Paul Villeco
@paulvilleco
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Storyboarder for Nickelodeon, formerly on Steven Universe, Superjail, others. He/him.
Joined December 2018
On Steven U, I once got an angry note from Standards & Practices (aka the network censors) that said "NO SEXUAL REFERENCES!!" It took me forever to figure out this was a response to a note I'd written under a board panel that said "BG is reuse, reference scene #69".
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"Cal Arts style" was The Iron Giant, nearly everyone who made Steven Universe was from New York, what are you people even talking about.
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Skipping the numbers 69 and 420 in my board sequence like the 13th floor in hotels.
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Seems like everyone's favorite kind of media is where they take a cartoon made for kids and remake it as a cynical live action thing for adults, stripping it of its art, style, tone, themes, setting, and characters. It must be everyone's favorite thing because they keep doing it.
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Personally, I believe it's really important that media for kids doesn't invalidate their emotions or tell them they're "bad" for having perfectly normal human feelings like anger or sadness or fear, and I'm dismayed by how many other animators believe precisely the opposite.
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For the record I also like more visual variety in art, it just feels like this is really about something else entirely.
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Here are some boards I did for the #ChangeYourMind #StevenUniverse special. Haven't found a better website yet for this kind of imagedump, so for now, check out way more panels on Tumblr:
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@freshmaker__ I think they have to look through so many drawings that their eyes sort of glaze over, but they pay way more attention to every note you write. I've gotten in trouble just for off-color notes I've written solely for crewmates to see, that would never even appear in the episode.
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I've got some pitches but I don't see a good place to take them so in the meantime I'm drawing for Baby Shark.
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I'm reading all the Steg reactions and cackling like a witch.
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Like everyone I know who works at CN has "opinions are my own" in their twitter profile, but not me. So when I eventually post a 30 tweet thread about why Jotaro is the best Jojo, I want yall to know that's the official view of Cartoon Network and Turner Broadcasting Inc.
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I never got into art with the intent of getting rich or famous. All I ever wanted was to create media that makes an impact on people, that sticks in their brain like the cordyceps fungus, eventually taking control of their central nervous system and.
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Mr. Rogers was able to talk responsibly about "negative" emotions in his show for toddlers, your cartoon aimed at kids aged 8-12 should be able to stray from relentless positivity as well.
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In the fictional world in which Ratatouille takes place, where rats are sapient and capable of understanding the nuances of cooking and sanitation, you shouldn't assume a rat can't make you a delicious meal. However, in the real world, things are a bit more complicated.
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fyi this was the toned down version. The original line I pitched was "that game's fun, but a boy on the cusp of manhood can't spend the whole day whacking it", and it made @ghostdigits exclaim "Paul!" like she'd just caught a pet taking a dump on the carpet.
@freshmaker__ @paulvilleco a growing boy can't spend his whole day whackering.
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Playing Among Us with randos with stupid screen names, thinking "if I get killed by 'Homophobic' I am quitting this game forever".
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"So the moral of this episode is, the protagonist meets a family different from his own and learns that being different is okay.".Then is it okay to make the parents in the family a gay couple?."Of course not.".
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My personal request to fan wikis is when I look up a character name because I'm catching up on a show but forgot who they were between seasons, maybe don't make the very first line I see say "(deceased)".
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Personally, I blame myself for helping to make the first X-Men movie a success. I just wanted to see Jean Luc Professor X, I'm sorry.
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When people say "in human history". "History" means "records of the past", so until we meet aliens literally all history is human. "History" doesn't mean "all of time", history didn't start until like 3000BC, that's why dinosaurs and stuff can be "prehistoric".
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I have to get something off my chest: the most gorgeous, painstakingly animated fight scene is less interesting to me than a simple held drawing of a character showing an actual emotion.
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Trans women are women and trans men are men and the fact that JK Rowling is still so miserable and awful even with fame and billions of dollars and the adoration of children across the planet is just sad.
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Animation artists and critics who want cartoons constantly moving on 1s or 2s aren't that different to me than those people who put the 60 fps smoothing algorithm on cartoons to make them "better". This isn't really about quality, you're just neurotic.
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imo the key to doing good cartoon face "takes" is to shoot for clarity, not size.
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Twitter for me is a game of self-restraint, and every time you see a Tweet from me, it means I've lost.
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In general, people making kids media need to realize that their unspoken, unexamined prejudices about the world will slip into their creation and impact child audiences far more than any patronizing, vapid, bullshit moral cliché.
