STUDIO CITY : Youths Take a Serious Look at Cartooning

Before 14-year-old Arika Lewis and a group of 20 other young people from Watts’ Nickerson Gardens housing project visited the Nickelodeon animation studios, they had no idea how much work goes into creating the cartoons they watch weekend mornings.

“This lasts only 11 minutes for all this paper?” Arika asked production coordinator Kim Karnatz, while thumbing through a thick black binder of drawings from an episode of “Rocko’s Modern Life.”

Indeed, the binder was only a sketchbook for a cartoon that requires 24 drawings for every second of screen time.

A staff of 30 people in California and a battalion of Korean animators spend nine months completing each installment.

These and other mysteries of the cartoon trade were revealed to the group of 9- to 14-year-olds during a Wednesday field trip sponsored by the Los Angeles City Camp, an offshoot of Cities in Schools Inc., which has developed programs aimed at broadening the experiences of inner city children.

“The goal is to enlighten them and empower them,” said Brian Selem, an L.A. City Camp board director. “Every month, we have something so that they can see what else is out there. You open a door to them and when they see what’s in there, they never forget it.”

At first the group at Nickelodeon’s Studio City studios was restless as they sat through an episode of “Rocko’s Modern Life” in which one of the characters, a cow named Heffer, has its brain sucked out because it sits too close to the television.

But once they got a chance to meet the artists and actors who actually put the cartoon together, they were hooked.

Students jammed into a closet-sized room to see background artist Adriana Galvez demonstrate an airbrush and expressed awe when color supervisor Nick Jennings showed them an animation cell in which a painting of Chokey Chicken impaled on the Eiffel Tower was flawlessly melded with a photograph.

Organizers of the trip hoped that the students’ enthusiasm will translate into a better understanding of how they can use their talents in the business world.

“We want to give them a sense that there’s a whole different way of life out there . . . just give them a sense that they can do it, too,” said Kate Seitz, Nickelodeon’s supervising producer.

Perhaps the most important lesson about the realities of TV production came when animation manager Michele Jabloner asked the students what Nickelodeon could do to make their shows more interesting.

“Let us make it and let us be in it,” shouted Shadonna Jones, 13, clutching a stuffed doll of Stimpy, the dim-witted feline who co-stars in “Ren and Stimpy.”

Jabloner’s answer marked her as a master of entertainment industry diplomacy.

“My agent will call your agent,” she said, ushering the group on to the next part of the tour.