Since I mentioned "repurposing" in my last post, I'd thought I'd talk about it as I recently (and accidentally) found a NEW instance of it being done with my work!
When I designed the art, everything was on separate layers (I mean everything: Shaggy, Scooby, Daphne, Velma, Fred, Aztec God, Mayan Temple, Alien Ship, Bermuda Triangle dotted line, etc, etc). You did this so that anything could be adjusted easily for different formats. You also see this being done currently with book covers and their audiobook releases.
It's like a digital version of Colorforms (if you are old enough to know what they were!) where you have a background plate and can places the elements anywhere you like to form a new image.
As Scooby was on a separate layer, they pulled him from the original digital file and then moved his one eyeball so that he would be looking at the viewer. Easy Peasy, and done in under a minute!
So they used my Scooby, and then found the rest of the Gang from other files and used them (Shaggy's jaw is off though, and the coloring work on Daphne, Velma, and Fred is slightly different), so it makes me think that all the members of the Gang were pulled from early DVD covers. The background plate art of the haunted house has been used many times for many different things! The first time it was used was for a DVD cover (could be wrong) and then it got absorbed into the official style guide for Scooby. The little ghost above the logo could be an element pulled from the "design elements" section of the Scooby style guide as well.
Every four-five years they re-release the original animated TV series again and they needed a new cover to freshen it up. In an effort to save money, they give the designer access to the archived files and they pull various aspects from various sources to create a new image. They probably had this new release ready to go in maybe a couple weeks (with all the approvals and sign-offs needed) and it cost them nothing beyond the designer's time, which was probably a day's work.
Repurposing is a staple of the marketplace and it can help a corporation save some money during lean times! Warner Bros already paid for the art and they own it, so why not reuse it again! Makes perfect sense, but it does hurt us artists in the end as they don't get us to do new work. Not that corporations care, it's all about the bottom line.
Repurposing of OLD art only hurts me in my effort to make NEW money. I'm not complaining, but this is one of the main issues why getting new work can be really slow.
I myself repurpose some of my older work! You just saw an example of it with my "Frankenferb" post last month! It was an old piece of line art from 2010 that I colored a month ago and freshened it up to make a new, cool design! My new Winnie the Pooh tribute piece was created using aspects of my original Pooh art I did back in 2006. That worked out great as it tied together my professional time with Pooh with his 100th Anniversary!
While I keep my own archive of all my art, my Scooby stuff is sitting somewhere at WB waiting to see the light of a new day in the marketplace. The same with my Disney stuff! There's a LOT of art that I did that I would love to see released again! While there's no new money from it, I can use the new release of it to promote myself and try to get new work from it. New releases of my older stuff keeps my name out there. As the kids say "my content is fresh, baby!"
Repurposing. While corporation may love it, and it has its benefits, we creatives tend to dread it.
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