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I boarded for this episode! Go check it out if you haven't.
EPISODE 2 IS HERE!! This is a big one so ENJOY!! 🤡🎶🦉
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This isn't a reference to any one job I've worked on, it's just a reminder that when the message of your kids' show is "it's okay to be different!" but all the characters in it are the same in some way, you're really just telling kids which differences are and aren't acceptable.
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I love it because there's so much you can communicate with a single expression in the right context. I think you get a lot more out of this drawing than that YD is simply "angry". You get a sense of who she is as a character and how she views others and expects to be treated
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What if we did away with this kind of reductive analysis altogether and just acknowledge that "good" means different things to different people, and people just have subjective but still legitimate preferences for one thing over another?.
Weird how everyone thinks media was good when they were kids. Must be some crazy coincidence.
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@GraceKraft lol they've got genuinely the filthiest minds in the industry. I guess you'd have to, to do the job.
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Logging on to Tumblr for the first time in a while to find out my board panels for An Indirect Kiss got flagged as adult content lol. Thanks for reminding me why I'm leaving your site dudes.
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I have never done a drawing for the purpose of it being turned into a funny meme. In fact, I have never tried to amuse anyone for any reason. Such unserious behavior is beneath me and I hold it in severe contempt.
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Look out, it's the Jerkyman, if he touches you he'll turn you into jerky
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Either Garnet, because her stoic demeanor makes subtle expressions powerful, or Lars, for the exact opposite reason.
@paulvilleco Hey Paul who was your fave SU character to make crazy faces with.
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Sometimes I'll write up a whole tweet but discard it instead of posting, just to deprive you undeserving masses of my wisdom.
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I've been begging people to understand that kids, as a demographic, are as complex and varied in their tastes as the adults they turn into and that trying to figure out what "kids" want is as absurd as asking what "adults" want, but it never sinks in for some reason.
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Went to a life-drawing class for the first time in a long while
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Reading the news about Breonna Taylor today, getting a strong urge to tweet some things guaranteeing I'll never be hired again.
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I'm all about the environment, I don't even own a car. Instead I'm carried from place to place in bed by two burly longshoremen I call my Paulbearers.
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Really sick of hearing people warn that abolishing the Electoral College means that only a handful of cities will decide the election when this is our actual factual current objective reality:.
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I am 30 something years old and I would like to stop having that nightmare where I'm going to fail out of school because I forgot to go to a class.
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At the time, it was planned for Yellow Diamond's resentment towards Peridot to play a big part in the following season, so I even tried to work in some foreshadowing in the implied threat in her eyes, though that wound up being kind of a red herring.
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Just came on to Twitter to see an animation colleague being harassed by someone else in the industry, under his own professional name, and just seriously, wtf.
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Is this actually a rule in our industry? Like every western animated movie I've seen feels like 90% corny jokes and musical numbers as filler. If every scene advanced the plot most of these movies would be over in like 10 minutes.
1-Question to animation industry. We all praise films like Totoro as a master piece, and yet, western animation industry has this religious rule, “every scene must move the protagonists journey forward“ but is it true? Am I the only one who wants more diversity in storytelling?
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With the threat of coronavirus looming, it's important to remember not to touch your own face. Instead, ask to have your face touched by a friend, manservant, or perhaps a kind stranger.
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I've been accused of doing drawings to get turned into memes, but I think a lot of memes just work the same way - articulating a weirdly specific feeling that could never be described with the written word with the same brevity or universal recognition
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@KingOfSafari It kind of bugs me, but it can help sell a contrast between a character being reserved/stoic/unflappable versus really letting their emotions out
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I rarely try to make a face-take "funny", I mostly just want to make sure it communicates what that particular character is feeling. If it's funny, it's because the situation is funny or because you can recognize the emotion. Often, a small expression can be funnier than big
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You (a foolish peasant animator): 3/4 view.Me (sophisticated, enlightened): 9/16 view.
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I understand people's tastes are subjective, what I don't understand is the need to annihilate anything that isn't exactly the same as everything else being made.
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So I guess I'm saying S&P wasn't wrong to be suspicious of us, but still.
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Maybe I'm wrong, but I think you even get a sense of the entire culture she comes from. She's not just mad because her ego was punctured. The very *idea* of a Peridot disrespecting a *Diamond* is morally repulsive to her in a way that's internalized beyond a personal prejudice.
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Sending drawings of depressed old men to my husband with the text "is this funny??".
