Animator Calls Earthlink Ads a 'Total Rip-off'
February 12 -- For weeks, Slacker director Richard Linklater and animator Bob Sabiston, who just unveiled the non-linear animated film Waking Life at the Sundance Film Festival, have been getting calls complimenting them on their innovative Earthlink ads.
The trouble is that Sabiston, an experimental Austin, Texas-based animator, didn't do the Earthlink ads and is considering legal action over what he calls a "complete and total rip-off" of his style.
Like Waking Life, the ads use "rotoscoping," in which live footage is painted over frame by frame, and both feature talking heads that constantly morph into other things. In the Earthlink ads, a man talking about searching on the Internet becomes a mouse looking for cheese, and a woman who say she hates spam becomes a bee.
Working Together at MTVSabiston had created similar spots for MTV in 1997, under the aegis of John Andrews, who also produced Beavis and Butthead for the music network. When Earthlink wanted ads in that style, Andrews, who is now with animation production company Klasky Csupo but still kept up an "informal representation" agreement and friendship with Sabiston, approached the animator about the job.
Sabiston initially turned the project down because he was too busy completing Waking Life for Sundance. He says that Andrews pestered him and his team of animators to commit, but then he didn't feel right about it and changed his mind. "I started getting nervous," says Sabiston of working remotely with the Los Angeles-based company. "They wanted us all to have cell phones and wanted to outfit my studio with a cable modem. I didn't want my software getting out."
Sabiston has created his own rotoscoping software to give "the animation that floating look" but hasn't yet patented it — "that would cost $25,000," says the animator.
"His sense of proprietariness toward rotoscoping is sort of laughable," says Andrews, who proceeded without Sabiston on board. Andrews says Sabiston "pulled out of the project in an untimely fashion that was extremely damaging. If I hadn't done the spot for Chiat/Day [the ad agency Earthlink was working through, which had contracted with Klasky Csupo] they would have gone to another animation house and they wouldn't have used Bob and they [certainly] wouldn't have paid him."
