00:12Hi, I'm David Feis, and I'm a director at Sony Pictures Animation.
00:15I grew up near Sacramento, California.
00:18The first time I remember drawing was when I was five.
00:20I was in kindergarten, and I did a drawing that my kindergarten teacher made a comment
00:24on to my mother.
00:25He was like, he looks like he wants to be an artist.
00:29It really did make me want to be an artist.
00:31I was interested in animation.
00:33I was curious how it was done.
00:34And then one day in the closet, I discovered an old 8mm camera.
00:40It was my parents' camera they had bought when I was a baby.
00:43And I opened it up, and the instruction manual said it had single frame for animation.
00:47I thought, that's it.
00:48So I bought some film and started moving my drawings around with the camera.
00:53It was like magic to see my drawings moving.
00:56It had like two different worlds that I was in.
00:58And I would do animation.
00:59And then separately, I would paint and see a photograph.
01:02And I'd want to make it as realistic as possible.
01:04I think in a lot of ways, I think most artists evolve that way.
01:08They start off trying to be a real fine artist, and then they evolve, and they start getting
01:11more abstract, and their style comes out.
01:14I'd been making films all the way through my teens.
01:17And I wanted to come to Los Angeles and work in the industry.
01:21My aunt knew that I wanted to work in the industry, and she happened to have an acquaintance who
01:26knew somebody who worked at Hanna-Barbera.
01:28So she made arrangements so that I would go to Hanna-Barbera and meet the recruiter, and
01:34brought my projector, projected it on the wall.
01:36He called Iwo Takamoto, who was like the main designer and creative force at Hanna-Barbera
01:43at the time.
01:43He was the guy that created Scooby-Doo.
01:46And he called him in.
01:47I showed him my movie.
01:49He said, well, we should hire him.
01:51And it was a surprise, but they hired me that day.
01:54And within a week, I believe, they brought me down from Northern California, and I was
02:00working.
02:00When they hired me, I was the youngest person at Hanna-Barbera.
02:03When I first started, I worked with this fellow named Ken Mundy.
02:07Ken had done a lot of television commercials, but the most famous thing he had done at that
02:10time, I believe, was the main titles for Wild Wild West in the 1960s.
02:15And I was his apprentice.
02:17And he was this older fellow who had been working in the industry for many, many years.
02:21But he was very kind to me, and he saw that when I first started animating, I didn't know
02:26how to animate.
02:27He was showing me exactly how to do it.
02:28The first day of work, he showed me how to flip the animation.
02:31And I'd worked for about a year and a half, I think, at that time.
02:34There was an opportunity to follow some Canadians who were opening up a subcontracting studio
02:39to work for Hanna-Barbera in Toronto.
02:40So I went with him with an opportunity to be a full animator.
02:44Well, I did work on Scooby-Doo series, Flintstones, different incarnations they had.
02:48And then while I was in Canada, Bill Hanna was looking for some young animators to go
02:53to Spain for another subcontracting studio that he had set up years before.
02:58It was a feature, so I took it.
02:59Bill really was a mentor to me.
03:01He was a legend.
03:02He was legendary, but he was a regular guy.
03:04And he actually worked with the people.
03:06He wasn't like standoffish.
03:08He was there.
03:08He was like right there in the trenches with us.
03:10And I respected that.
03:14Deke was a company that did Inspector Gadget.
03:16But I started working with them.
03:18They had me working on it on ALF, an animated series.
03:21I ended up doing the main title for ALF that got an Emmy nomination, actually.
03:27I had an agent at the time, and he had heard about Sony Pictures looking for people.
03:32It was a new division.
03:33So I went in for an interview with Sony Pictures Animation.
03:36And they hired me.
03:37Yeah, it was like I never worked as a head of story.
03:40They hired me as head of story on what ended up being open season.
03:45At the time, they didn't have a director.
03:46They didn't have really any designs.
03:48They just had this concept from Steve Moore.
03:51And he had sold to them the idea of Boog and Elliot.
03:54They had me doing like setting the tone.
03:57I was actually setting the tone like doing story sequences.
04:00But early on, I did create a sequence that introduced Mr. Weenie.
04:04He wasn't German at the time.
04:05That was something that we had developed in open season one.
04:08But that was the beginning of Mr. Weenie.
04:10This opportunity came up for, they needed a director.
04:14They wanted to do four shorts that would appear on the DVD of Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2.
04:19And I was recommended for that.
04:21And then they had me in the interim boarding on Hotel Transylvania 2.
04:24But then open season Scared Silly became available, and I was asked to direct it.
04:30I did enjoy very, very much working on open season the first time through.
04:34And there were a lot of ideas that I remember coming up with that I really would have liked to
04:38have seen.
04:39But when this opportunity came up, I remembered them.
04:42It's like they came back flooding back.
04:43Sony Pictures Animation gave me an opportunity to really make my own vision.
04:47And it will be a different take on the open season series.
04:51Well, it's important that open season Scared Silly is accessible to very small children.
04:56Because I have a two-year-old now, and it's important that I do something that he's going to be
05:01able to enjoy with his older brothers, too.
05:05Making an animated movie, you use what's called Scratch Tracks, where you get, like, usually it's just other artists who
05:11come in to do voices.
05:13And so developing this movie didn't have anybody to do Elliot or Mr. Weenie.
05:19So I discovered one of the young people that work here at Sony Animation, and he works in IT, I
05:25believe.
05:25Bill Townsend, who's only been working here, you know, about a year and a half, did the Scratch voice for
05:30Scared Silly.
05:31And he did Elliot, and it was pretty good. It was actually awesome.
05:34And Mr. Weenie was hilarious. He did this German voice.
05:37Something bad has happened! Something really, really bad!
05:41We ended up hiring Will, Bill Townsend, to be our Elliot and to be our Mr. Weenie.
05:45He's really fresh, but really honest.
05:48It's a really sincere portrayal of these two really important characters.
05:52To come back to open season after a gap of really, it was about nine years, I guess.
05:58Yeah. It was awesome, actually.
06:00I mean, it is a fun job.
06:01It's like, honestly, I've really never felt like I've had to work a day in my life.
06:05Because this is what I did as a teenager, and I'm still doing it.
06:08I mean, it's a really good day in my life.
06:23J الع
Comments