Our animation for StoryCorps was covered in yesterday’s New York Times. Read the story here, and don’t forget to turn on PBS tomorrow night to catch “Danny and Annie” on the documentary program POV!

We’ve been busily working away this summer on a series of StoryCorps shorts that will air on POV, the PBS documentary program. Each episode uses original StoryCorps audio recordings, capturing the powerful and poetic stories of everyday people. The six shorts take viewers from an intimate conversation between a boy with Asperger’s syndrome and his mom, to a Brooklyn couple remembering how they fell in love and recognizing that they now must learn to let go, and several other memorable places in between.

The StoryCorps shorts will air with selected feature-length films starting on Tuesday, August 17. We’re working on more StoryCorps shorts that will air on POV in 2011. Many thanks to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, who is funding the series. It has been a dream project!

We’ll share more about the cartoons in future posts, but for now here is the schedule:

August 17
“Danny & Annie”

August 24
“Q & A”

August 31
“Germans in the Woods”

September 7
“The Human Voice”
“The Icing on the Cake”

Writer Adam Peltzman, voice actor Sean Crespo, and producers Karen Fowler, Claire Curley, and Eliza Hart.

Tim and I are both big fans of Conan O’Brien, and with all the hoopla about him lately, I thought it might be fun to show how he influenced this spot.

We’re working on color and background design for our latest project. Our goal is to suggest a lot with only a little.

The stage will consist of abstract backgrounds that have a feeling of depth and light like the one above, and others that incorporate elements that are more specific to a particular environment.

1. Delight, inspire, and enlighten.
Audiences want to see amazingly great stuff that is fundamentally new. Homogeneity, canned ideas, and old ideas painted up to look new are out. Creativity has to be front and center, not marketing. Stories should inspire audiences, make them think, and give them new understandings about the outside world and themselves.

2. Prosumers. Not consumers.
The audience is a partner. The goal is not to extract value from them in the form of ticket sales, useless merchandise, or a barrage of ads. The goal is to create work that brings real value into their lives. Focus on connections, not transactions. Build authentic, honest, open, and collaborative relationships with the audience.

People want to support and spread the word about content they believe in. Enable them to promote, share, and actively engage with work.

3. Trust is hard won, easily lost.
Trust is essential. Audiences should be able rely on ethical production standards, a predictable level of quality, and honest representation. Advertisements should be clearly identified.

4. Be inclusive.
Quality content should be available to all people regardless of age, race, sex, or class. Focus on underserved and ignored audiences. Content should be available at the lowest possible cost to the audience, making it available to as wide an audience as possible.

5. Content must be mobile.
People want to be entertained at a time and place of their choosing. Media in a single form is less valuable. Produce work that can be enjoyed in a theater, on TV, online, or on mobile devices. Give people access to quality content no matter where they are, or how they’re watching.

6. Audience determines value.
The audience is intelligent and connected. By sharing content with their networks, remixing it, and adding information such as ratings, the audience contributes and determines the value of work. Media giants, marketers, and critics are not the arbiters of quality entertainment.

I start by listening to the track in loops of one second. As the loop plays back, I jot down the sounds and mouth shapes being made on a chart listing each frame (0-1, 0-2, 0-3…0-6, 1-1, etc).

The storyboard usually has the major dialogue beats mapped out, so I thumbnail the key frames from that and consider whether any others should be added.

The key frames in my work come from the stress in the voice. Every major action is designed to link up with a point of emphasis in the voice. If I respect each frame and look for ways to ride the flow of the voice track with smaller gestures — the opening and closing of a clenched hand, the raising of the eyebrows, a shift in posture — the end result is so tightly tied to the audio that the relatively low frame rate is acceptable to the eye.

I think of the performance as a kind of choreographed dance. Our characters often talk for as long as thirty seconds without the camera ever moving or cutting. Their performance must be compelling, without gaps or redundancy.

The following video is the finished animation for the sequence shown above. As you can see, I push the finished drawing past what I’ve indicated in the thumbnail. The biggest addition in this sequence was the shifting of his weight and darting looks over the shoulder. I also made an effort to push the composition of the movement, making the action read more clearly through silhouette.

Everyone has different processes and preferences when it comes to planning animation. What are yours? Do you have a frame rate that you swear by? Let me know in the comments!

For optimal playback, download the Quicktime to your desktop.

Documentary audio has been used to powerful effect in all types of animation. John Hubley used improvised recordings of his children as the soundtrack to his Academy Award-winning “Moonbird”. Man-on-the-street recordings gave Ralph Bakshi the realism he was looking for in films like Fritz the Cat. Nick Park’s inventive reinterpretations of conversations with everyday people resulted in the outstanding “Creature Comforts”.

In “Q&A” and “Germans in the Woods”, Rauch Brothers used documentary audio recorded by StoryCorps. The real life stories they capture are incredibly powerful and poetic. It also gave us the opportunity to make a film without worrying about scripts, actors, effects, or music. Below are five secrets to recording the personal, intimate kind of interviews we have used.

TIP: Thanksgiving is the perfect time of year to record an interview with a family member. StoryCorps has a great D-I-Y guide, available in conjunction with the National Day of Listening this Friday.

1. Be Prepared. Have a list of questions written down before the interview. StoryCorps’ question generator is a great place to get started. You should also set up and test your recording equipment ahead of time. The more prepared you are, the better the interview will go.

2. Make Your Interviewee Comfortable. People are often nervous about being interviewed. Try to choose a time and place for the conversation that will put your interviewee at ease. A quiet, cozy room at home often works nicely. Take a moment before the interview to discuss what you will talk about. This helps your interviewee know what to expect. It’s also important to reassure them that there is no way they can mess up the interview or do it wrong. All they have to do is be themselves.

3. Ask Follow Up Questions. Most people are not natural storytellers. We leave out the beginning. We get stuck in the middle and never make it to the end. Ask questions that flesh out the story and create a beginning, middle, and end. Questions that coax out details are also helpful. If the day your mom won the spelling bee was the happiest day of her life, find out more. What was it like standing on stage? What was the word she won with? Who were her competitors? Keep in mind that yes and no questions are a dead-end. Who, what, and how questions work much better. Don’t get hung up on dates and facts. Instead, emotions and feelings will be the most interesting part of the story.

4. Record More Than You Need. Even if your animation will be just 2 minutes long, you should record at least 40 minutes of conversation. You will want to edit your interview down to only the most interesting parts that tell the story in a clear and concise way. When you sit down to do this, you’ll always be better off with too much rather than too little.

5. Enjoy Yourself. Not every recording will work for animation. That’s okay. The process of making the recording itself should be rewarding and fun. You will have the opportunity to get to know someone in a unique way. You will improve your interviewing and recording technique. Relax and enjoy and things will come much easier to you. If you don’t get what you want out of your first recording, try again. Ask about a different story. Choose a different interviewee. Keep at it until you get what you’re after. You’ll learn a lot in the process.