Droids Layouts

The Droids series started production in 1985 after 3 episodes of the Ewoks had been completed. I was on the Ewok crew for the first 3 shows then switched over to Droids for show 1. Ewoks was ok but I really started to hate drawing trees all the time so Droids was a nice change. Our quota was 10 layouts per day. A layout was considered one 12 fld background and whatever number of poses were required to show the action per scene. In some cases it was only one pose while in other more complex scenes there might be 5 or more. A pan background was measured by length in fields. I usually planned out my days by separating my scenes into "easy", "medium" and "hard" shots. 6fld close ups were "easy", 8 - 10fld medium waist shots were the "medium" scenes and 12fl or pans were "hard". If a 6fld "easy" shot had a bunch of poses (more than 3), I shifted it up to a "medium" shot.

I typically worked from 9 - 5 each day with a one hour lunch so it was 7 hours to do 10 scenes or about 40 minutes each. The easy scenes might take about 30 minutes each, the medium 30 to 60 minutes and a hard scene might take 60 to 120. With this in mind, I might start off the day with 4 easy scenes taking 2 hours, then a medium scene for an hour. That got me 5 layouts before lunch. Then after lunch I would tackle a hard scene or two for two hours, then end the day off with 3 medium shots. This was never consistent and would often be balanced off by a day of really hard shots getting maybe 4 done in one day and then balancing it off the next day with 16 easy and medium shots.

I found that if I separated off the technical stuff from the artistic, I could get a much better work flow going. In those days we had to create the folder from a blank, cutting and pasting the storyboards, then filling out the external labeling, making a layering folder, field guide, then pose sheets with field guides and finally the background and any over or underlays. Each of these elements had to be labeled as you can see in the examples posted. Sometimes, I would spend the first day doing nothing but all the technical labeling and field guides so that each scene folder had every sheet of paper in it, just without the drawings. I'd separate the scenes into the three categories and set them on my desk in tree piles. The next day, I'd come in and just start plowing through the scenes. This tended to make things go a bit faster and smoother for me. I'd often go over quota and get paid "overtime" for the extra scenes done each week.

On one of the shows (Episode 3 "Race to the Finish") I was given the entire race to lay out. I spent the entire weekend doing all the tech stuff and then came in on Monday and pounded out 64 scenes in a day. Everyone was amazed. I claimed 54 overtime scenes and the supervisor got really mad and told me never to do that again.

The Droids shows were very scene heavy. They averaged about 450 scenes per show (22 minutes) which works out to close to 3 seconds a scene which is pretty fast cutting.

Each story arc was 4 episodes long. We also did a 1 hour show (45 minutes) at the end called "The Great Heep".