Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

– Having posted a piece about John and Faith Hubley‘s Cockaboody yesterday, I thought I’d take the opportunity of showing off another older piece from Aug ’07. This walk cycle was animated by Tissa David. The drawings are partic-ularly rough – her first shot at the walk designed for her eyes only.

Tissa is careful not to use too much paper. Hence she reuses old paper for her very rough preliminaries as she figures out her animation.

It’s frequent, when visiting her work space, to see lots of pages featuring characters on both sides of the paper upside down as well as sideways. She doesn’t often let these rough roughs out of her hands before she throws them out. I guess I was there at the right time and talked her into giving me these drawings.

She animates the walk, here, on top pegs bacause that’s all she has left of space. Tissa nomally works on bottom pegs. Actually, since this is going to be a sliding cel, it would have been done top pegs anyway.

Georgia, the younger girl, leaves the bathroom and moves to the floor to play with a doll (whose head she accidentally pulls off).

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(click any image to enlarge.)

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The walk is heavy and a bit flatfooted. She doesn’t come down on her toes but plants the entire foot.

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Her arms are high because, a baby, she’s still a bit off balance.

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Tissa’s walk cycle on three’s
Click the very lower left to put the QT into motion.
Click the lower right to watch it a frame at a time.

- John & Faith Hubley‘s short Cockaboody was a gem of a film culled from the vocal play of their two daughters, Georgia and Emily. I’d posted the storyboard for this back in July 2007 in three parts:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

The film was developed within the Hubleys’ animation class at Yale, and the school shot a short documentary on the making of the animated film as it progressed. This documentary was an absorbing look, not only at the film in progress, but at the process of animation as well as the methods of Hubleys as their work grew. In Quest of Cockaboody premiered Dec. 13, 1973, and here’s the invitation that was sent out for the film shown in conjunction with Cockaboody, itself.

Front (Click any image to enlarge.)

Back

I’ve only seen the documentary once. There must be a copy floating around, but I haven’t seen it in 35 years. Needless to say, it’d be interesting to see it again.

Cockaboody was animated, entirely, by Tissa David. Here are some of poses she used in prepping the film for herself.

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- Dig was a half-hour Special that was produced by John and Faith Hubley for CBS Saturday morning fare. It was supposed to be one of three programs on the earth around us, but it ended up as the only one of the three to have been completed.

The lion’s share of the animation was done by Tissa David and Johnny Gentilella. Phil Duncan, Vinny Bell and Chuck Harriton also did their share of the work.

The story was about a boy and his dog that accidentally get into a construction site and soon find themselves talking with a rock.

The rock takes them underground to a musical journey through the geology of the earth. The music and songs were by Quincy Jones. Jack Warden plays the lead rock, Ray Hubley was the boy, and plenty of others from the Group theater (such as Morris Carnovsky and Maureen Stpleton) did other voices underground.

Tissa handled most of the boy and a couple of the rock songs and conversations. She also helped construct some of the characters doing models. Here are some of the rough models she put together and worked from.

This was one of John’s earliest drawings (post storyboard). It was
probably done while in conversation about the character with Tissa.

This is Tissa’s first version of the boy.

The dog also takes shape.

Here “Iggy” the rock is formed.

- Let’s take a look at the scene in Hubley’s Everybody Rides the Carousel
wherein the young lovers have had a spat and push on to have a romantic scene despite the fact that neither of them wants to do that.

They’ve argued over the girl having cut her hair without telling the boy. He’s annoyed and she laughs at him. They push on to a frothy conversation. Both put on masks to continue the conversation while the inner characters
are annoyed and have an inner monologue. They get to the point where they can’t take the masks off and end plling away from each other.

I’ve gathered John Hubley’s layouts for this sequence. Tissa David animated them. You’ll note that the pencil numbers are a scene breakdown done in Tissa’s handwriting. The very loose drawings were done with a sharpie or pencil. The pencils would have been done while in handing it to Tissa during the conversation. They’re to delineate some point in greater detail for her.

I’ve also pulled some frame grabs so you can see how it was finally rendered. The coloring was done on vellum and shot bottom light. No more than 3 levels were used (including the background.) Tissa, aside from concerning herself with the dramatics of the scene, had to watch that the characters didn’t overlap. More complication for her.

(Click any image to enlarge.)

By the way, this was Meryl Streep’s first screen performance.
Charles Levin, another NY character actor, played the boy.

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Here’s the park bench.
A quick rough copy by me to Tissa of John’s Bg LO.

John’s model of the boy’s head for Tissa.

John Hubley’s models of the Girl’s heads for Tissa.

a rough drawing of the girl by Tissa.

Johnny (Gentilella) Gent had the hardest time on the Letterman series done for the original Electric Company. He could never get the characters and kept trying to add 3D form to the 2D characters that John Hubley had created.

It was my first job, and I was in awe of every animator that walked through ________A very early John Hubley model of Spellbinder.
the door. We had 2½ months to do
all the artwork on the 20 spots that were 2½ mins each. A total of 50 mins in 10 weeks. (That’s about right these days for a 30 second spot!)

