One of the key problems within the studio was the layout department. The studio had never had a 64 show series to do. Everything up to that point was half hour specials or the Raccoons shows. The studio had split in two just before I had gotten there. Half the crew went and formed a new studio called Hinton's to produce the Raccoon series and the other half stayed to do the Teddy show.
Many of the new people in Layout had little or no experience doing layouts before, some were fresh out of college and a few were right off the streets with no animation experience at all. The layouts we were getting in posing were pretty bad. I had noticed that they had a very poor system for tracking and handling scenes within the show. I spoke to a few of the layout artists about it but they really didn't know what they were doing.
I went and spoke to the owner of the studio and told him about my background with Nelvana, Hanna-Barbera, etc. and told him how they needed a system to handle the flow of scenes both within each show and from one show to the next. They had no reuse system that overlapped into subsiquent shows. So if you were in Gimmick's house in show 3 and then were in it again in show 7, they would redraw the layouts without considering the reuse of those backgrounds from show 3. It was a complete waste of effort and all it required was some organization.
I offered to help out and was eventually put in charge of the layout department. Come to think of it now, show 29 was probably the last show I did animation on before moving to the layout department. That may be why I kept these poses.
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