By Peter Tonguette
Daffy Duck and Porky Pig might not sound like the calmest, most congenial, or most coherent movie stars to work with, but for picture editor Nick Simotas, they were a dream come true.
Simotas edited the new Warner Bros. Animation feature film “The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie,” in which filmdom’s most noted duck and pig tandem intervene in an extra-terrestrial invasion. Directed by Pete Browngardt, the movie incorporates silly science-fiction references, a supporting role for Petunia Pig, and, most significantly, a subplot involving bubblegum.
Simotas, though, wasn’t turned off by the wild antics of his leading players. A veteran of the “Looney Tunes Cartoons” series on Max, the editor has long relished animated projects for the opportunity offered to contribute to all phases of the filmmaking process. “You’re a part of molding the storytelling from the very beginning,” Simotas said. “Even though editorial is called ‘post,’ we’re kind of ‘pre’ and ‘post.’”
Meticulously rendered in 2-D hand-drawn animation, “The Day the Earth Blew Up” honors the heritage of the foundational Looney Tunes shorts by Chuck Jones, Bob Clampett, and Friz Freleng. Through his expert pacing and sense of comedy, Simotas moves the story along with precise comic timing sure to please Looney Tunes buffs and amuse viewers of all ages.
On the eve of Ketchup Entertainment’s theatrical release of the movie (March 14), CineMontage caught up with Simotas, who discussed the pandemic-era creation of the film, the influence of his son and daughter on the making of the movie, and the joys of working with Daffy and Porky.
CineMontage: How did you end up editing animation?
Nick Simotas: It happened by accident. I went to Cal State to study film, but my whole plan was to work in live-action. I grew up loving “In Living Color” and “Saturday Night Live,” and I just wanted to do sketch comedy. During my senior year, one of my professors, Shelley Jenkins, who I made a short film for, told me, “Hey, I really liked that project you made. Your comedy stylings are very similar to Steve Oedekerk.” He was a friend of hers. She said, “I could set you up with an internship at his studio.” I had an internship on an animated series that Steve was doing, and because I knew After Effects and I knew Premiere, they threw me into post. I helped out with animating and editing here and there, and then that internship turned into a paying job within three weeks.
CineMontage: When did you realize you wanted to stay in animation?
Simotas: I’ve always enjoyed animation, but I never imagined a world where I’d work in it. Once I was working in it, it was so much fun. I almost might have been star-struck, because I remember that on [Oedekerk’s] “Barnyard,” I got records back and heard Rob Paulsen’s voice and Cam Clarke’s voice. They voiced the Ninja Turtles, which is what I grew up watching.
I also realize that we can sort of help how a project is directed, how the story is told, from the very beginning all the way through the end. In live-action, you get the dailies sent to you and what you’re given is from a script that’s already established. With animation, we get boards, we work with board artists, and we can even tell them, “Hey, I would love a medium shot for this.”
CineMontage: How did you get involved in the “Looney Tunes Cartoons” series on Max?
Simotas: I was brought into Warners to work on “Teen Titans Go!,” which is a straight-to-video feature that they did. “Looney Tunes Cartoons” was running behind, so I helped out on a few animatics. Then their main editor left, and I joined full-time. I couldn’t believe I was working with Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny.
CineMontage: Do you have to have an appreciation for these characters to do your job well?
Simotas: I do think so. Every single crew member on “The Day the Earth Blew Up” grew up watching these characters and knows everything about them. Every Friday, Pete Browngardt, our director, would gather us together and put on one of the old Bob Clampett or Chuck Jones Looney Tunes shorts. We would all sit around and have a discussion about what about these was unique. Every single crew member is in love with these characters, and we wanted to treat them as they should be treated.
CineMontage: You made the film during the pandemic, right?
Simotas: The first boards were handed off to me in December of 2020. They were working on it at least six months’ prior, doing designs and story. I sat down at the final mix in February of 2024.
CineMontage: How did that impact your work?
