John K's pitch at Dreamworks

Wow. Even in the highly unlikely case that this is even remotely true, he should have been able to quickly adjust his pitch to state the "arena" his characters operated in.

Say I'm invited to pitch something to Dreamworks and they give me this arena crap:

Me: Oh, okay. Duck pond.
Exec: Duck pond? With ducks?
Me: Yup.
Exec: Ducks have been done to death.
Me: Not like this.
Exec: ORLY?
Me: YARLY. Behold!

BAM. The pitch commences. *rolls eyes* Hell, even if they STILL don't want to see character stuff, I could talk about the setting, the color pallette, the other fauna and flora, my thoughts on voice actors. All of it.

You should be able to approach your work from a number of different angles. Even a seemingly dumb brainstorming session such as that can be navigated with a little patience and creativity. Execs are notorious for being stupid, but great things have been made anyway.

Frankly, it sounds like a bunch of butthurt to me (can we say that here?). :B

EDIT: Wow, didn't realize this was an old thread. XD
 
Old thread, but still an interesting topic.

Dreamworks as of lately has been picking up lately, they've made a lot of good works and had a lot of talented people by their side.

http://tobyshelton.blogspot.com/

This guy has become one of my favorite storyboard artists, and he's worked at Disney and Dreamworks.

So to hear John K. act as if people like this hate their job and that animation companies don't know how to make an animated film is really insulting to the people who work there.

I've been looking up a bit of the process on Dreamworks after seeing Megamind and if I were an artist, I'd be really interested in working there. A lot of their work is art and idea heavy and just seems to have a lot of creative spark to it.
 
When I think about it though, it may explain why in spite of the fact that they'be attracted some great animators over the years, even letting them sometimes do OUTSTANDING short film work (yes, it was caps good,) they've yet to materialize much feature work from that staff. If the whole game is the arena, and you can't easily define the arena (because it's about the story,) you've created an environment where you might have top tier talent doing McDonald's tie-in commercials for what ever your current movie is.

Actually, I saw just that when I visited Dreamworks in 2006: lovely studio, professional atmosphere, and geniuses making tie-in ads. This is in stark contrast to AKA Cartoon which I visited later that year, where I saw geniuses being allowed to pretty much do whatever they wanted. Dreamworks might have had a lovely free cafeteria for all of it's workers, but AKA is easily the place I would've rather worked as an animator if I had the skills.
 
As a further insult, I at one point when John said people hated their jobs (I think he was talking about Animaniacs at the time), someone stated that the artists enjoyed working on it, and John just brushed them off as "the medicore artists who were lucky to have a job."
 
John K is a narcissistic megalomaniac, there is no doubt about that. So people should always take everything he says about others with a rather large grain of salt since he always consider himself as utterly superior and therefore likes to portray others as complete eeediots with zero talent at whatever it is they do.

(But of course, as one must always state when criticizing Mr. K, his annoying personality doesn't in any way diminish the fact that when it comes to making traditional cartoony slapstick, he just might actually be the most talented guy alive today.)
 
Isn't it funny how sometimes we only hear the negative stories about what's its like to work for Dreamworks? It makes you wonder how much validity they have.

I think it's like Rashomon, where we're only hearing one person's side of the story. For example, Patton Oswalt's story about doing some punch-up gag writing for Over The Hedge, while funny, sounds rather unbelievable.
 
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