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Justice for George Floyd. Justice for Breonna Taylor. Justice for Tony McDade. Justice for David McAtee, and justice for all the others. What our government has done this week in defense of these killings is sickening.
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Sending all my Nickelodeon money to furries, commissioning nothing but art of the donkey and elephant political party allegories making love, just the nastiest stuff you've ever seen. It's the only thing that can heal this divided nation.
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Also, for the record, I'm not just talking about obvious identity issues here like LGBT rep. When nearly every single kids' media protagonist is a financially comfortable, relentlessly happy extroverted imbecile, kids internalize *that* message, too.
This isn't a reference to any one job I've worked on, it's just a reminder that when the message of your kids' show is "it's okay to be different!" but all the characters in it are the same in some way, you're really just telling kids which differences are and aren't acceptable.
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I see a lot of big cartoony expressions that, to me, aren't really that funny, because they just did a goofy drawing that doesn't actually mean anything. imo what's funny is communicating a specific emotion or experience in just a drawing.
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In the future, scientists will invent a way to observe any moment in the past through time travel. It will be used primary by teenagers to record your most embarrassing life moments for viral cringe compilations.
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Anyway, sorry to go on so much about my own drawing. I just love expressions in cartoons and I have a lot of thoughts about them.
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"Four movies you're pretty sure you like more than anyone else you know."
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No studio should do something like this ever again imo. This is a terrible precedent to set for movies and the people who make them.
Friendly reminder that the people who complained about the Sonic movie design had all better buy tickets or else no studio's ever going to do something like this again.
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Historically, purple and red were associated with royalty and lavish wealth (in addition to gold, obviously) because of the high cost of making indigo dye. So the colors here do communicate meaning, but that meaning isn't separable from the context of setting and narrative.
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The problem with being a media snob is there's no end point, there's no max level of snobbery. You can recite The Odyssey in its original Greek and some guy will come along tutting at you for not knowing the art of prehistoric hominid rock-beating and make you feel like a chump.
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What if we just had a more varied media landscape where the things people liked about previous decades of animation were still being developed alongside the trends of this decade? What if we didn't just go "oh kids don't want that anymore" anytime something new is successful?.
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I think the flaw in this analysis is that Ghibli movies aren't primarily about the plot, they're about communicating an experience of being in nature or on a plane etc, and the scenes are very hyperfocused towards that purpose.
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It's June, so I want to say happy Pride, especially to our trans siblings. You are loved and you are valid and you have allies who care.
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Her anger doesn't primarily come from a place of hurt [she couldn't care less for a lowly Peridot's approval] but out of frustration that she can't stomp that obnoxious little bug like she would if they were in the same room together.
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Among Us has taught me that I'd be an amazing serial killer but also the first victim in a horror movie. It's also made me hope to Christ above I'm never judged by a jury of my peers. My stupid, stupid peers.
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Warm up doodle. "Sad but weirdly hot old men" is such a difficult aesthetic
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Everyone knows the Italian peninsula is shaped like a boot, nobody talks about how it looks like that boot is tripping over a slice of pizza
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During the last Democratic debates, I scrubbed through the footage to find the saddest frame of Joe Biden getting ripped apart by Kamala Harris and drew it
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Shounen characters will show off how their bodies are covered in scars as if that makes them look cool when that's how I look just from owning a cat.
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Slowly giving my new employer more and more Paul Villeco like boiling a frog, upping the heat little by little and letting them acclimate so they don't even notice until it's too late.
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When the Zoomers finally ban racism I hope they let us keep anti-Italian jokes, because they're really funny.
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I hope the Stone Age societies that will scrounge through the ruins of our collapsed civilization find all these 12 foot skeletons and think giants were real.
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People won't like me pointing this out, but if something you really like gets remade into something you don't, the success of that remake diminishes the likelihood that the kind of thing you like will ever get made again, and it's valid to be upset about that.
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Has anybody written anything about friendships/relationships between people with ADHD and people on the autism spectrum? This is a pattern I’ve seen a lot in my life.
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Signing up for the Pizza Hut rewards program and wondering where my life went wrong.
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To get really real for a moment, if you draw inspiration from any classic-American-style sitcoms, you shouldn't even be allowed in a writers' room, you should be in jail.
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Warm up doodle. Been trying to figure out this OC's face for years. Right now he's looking too much like the kind of mid-tier shounen-villain who shouts "NANI!!!?" when the hero does something humorous
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