Simotas: Every edit session was over Zoom. Early in the pandemic lockdown, I bought a Blackmagic web presenter that allowed me to seamlessly stream one of my screens through Zoom as though it was a webcam. It was awesome because those things were sold-out everywhere. After the first year, we got used to it. It was January of last year that Pete and I sat down for the first time in an in-person edit session.
CineMontage: Walk me through the stages of your work on the movie.
Simotas: The first step as an editor is to get the storyboards and the voice records. We put them together to set what is essentially the blueprint of the show. We time the boards out with the dialogue, adding sound effects and music, and just making the scene play. Sometimes it can be very loose, but most of the time it is very, very, very dialed-in to the point where a single board panel might only be two frames.
CineMontage: How can you determine the length of a shot down to a frame or two?
Simotas: In everything that you watch, there’s a rhythm, especially in comedy. It’s almost frame-specific when a gag hits or when a fall hits. As an editor in animatics, you’re setting the pace of literally everything, even the speed at which someone walks from one side of the room to the other. A lot of the time, I use sound to help me with that. I might put in Foley of someone just walking through a room. If I think it sounds like a good pace, I time the boards to that.
CineMontage: Did you and the director have a lot of back and forth at this point in the process?
Simotas: We did a sequence at a time, which is anywhere between two and ten minutes, depending on how it’s broken up. The nice thing about being in this phase of things is that I can take an animatic and if I have an idea about something a character might say, I can jump on my microphone and add a line or sketch a little mockup board to fill that place and pitch it to the director.
CineMontage: What’s the next leg on the animation journey?
Simotas: Then it goes to animation, and then we wait. Once it comes in, we drop in the animation to the same timing that the animatic was to make sure everything lines up. We sync it all together. We do some nips and tucks. Sometimes you get the animation back and we say: “Oh, yeah—that could’ve been tighter.” You might pull some frames here and there to clean things up. The nice thing about 2-D animation is you can add a hold. If a character does a motion and you want to hold the last pose of that for an extra six frames, you can do that. It’s not even noticeable, but in CG or live-action, it is very noticeable if you hold frames.
CineMontage: At this point, is it an opportunity to look at the whole film anew?
Simotas: We are coming into it completely fresh, and there might even be times where we say, “That joke isn’t landing.” We might even rewrite something at that point, but usually it’s pretty minor. We might draw a new board, send it back to the animator, and have them redo a shot to fix what we’ve now changed.
CineMontage: Eric Bauza voices Daffy and Porky, and Candi Milo voices Petunia Pig. Peter MacNicol, Wayne Knight, and Laraine Newman also are among the vocal actors. At what point are you working with their voices?
Simotas: During the animatic phase, we don’t even have the actual voice actor in. We use a lot of scratch dialogue. I have a version of the film where the entire film is voiced by just me and one of the board artists. It’s not financially efficient to keep bringing in voice actors when we want to change one line here, change one line there. Once the animatic is locked, that’s when we bring the voice actor in. If, down the line, we rewrite once color animation comes in, we’ll bring them in again but usually save all that for just one major pickup session.
CineMontage: You’ve worked in all forms of animation. What difference does it make to a project to work in 2-D hand-drawn animation?
Simotas: There’s more nuance to it. It’s funny, because hand-drawn animation does lend itself to imperfections. You can see it watching this movie. Maybe every little mouth shape isn’t exactly to sync. Sometimes you watch those old Disney films and the characters might look a little floaty. It isn’t super-snappy, but it has such character to it that you don’t really get in CG animation.
CineMontage: Nick, you have two children. Did they help put you in the right frame of mind while working on “The Day the Earth Blew Up”?
Simotas: They did. A lot of animation is inherently family-oriented. I have worked on more adult animated projects that I don’t let my kids see, but the nice thing about having them around on this movie is that I used them as a gauge: Is this working or not? Because the movie was done largely at home, I showed them every animatic I was working on and I got their reaction. There was one version of the gum monster sequence that absolutely terrified my son when he was five, and I was like, “I think we need to dial this down.”
CineMontage: I take it that your kids are Looney Tunes fans?
Simotas: They are. Because of this movie, and because they’ve been around it so long, they legitimately love Porky and Daffy.
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