Show 027 – Ken Duncan, Part Two

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“To me it’s not about moving stuff around. It’s about thinking about a personality within a story.”

The conversation with Ken Duncan continues. In this second part of the interview, Ken talks about some of the his earlier films at Disney. Then the conversation focuses on his personal approaches to acting and his general workflow for animating productively.

[audio:http://media.libsyn.com/media/animationpodcast/AP027.mp3]

Continue for Show Notes, audio file download links, and comments…

Get the MP3 here: Show 27: Ken Duncan, Part Two
(25MB, 54:20 minutes)

Or get the enhanced version playable only with Quicktime, iTunes, or iPods.
(Includes chapter breaks, pictures and links in addition to the audio.)
Get the enhanced podcast here: Show 27: Ken Duncan, Part Two
(26.4MB, 54:20 minutes)

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SHOWNOTES

00:00 The Intro Voice
00:05 Sponsored by –
00:21 Introduction – Duncan Studio
01:03 Coming to Disney from Bluth
03:35 The experience of working at Disney
05:09 Rescuers Down Under and meeting his wife
06:14 Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin
08:33 Pocahontas and supervising Thomas
10:04 Dialog recording sessions
11:06 Figuring out acting
17:02 Boleslavsky – Acting: The First Six Lessons
21:06 Choreography of characters – The Odd Couple
24:02 Finding meaning in performances
30:10 Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold LLoyd
35:31 Animating in red for clean-up pt. 1
36:58 What is a breakdown?
37:57 Animating in red for clean-up pt. 2
39:55 A process to animate a large piece of the film
41:41 Discipline to rely on knowledge and not technology
44:12 Animation: a commercial art with finite schedules
47:07 Inspired by other actors’ approaches
48:57 Animators who lead the artform
49:59 Animation is a crazy idea
50:40 Conclusion
50:51 Question about show length
51:09 Feedback info/Voicemails – Email Clay – Link to Voicemail – Link to Michael’s blog
53:55 Sponsored by –
54:06 Closing

Comments

18 responses to “Show 027 – Ken Duncan, Part Two”

June 9, 2008

Michael Woodside

Awesome Clay! I’ll be listening to this as I make some new pieces for my reel today. Can’t wait!

Reply
June 9, 2008

ross

Hey Clay, great show…….in response to your question about the show length, for me personally i like the longer version’s.
Cheers :o)

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June 9, 2008

Andy Seredy

Clay,
Man, your pod cast kicks the proverbial butt!
Thanks again for giving me something to listen to while I push frames.
Cheers,

Reply
June 9, 2008

Nate

As everyone else… I’m laying down my key poses while listening. I think I’ve listened to every single one atleast twice by now. Just wanna say thanks again! I don’t know where else I would turn for a constant stream of inspiration to animate to. You the man :~D

Reply
June 12, 2008

Ratul Sarna

Hey Clay!
Thanx for another great podcast. This has become one of my favourites (if not The favourite) because of the theme of the conversation- performance. Thanx a lot for bringing to us, the knowledge of the greats.
And I also prefer the longer versions 🙂

Reply
June 12, 2008

ed

Looooooooooooooooooong, play it long!
Keep ’em coming! – loving the monthly format. Cheers!

Reply
June 14, 2008

Hugo Orellana

Hey clay, glad to see you are doing more episodes i sorta lost interest after there was sort of a drought on episodes back around December i think. glad i checked back to see if there were more episodes, these new episodes are so good keep up the great job and best wishes.

Reply
June 15, 2008

Dan Keller

Hey there Clay!

I too am enjoying the new format. It’s great to hear how Ken Duncan mentioned the part in Toy Story, where Buzz realizes he’s not a flying toy. That scene is probably one of my favorites!!! Keep up the fantastic work Clay, and I look forward to the next one!

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June 15, 2008

Thomas

Hey Clay,

It was awesome hearing myself on your podcast (Duncan, part ONE). Currently I do not have a web page, but I will post it once I do.

Regarding the length of shows, I personally like the longer ones. It’s much better to have a couple of shows in my library than several per interview.

Two questions:
1. You talk about how someone animates a certain amount of “feet” of animation. What does that mean?
2. (I don’t know how to spell this) What does zerox/xerox/zerocs mean?

Thank you Clay.

Kindest regards,
Thomas.

Reply
June 17, 2008

Mark Mayerson

Thomas, 35 millimeter film passes through a projector at 90 feet a minute, so 90 feet equals 60 seconds. In this interview, Ken mentions that he was animating 15 feet/week at the end of Tarzan, which means that he was animating 10 seconds a week. Just multiply the number of feet by 2/3 to figure out the number of seconds.

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June 19, 2008

Kyle Maloney

Whoops, I left my comment on length on part 1 instead of 2. you can read that one for what I had to say. In short, I prefer them longer.

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June 19, 2008

Thomas

Mark Mayerson, thank you. Dale Baer also talked about it in his interview and it all makes total sence to me now. Thanks.

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June 24, 2008

Paul N

How could more info be a problem? Yep, chalk up another thumbs-up for the longer format.

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June 29, 2008

PEter

thanks for another great show. no problem with longer shows here. I listen to the Hollywood Saloon regularly and they’ve talked about how initially the podcasting community were adament about not crossing the half hour barrier and they’ve certainly proved that wrong with epic shows reaching up to 4 hours in length. Smodcast is another podcast that often goes beyond the hour mark, ditto with filmspotting. As long as there’s the material to fill a show I’m all for it. Thanks again, I really appreciate these (I’ve listened to the whole library nearly a dozen times).

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July 5, 2008

Floyd Norman

I was able to listen to the interview on my iphone while flying to Pittsburgh last week. Great stuff as always, Clay. Sure makes the time fly past. More! More!

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July 14, 2008

Uros Setina

Thomas, to xerox means simply to photocopy a peace of paper. Xerox is American company which started producing photocopy machines. AFAIK they were the only ones for some time, so the expression “to xerox something” stuck in the common language. I believe this expression is not used outside of English speaking countries.

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September 1, 2009

OIivier L.

what is the name of that Charlie Chaplin documentary Ken was talking about again?

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August 28, 2011

Naruto Shippuden

I was able to listen to the interview on my iphone while flying to Pittsburgh last week. Great stuff as always, Clay. Sure makes the time fly past. More! More!

Reply