Serious Time #47 The Legendary Chuck Jones

Chuck Jones was one of the most famous directors at Warner Bros. for his works in the show Looney Tunes. He has directed more than 200 cartoons for Warner Bros., more specifically 10 films a year and 6 min. per film. Like most Chuck had a process/ structure for the things he did, one of those things were his jokes. Most of his jokes always followed a 2 part structure, the fist part has you make an assumption and the second proves it wrong. The jokes that Chuck made were not the best part of his films though, it was the characters. The character process was a very long one, a good example of this is Daffy Duck. Daffy through the course of 15 years changed from a wacky lunatic into a guy who wants glory and is always the butt of the joke. Another thing a lot of his characters posses is desire. Each character has a simple one which in turn makes the character more vivid. The next step is movement. Chuck says that the story should sell itself by the way it moves over the dialogue of the actual film. One big part of all of Chucks work was discipline. This is what Chuck used to have the film or characters seem repetitive. He had rules for each character, a good example of this would be Bugs Bunny. Chuck said that they never wanted to make Bugs a bully with him picking the fights. So to avoid this they always had someone do vice versa to him, these are the only times that he would fight back. The way Chuck used facial features also evolved over time. At first they were highly exaggerated and would come in short bursts, but eventually that changed to more minimalistic facial expressions to get laughs. Probably one of the things he did the best was his use of human behavior. To get a better understanding of human behavior you have to go to the source of the subject  and study that, not just sit around and and watch movies. In short studying the real world very important in order to gain inspiration. That's all folks!

I really enjoyed this video! It was so cool to have a look inside of the mind of Chuck Jones. Looney Tunes was and still is one of my favorite things to watch on the weekend so this was really cool to watch for me. I never knew or even thought of any of the things brought up in this video til now, I didn't really think that there was such a crazy process for only a 6 minute film. I highly agree with the final message of the video which was the best place to gain inspiration and to learn human behavior is to go out and study the source instead of just watching movies. I just really wonder what gave him inspiration for his films, sadly this is probably something we will never know. This is more relevant to the animation side of digital media. Overall pretty cool video.