Steve Burns Quotes

'Alice' took over two years to make and took a great deal of planning, obviously much more than usual. We spent so much more time prepping the film, and that was unique for us.

'Iron Man 3' was very educational. There's a train that starts moving which already has so many moving parts, and it's a constant process of animatics and storyboards and consulting meetings, and it's a very mechanical process once the script is written. It's sprawling, and they're throwing money at it to get these things accomplished.

When you make an animated film, you make it over and over and over. We almost do ten versions of the film.

Making a cartoon occupied usually about three full days, two spent in labour and one in removing the appearance of labour.

The great thing about the animation process is that is goes from, I write the lines, it goes to the actors, the actors bring a whole world to that, they bring the characters to life, then it goes to the animators, then it goes to the editor who cuts it together, and then you screen it and it goes back through the system again.

As far as doing a TV special, I would have to be in control of it. I'd want my own team of animators to work on it.

I had a job on a Spike TV show called 'Fresh Baked Video Games.' I was the animation producer/kind of a writer, but I couldn't get anything through.

Most TV shows are writing the next episode while you're directing the one you're doing, and they're trying to figure out what they're going to do, and they're putting it all together.

I like pre-production and post the best. I don't like shooting at all. I find it grueling and tough, but I love post and the whole process of seeing the film finally come together. You start ironing out all the rough spots, and the really bad bits you just throw away. So from day one of post to the last day, you see nothing but improvements.

I worked in the story department for years on 'Cars' and 'Toy Story 3.'

If you would ask me what my ideal process is, I would say, long pre-production, long production and long post-production.

Now, I just made an animated movie a few years ago, 'The Tale of Desperaux', and that had twelve hundred shots in it. Twelve hundred CG shots is a pretty big plan.

Animated films are so precisely engineered - right down to forming lines of dialogue with words pulled from several different takes - how do you translate that spontaneity from the live-action to the digital realm?

In live action movies, you just hope that everything works. Because the actor may had a bad morning and doesn't play good, or accidents happen continuously. Many things contradict what you are trying to say. But in cartoons, nothing contradict what you want to say.

I got involved in script development from the beginning. It was nice to see how a film gets made right from the beginning. It was quite hands-on for me.

It feels like animation has a little more independence than traditional sitcoms ever did.

Pre-production and post-production is something that I've never been exposed to. I was pleasantly surprised that you could accomplish a lot during pre-production.

I always thought the writing process for movies and TV shows was just a blueprint. The making of it was the thing.

The question I get more than any other is, 'What does it mean to direct an animated film?' And the reality is that it's not a whole lot different from what you do in live action.

One of the tricky things with animation is, because we spend four years on the movie and everything is done so methodically day by day by day, it can be a struggle to have the finished film feel spontaneous and loose and naturally occurring.

Gravity Falls' is a very hard show to produce.

When you're working on a film, it's not always finished visually, what you're looking at.

There's a process in the movie industry in both live action and animation called development hell!

A movie goes from several stages, from idea to script. As you continue shooting, you will make some adjustments. You're constantly adjusting. It's like a piece of music. You're constantly trying to make it better.

As a filmmaker, I'm very collaborative. I don't pretend to know everything that is needed to make a movie. What I like to do is get together with a group of people, starting with developing the story and bounce around ideas.