by Greg Condon
When Joe Gall began his career editing animated TV shows, the industry was on the cusp of great change.
When he started in 1976, animated shows aired almost exclusively on Saturday mornings and were still shot and edited on film. Throughout the 1990s, as editing flatbeds and moviolas were replaced by digital software, animation programing shifted as well. As more outlets for animation appeared, shows expanded to airing daily for after-school markets and primetime for adults.
Gall saw it all: His career spans cels to CG as an editor on such fondly remembered shows as “He Man,” “Tiny Toon Adventures” and “Justice League Unlimited.” Joe worked nonstop for nearly 40 years, developing close relationships with top animation directors at studios like Filmation and Warner Bros. As an animation editor myself, I have seen very little documentation on the process during those analog times. I was curious to discuss his career as well as the workflow in the pre-digital age.
CineMontage: How did you get started in animation editing?
Gall: I started out as a driver for Filmation studios. They needed someone to take scripts and storyboards to various places around Los Angeles. This was in 1976 and after 9 months of driving, they asked me what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. I just graduated from Cal State Northridge with a religious studies degree and was thinking of becoming a minister but kind of souring on that idea, and so I said, “You know, I’m wide open!” I was offered a job in either the Editing or Camera department, and I chose editing.
I was no more interested in animation than the average person, although I had been into comic books since I was 8 years old. I became an assistant editor, then a year after that I started editing shows because there were so few people there. I think there were only two other editors. The first show I worked on was called “Quackula,” which was a short-lived series. At Filmation everything was in house; the writing, the layouts, animation, camera, sound. All of our recording sessions we would put in 35mm magnetic film and we would edit the recording sessions on film actually.
CineMontage: I am curious about the workflow in television animation before computers. So you were cutting on moviolas?
Gall: Absolutely, even all the way through the “Batman” series at Warner Bros we were still cutting on film. I didn’t use a flatbed, I used an upright moviola. At Filmation since it was shot in house, we would get it literally one scene at a time. It would take a week or two per scene. We would get the show in little by little and have to assemble it. We would store each individual scene in film boxes and when we got enough of it in, we would assemble the show, sync it up with the sound and the dialogue and then throw it up on a moviola. Then the producers and directors would come in to watch it and we’d talk about it. I would sit with a director and cut the show down because they came in 30 seconds to a minute [too] long. That extra footage is what enabled us to trim or rearrange scenes. And that was a fascinating thing to do on the moviola, on Avid or Final Cut Pro, it was much easier in many ways. Then you were actually cutting the film and putting it in a trim bin, so it was more labor intensive.
CineMontage: So if they were like, cut the last 10 frames, you literally cut them off?
Gall: Yeah, and then they would say “don’t like it” [so] we would have to put it back together with splicing tape. I was working on something called a work print. As we would edit it we would call retakes. There were always things wrong with scenes. Things painted incorrectly, animated poorly, characters being on the wrong levels, there were many levels of the animation cels and the camera person would often just lay them down incorrectly. So there were a lot of retakes. Then after we got done editing and putting in all the retakes, it would be sent to a negative cutter who would then take our work prints and assemble her negative to match our final work print. And the work print along with all the audio tracks would go to the dubbing stage where it would all be mixed together. And that was all done on film, it was an incredibly tedious process of just boxes and boxes of reels of film for all of the various sound effects, picture and dialogue tracks that we’d have to send to the dubbing stage.
CineMontage: A lot of organization required!
Gall: Yes, and as a driver I familiarized myself with a lot of that because I’d be the one hauling all of those reels to the dubbing station in Hollywood.
CineMontage: When assembling these shows, were you using temp music at all?
Gall: No, it was just picture and dialogue. The directors and producers could imagine the music themselves, they didn’t need to have it cut in at that stage, nothing like that was done until the show was edited completely. Nowadays it’s a bit different. They do something called a Leica reel or animatic in which sound effects and temp music are put in.
CineMontage: Yeah, a lot of my job is creating temp sound. The clients like it and it helps sell the storyboard.
Gall: So a lot of your editing is done in the storyboard stage?
CineMontage: Yeah, that is like 90% of the editing, by the time we are getting animation back it is just trimming it down so it hits the runtime and updating retakes. You would start editing when you got the finished animation?
Gall: Yes, we would get the colored film and that would be the first thing I would see. Well, sometimes I would slug a storyboard; I don’t know if the term “slug” is used anymore. You get a storyboard and you would “slug it out,” meaning you’d determine how long all the action should take on a particular scene. They didn’t need to see storyboards put on film, they would just look at it, slug it out and that was it.
CineMontage: Would they pin them on the wall?
Gall: No, just flip through pages. They would say “oh that looks good” and the animator and director would time it. Later in my career I did a lot more editing in the storyboard stage. I retired 10 years ago, a lot has changed even in the last 10 years.
CineMontage: So you moved from Filmation to Warner Brothers ?
Gall: Well, I had a short stint of only four months as post-production supervisor at Disney when they were making “The Little Mermaid.” I didn’t know what the hell I was doing so I was quickly let go. I don’t even know why they hired me. They wanted someone with a sensibility of getting things done quickly and since I was coming from TV animation, they thought that would be good… but it wasn’t.
So that was four months of hell, then I went back to Filmation in ’88 and they went out of business in ’89, but then Warner Brothers opened up their TV animation department. All they had prior to that was their classic animation department. I was fortunate to get hired immediately as their first editor. They told me it would be a 6-month gig and 25 years later I retired.
That was from 1990 to 2014. It was a good run. The first series was “Tiny Toons,” next was “Batman” and then “Animaniacs,” then it all becomes a blur.
