The 2022 National Association of Broadcasters Show attracted what organizers said was roughly 52,000 attendees – a number that many exhibitors found encouraging for the first NAB in three years and the first held in the COVID era – and featured sessions including a main stage master class on the making of DreamWorks Animation’s The Bad Guys.

Hosted by ACE in partnership with NAB, the session featured director Pierre Perifel and John Venzon, ACE (The Lego Batman Movie, Storks), and was moderated by Carolyn Giardina. Based on the New York Times best-selling book series by Aaron Blabey, the comedic story revolves around a criminal crew of animal outlaws. During the session Perifel and Venzon walked the audience through their creative process, using a scene from the beginning of the film to show how it was developed from storyboards to the final animation.

Besides loving L.A. crime films like L.A. Confidential,Heat and Chinatown, Venzon said he also has a soft spot for The Blues Brothers so when Perifel was pitching the movie to him, “I thought, here was a chance for us to cut this in a way that animated movies don’t get cut.” He explained, “Typically, you ensure that no one gets disoriented and you aren’t aggressive [with the cutting] but from the get-go we decided to Baby Driver the heck out of the thing.”

Both stressed the differences in the process of working on an animated film to that of a live-action film, where scripts are written, scenes are filmed and then the footage is edited. “It’s like modeling clay, shaping it slowly and continually iterating the process,” said Perifel. “Editorial is the hub that gathers all of the assets from all the departments. We start with storyboard, go to layout, to animation, VFX and character FX and lighting and image finalizing and then sound. It’s a very scattered process as opposed to live action where you get the shoot (except for FX) and you have everything at once. “John is gathering all the footage, assembling it together and keeping it updated as more comes in. Everything evolves at the same time.”\

Venzon noted that people often think editing animation is a simple process of piecing together the animation. “And I say to them, no, no, no, we edit the movie first and then we shoot it. “Imagine if you came on two years ahead of time, and you sat with your director and your writer and your producer, and you reworked and reworked and reworked the movie and then only after you were happy with the movie, you would then go out and shoot it? That’s animation editing. The first two years are really figuring out the story.” This reflects the fact that animation is expensive, added Perifel. “You can have two animators working for three-anda-half months to animate a scene,” he said, which means the story and how it will look has to be well established before the animation starts.

Perifel continued, “The creative process that we go through in animation is because we can’t shoot more footage than what we can use. You know, it’s way too long and complicated and expensive to do that. So, we craft it very carefully before we actually do the shooting itself. We refine and refine and refine the script until we’re sure of ourselves. And then we do the execution of it with the animation.” To illustrate this creative process, Perifel and Venzon showed a series of clips, starting with a rough hand-drawn animation of the opening scene.Perifel shared, “Through watching the whole screening you get a clear idea if your story is working or not and in that first we realized we don’t know our characters well enough but we also understood that the story really was about Snake and Wolf and their connection. We needed to expand on this more.”