I did all the assisting, inking and inbetweening and had to do it quickly. (I estimated about 18 secs. per drawing. The game I played with myself to keep up was to keep one eye on the drawing and another on the clock.)

As I said, it was my first animation job. What did I know! I had to take Johnny’s drawings and reshape them into Hubley’s characters, and I had to do it in ink. No pencil tests. Just do it. Whatever came out, was the final artwork (and I use that word loosely.) I felt, even while I was doing it, that I was killing Johnny’s work, and I ultimately apologized for it. No one else complained, so it went as it did.

Here’s a cycle of Johnny Gent’s Spellbinder rowing a boat.

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(If you click on any drawing it’ll show you the full animation page.

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Johnny Gent’s Spellbinder rows a boat
on two’s per drawing indicated
Click left side of the black bar to play.
Right side to watch single frame.

- In the past, I’ve posted some of John Hubley and Tissa David‘s preliminary drawings for the picture, Eggs. I’ve got plenty of this artwork and I love it, so here’s some more.

Eggs was a short film which was rushed out at a low budget for a PBS show called The Great American Dream Machine, which was produced by designer, Elinor Bunin.

The film follows the political thoughts of John and Faith; they were concerned about overpopulation (there are at least four shorts they made about the subject) and were able to blatantly make a political short for this TV series.

Past posts of my can be seen here, and here.

There’s currently a copy of this short on YouTube.

These three drawings are character Layouts by John Hubley.

(Click any image to enlarge to animation-sized artwork.

This is a BG Layout John gave Tissa.

This drawing and all the remaining are Tissa David’s drawings.

She would block out her own rough Layout
before jumping in in to animate.

It gave her the chance to thoroughly think out what
little information John had given her. Usually just a
conversation with some very rough sketches.

This is Tissa’s Bg Layout for this scene.

– Yesterday’s NYTimes blog, The Carpetbagger, featured a short piece on the expansion at Pixar. The source of the Times’ information was the Pixar Blog which admits to the construction. The cost of construction, “does not include labour and other associated costs, which will undoubtedly run into the millions of dollars also.”

They then go on to add that the rest of the Disney studio is laying off workers, while they, Pixar, are expanding.
Très generous.

The Times comments: “But it’s hard to argue that Pixar is being in any way excessive with these plans. The studio, acquired by Disney in 2006 for $7.4 billion, has been planning the expansion for years, and desperately needs it: its current space, while opulent by some standards, is crammed far beyond its designed capacity.”

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– Mark Osborne, one of the co-directors of Kung Fu Panda, reminisces on AWN about classes with Jules Engel at CalArts. This is a heartfelt piece that I enjoyed reading. If you haven’t found it yet, you might take a glance. The piece was written to coincide with the celebration of Jules’ work which was held last Sunday; fortunately the words live past that date.

I like the fact that there are groups keeping Jules’ name alive. Aside from the positive comments from past students, there is also the Jules Engel Appreciation Group on Facebook. I wish some of the other important figures in animation’s history had equal attention. Maybe that’s part of my reason for writing on this blog.

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- To that end, let me share these four drawings by John Hubley of a baby for a Ruffles commercial. I haven’t seen the spot, done in the late 60s, but I have seen lots of toddlers drawn by Hubley. It’s amazing how different all of them are. Each child has a real personality and charm that I find extraordinary. How many kids have we seen in the past twenty or so years in Disney/Dreamworks/Pixar/Bluth features that are all so identical. Their feature films like to post the names of all the production babies at the end of their films, but I’m not sure any of the animators actually see their babies, at least based on the characters we’ve seenanimated. (Think of that cloying cliché of a toddler in the otherwise excellent short, One Man Band.)

I haven’t found two such tykes from Hubley’s hand that resemble each other – or other cartoon children.

(Click any image to see the full animation drawing page.)

A decent animator can’t help but know what to do with such models.

- It was 1973, and I was happily – I can’t tell you how happily – ensconced in the Hubley studio working on Letterman, a new series for an upcoming CTW show, The Electric Company.

It was my first animation job. I inked it all (directly from animator roughs), I assisted & inbetweened it all, and I animated odd scenes including all the title sequences. I was a novice, and I was doing it all. Excited and happy is all I can remember.

I was alone one morning in the small room wherein I worked. I made a habit of getting into work before anyone and leaving after everyone. I wanted to make sure I was indispensible.
A month into the gig, and I think I’d only spoken with my hero, John, about a half dozen times. I was rushing through one of the Johnny Gent “Spellbinder” sequences. I inked all of his scenes, then inbetweened in ink the drawings. No time to work in pencil for this schedule. Johnny was completely off character, in a very old fashioned way, and I had to rework them all closer to the models – in ink. The schedule just gave me no time to be proud of what was happening. (A year or so later I apologized to Johnny for what I did to his artwork. I was so inexperienced and had such a dominant role in how the final art looked in that series.)

John Hubley ran in to give me something and made a quick comment about the character I’d been drawing. He said it was a “Paramount eye.” I looked at the drawing, then at him. Then John drew on a small piece of paper a “Disney eye,” then a “Terrytoon eye.” He laughed aloud and told me to try to square off the eyes a bit. Then he ran out.