CineMontage: These are all the shows I watched growing up. Did you feel like that time was special when you were working on those shows?
Gall: I remember saying to Tom Reugger, who was the producer on “Tiny Toons,” in the middle of an editing session; “You realize this is a new golden age?” I knew the quality of what we were working on was so far above anything I had ever worked on or was airing at the time. The shows were in a league of their own. They would entertain all of us workers.
CineMontage: Why do you think the quality improved so much at Warner Bros.?
Gall: A lot more money. And at Filmation, nothing was animated overseas, it was all done in house. We did one series that was animated overseas and we only sent it because we ran out of workers. At Warner Bros., everything was shipped overseas and the budget on an average show was much greater than the budget on an average “He Man” episode. And there were a lot of really talented people starting with someone like Andrea Romano, our voice director, she was just outstanding. I remember my first day at Warner Bros., just hearing the “Tiny Toons” recording sessions, I thought wow, this is quite a bit above what I used to work on at Filmation.
CineMontage: Did you have more freedom at Warner Brothers to play around in the edit?
Gall: It was about the same. We ordered more retakes, if we didn’t like something. So the looks of the shows was really consistent. At Filmation we would basically have to live with what we got. We did a lot of manipulating on the moviola too, moving things around. It’s not like now. So you are on Premiere?
CineMontage: Yeah, it seems Premiere and Avid are the industry standard these days.
Gall: I started in Avid and then we moved to Final Cut Pro, which I ended up liking more than I would have expected. I found I was able to move very fast and do things really easily on it.
CineMontage: Hard for me to imagine the pre-computer days.
Gall: We sure were limited. If we didn’t like something we had to order a retake. We could only do so much by trimming or extending. If we thought a scene should be longer, we’d take yellow film leader and splice it onto the scene to extend it to whatever length we thought the scene should be. So there would be all this yellow leader inside our work print, awaiting the fully animated retake. We would tap our feet, go “ boom, boom, boom, that’s a good length.” And I would put that much yellow leader into the reel, and give the timing to the director so he could retime and it would be reanimated and reshot.
CineMontage: I just read how [the filmmaker and editor] Dorthy Arzner would measure the length of a kiss on film; if it was the length of her forearm that was long enough.
Gall: It’s amazing. And the old cliche of holding the film up to the light, that’s what we did! Or hold it over the lightbox on our work table. It’s fascinating to think that I did that from 1977 to 1995, so for almost 20 years I was editing on film.
CineMontage: How was the transition into digital editing?
Gall; It was scary. I didn’t know if I would have a knack for it. Everyone at Warner Bros. was really patient with me and the other editors. And I seemed to pick up on it pretty quickly. Not as well as someone who was 10 years younger than me who really picked up on it quickly. Though for some reason I still was in demand among the top producers there so I must have been doing OK.
As much as anything, which you’ve probably discovered, a producer wants to feel comfortable with the editor and sometimes that feeling of comfort is of equal importance to the skill. I know a lot of editors who I felt were much more skilled than I was, but I was always employed and a lot of them weren’t. I was very fortunate. There were many editing sessions where I could tell the directors just wanted to talk. Shoot the breeze for a while and weren’t too concerned with getting their work done.
CineMontage: I always felt in editing sessions with the director, you are a little bit like their therapists sometimes.
Gall: Or a bartender. Absolutely, and I took many therapy classes because I wanted to be a therapist early on, so those classes really came in handy. Sometimes they might request something I felt was really a mistake. I would have to find some way to say ‘are you sure you want to do that?’ Without offending. Eventually you get a relationship with a director where you can say almost anything but I always knew who was boss. And that was them, not me.
CineMontage: It seemed like throughout your career, you just worked nonstop. Were there times when a show would wrap and you would be out of work for a stretch?
Gall: After my very first season in 1978, I had a few months off. And that was the last time I had off. When I look back at my charmed life, how can I ever allow myself to get depressed? And I was aware of it going through it too. And to be able to retire on my own terms, when I wanted to. I saw the editing world becoming different and I didn’t particularly like it. So after I worked on my last series, “Beware the Batman,” I bowed out.
CineMontage: How did you feel it was changing?
Gall: Where editors were called upon to do sound effects and music in the animatic stage. And a lot more was being done on the computer in areas that I really wasn’t very good at. I saw that pretty soon I would no longer be looked at as the golden boy and I best quit while I was ahead.
CineMontage: Guess it is a double-edged sword with working digital: you can make changes quicker and easier than ever before but that can lead to an endless amount of changes?
Gall: They can do anything, they are basically God and that was very different than when I started. So it was moving in that direction and fortunately I worked with very reasonable directors that recognized when good enough was good enough. Which some don’t. I have had short stints with the other kind and I never enjoyed that. So I was very lucky, who I worked with and the shows I’ve worked on.
It was a real family-type atmosphere at both places. That was the other thing that had stopped. More and more of the editors’ doors were closed all the time and each production was like its own little studio. Things were shifting. It was becoming a different place than I was raised with.
CineMontage: Do you have a favorite project you worked on? Or one you felt you contributed to the most?
Gall: I think “Justice League Unlimited.” When they started introducing almost every character in the DC Universe. Being the comic-book geek that I was, I couldn’t believe my good fortune in doing this for a living! And to be talking with directors and animators who were equally geeky as I was as a kid. For the first time in my life I could actually talk to someone about it and I was getting paid nicely to do it.
My main contribution was making the director comfortable and confident that what we were doing was good. That when we were done we felt that what we had improved what we were looking at.
Greg Condon has been a Local 700 member since 2022.
