Next I posed a question to them about their experiences in the pre-production process.  Pretty soon, my original next two questions started getting wrapped up in the response and we ended up making comparisons between development, pre-production, production, and post-production… which actually knocked out all the rest of my preplanned questions quickly. 

I’m still getting practice public speaking and nervous enough that I’m not always the quickest on my feet, so I had to come up with another question fast.  So I asked them to talk about what they felt their greatest challenge as producers had been.  The production schedule itself was agreed upon to be the biggest hurdle to be faced.

Finally, we came down to the last 10 minutes for Q&A. Just the right length of time, we got in everyone’s questions and practically across the board it was real quality stuff.

Overall, an afternoon I enjoyed and I’d love to do it again sometime.

Shannon