I learned a lot that day. I watched eyes that day and probably all that week. I ran Hubley films at lunchtime (I’d made it a habit to project their films in the kitchen during many of the lunch breaks. The entire group enjoyed these sessions) and watched the eyes. I talked with Tissa David about eyes in one of our evening tutorials – she was trying to teach me how to inbetween properly.

I was reminded of this moment when Chuck Rekow commented on the Moonbird Walk posted weeks ago. “The shape of the eyes on the boys is a real departure from almost anything in the cartoon world —even 50′s era. It’s closer to real life, and reminds me of the graphic style of Ben Shahn. It lends the film an aura of “seriousness”, even though it’s a cute film about two boys and an imaginary bird. Obviously, the pre-recorded sound is a major deal, but this gem is loaded with touches of inventive detail.”

How right he is, and I love being reminded of it.

The eyes are the direct route to the soul of a person and, consequently, an animated character as well.

After working for the Hubley studio, for a short bit, I worked for Phil Kimmelman and Associates. This was a hardy commercial studio doing tight designer-based animation. Rowland Wilson was doing a lot of their design work, and the animation clean-up was tight. Animators Jack Schnerk, Sal Faillace and Dante Barbetta did a lot of the work the few months I was there. I worked primarily as an inbetweener and learned some hard and tight lessons while there.

After the very loose work I’d been doing for the Hubley films, it was not only difficult for me, but good to keep me towing the proper line. I wanted to learn animation, and all of it was important.

Here, too, an empahsis was on the eyes. No Disney eyes, no Hubley eyes, either. But now I was just concerned with keeping those lines tight tight tight. No shimmer on the eyeballs. After all, I was told, people stared into the characters’ eyes, and any flaws in the animation would show up first in those eyes.

I worked for PK&A for about three or four months. I’d also worked for Tubby the Tuba at NYInstitute of Technology under Johnny Gentilella, where we got somewhat close and I was able to discuss all sorts of animation problems with him. That was the only redeeming element, everything else about the studio was wretched. My displeasure ultimately led to my leaving as soon as I could.

Eventually, I was back at the Hubley studio helping to finish up the short Cockaboody.
The tightening of my inbetweening only brought positives to what I could now do for John Hubley’s animation.

To this day, I still watch eyes closely. For some reason, the tighter the lnework, the closer I watch the assistant’s work. The looser the line, the more I watch the design. I prefer watching the design. Often it means eyes that can be easily labelled: Disney, Paramount, or Terrytoons. I suppose today, you’d say: Pixar, Dreamworks or Blue Sky. (And believe me, you can see those differences even in cg.)

The images above are from the following films:

Moonbird as drawn by animator Bobe Cannon

Letterman as drawn by animator Tissa David

Of Men and Demons as drawn by John Hubley

Eggs as drawn by John Hubley

Glad Gladys (Electric Company) as drawn by animator Tissa David

Eggs

-Tissa David animated the entire film for John & Faith Hubley. This short, as I said in previous posts, was done for PBS’ Great American Dream Machine for producer, Elinor Bunin. As Bob Blechman verified, they were given very little money and time to do an 8 min. short. The Hubleys gave life to the short by putting it on the theatrical and festival circuit.

Here’s a rough run cycle Tissa did for the Goddess of Fertility, who goes about inseminating the world with her seed. Tissa adds to its eccentricity with having the low point in the cycle the passing drawing. She comes up as each leg hits the ground.

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a “Goddess” run cycle from Eggs
On threes at 24FPS
Click left side of the black bar to play.
Right side to watch single frame.

- Phil Duncan was a mainstay of the Hubley animators in all the time I was there.

You could tell who Hubley’s favorite animators by the frequency in which he doled out sequences to them. Whereas Tissa David or Bill Littlejohn or Barrie Nelson would have been asked to animate entire shorts by themselves, someone like Phil Duncan would get whole sequences to animate. At the same time, John so depended on Phil and trusted what he did.

There were never pencil tests at the Hubley studio. Only one instance of it do I remember, and that was on the Art Babbitt mime scenes from Carousel. As I said once before, I remember John running out to get me asking if I’d like to see animation as good as I’d ever see. We then watched the PT over and over together. Ultimately John took Art’s animation on twos and had me put it on four frame dissolves to get more screen time out of it. A budget was a budget and you had to make the most out of the excellence you had in your hand.

But as I mentioned yesterday, Phil would animate on odd numbers expecting the even numbers to be inbetweened. Most times, John asked me to reexpose the scene on fours and not do the inbetweens. Of course, Phil was aware this would happen and had planned on it.

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Here is a walk cycle (and more) by Phil Duncan from Of Men and Demons, which was nominated for the Oscar in 1969. The full scene includes the three demons walking and then flying up to their cave.

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(Click any image to enlarge to full animation paper view.)

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The rest of the scene breaks out of the walk cycle. I
enlarged the frames to accomodate the remainder of the action.

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“Demon” walk cycle from Of Men and Demons
On threes at 24FPS
Click left side of the black bar to play.
Right side to watch single frame.