Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

- Continuing on with the Raggedy Ann & Andy: A Musical Adventure drafts, we move onto seqeunces 7, 8 and 9. This involves the Loony King, the Loony Knight and Babette at sea.

Animators for these sequences include: George Bakes, Gerry Chiniquy, Doug Crane, Dick Williams, Chrystal (Russell) Kablunde, Hal Ambro, Charlie Downs, Art Vitello, Jack Schnerk, Corny Cole, Tom Roth, Irv Spence, Bob Bemiller, and Warren Batchelder.

A lot of talent in one place; too bad the film doesn’t hint at it.

To dress up the post I’ve added five of Tissa’s key drawings from an early scene.

Sequence 7

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Sequence 8

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For some reason this bad drawing of the “Greedy” was attached
to the drafts. So I just iuncluded it here, as well.

Sequence 9

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- Here is the third installment of the drafts for the feature of Raggedy Ann & Andy. This was the Dick Williams directed feature done for Bobbs-Merrill (who owned the property – the books and wanted to create a long ad to make them popular again. It didn’t work.) I’m not quite sure who I’m posting these charts for, but I was asked, so here they are.

If you haven’t seen the film and want to, you can go here. A wonderful page on YouTube. The sequences worth viewing are this one – seq. 4 – and the taffy pit. Tissa David did some nice, emotional animation for the first; Emery Hawkins did the wildest sequence in the film for the second.

I keep reading strange rewirtes of the history of this film (by people who worked on it), so I’ll talk about what I know in an upcoming post. I was involved from the first day Dick Williams came on board. The first animator he contacted was Tissa, and the two of them did a test pencil test.

Here is sequence 4 “The deep, dark woods.” Part 1 was animated by Tissa – 876 feet. Part 4.1 & 4.1A was split between Tissa, Art Babbitt and John Kimball. Babbitt did the camel, and his Ann & Andy were so far off model that we had to keep Tissa’s work away from Babbitt’s. After all, his character was the Camel with the wrinkled knees. No attempt was made to bring his characters closer to the model sheets.

Art Babbitt’s Ann & Andy
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Dick Williams’ cleanup of Tissa’s Ann & Andy
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Babbitt’s “Camel with the wrinkled knees”
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The charts
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- On Tuesday night, John Canemaker, Joe Kennedy, with Heidi and I escorted Tissa David to a fine Italian restaurant a block away from her apartment and celebrated her recent 90th Birthday.

The evening was a real treat for me, and we all seemed to settle back to some great conversation and an enjoyable evening. Joe Kennedy was prescient enough to bring his camera, and we shot some photos. I’m not usually inclined to post such pictures, but Tissa’s 90th was important enough to me that I thought I’d share them. So here, to bore you out of your minds, are the photos of that mini event.

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Here we all are, gathered from L to R: Heidi Stallings, me,
Tissa David, John Canemaker, Joe Kennedy.

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Tissas and I in conversation when we’re supposed to be posing.

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Tissa and John.

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Joe was snapping the picture.

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The cake

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The lady of the night. It turns out that Tissa isn’t able to eat chocolate.
We ordered some vanilla ice cream, which she loved, and the rest of us
gobbled down the chocolate butter cream cake.

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The latest blizzard had begun as we walked Tissa home.
This was my favorite photo of the evening.

Many thanks to Joe Kennedy for sharing the pictures.

- Recently, Tissa David gave me a bunch of posters that she’d stored for many years. I’ll post them all, but it takes forever to scan them and reconstruct them in photoshop. So they’ll probably come one at a time.

Here’s one Grim Natwick gave her. She was the 3rd that Grim signed it to.

(Click the image to enlarge it.)

- Here’s a walk cycle Tissa David animated for R.O.Blechman‘s hour program, A Soldier’s Tale. This is a tiny scene in the show. The camera is moving in on her, so I tried to adjust her a bit to be able to view this as a cycle.

For a slightly overhead view, wth her walking in 3/4 profile, it’s pretty complex animation. The woman carries a lot of weight in her body, and I think Tissa did a great job with her.

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The following QT represents the drawings above exposed on two’s.

Click left side of the black bar to play.
Right side to watch single frame.

This piece was originally posted on April 1st, 2008:

- Here’s an interesting short cycle that Tissa David animated for Letterman. Letterman, himself, plays with a football.

Tissa often animated on more limited shows this way. The drawings B1-B6 can work as a short cycle; drawings B1-D25 work as another cycle. She’ll move out of this and come back to it again later. It hides the cycles yet allows you to reuse drawings cleverly. It’s not just a constantly repeating 1-25 as appears here.

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____________(Cick any image to enlarge to see full frame drawing.)

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Letterman flips the ball on threes.

Two years ago, I posted part of this piece which included the drawings. I’ve expanded it and added the QT so you could see how it moves.

– Back in 1973, the Hubleys produced Upkeep, a short film for IBM. It chronicled the history of the service repairman in a light hearted way. Actually an industrial, it was treated like a personal film. (There’s a thin line between some of their industrials and their personal films.) Of Men and Demons was done for IBM though they considered it a personal film; it instructed in the positive aspects of the binary code and was nominated for an Oscar.
___(John & Faith Hubley with
___composer, Benny Carter) ______Tissa David did the lion’s share of the animation for ______________________________Upkeep. Phil Duncan, Lu Guarnier and Jack Schnerk were the other key animators on it. Helen Komar and I assisted all of them, and I inked the whole film. Gen Hirsch and I colored it. John did all the Bg’s.

The initial animation on the service man was done by Phil Duncan. Tissa had to pick up the character, and she found the walk Phil had done so funny that she kept it throughout the film adding shades and tones to it as she thought appropriate.

The art was inked with a sharpie, bled with thinner, then colored with magic markers. Each drawing was then cut out and pasted to cels. Hubley’s Bg’s followed the same style: sharpie on board, washed & bled with thinner, added watercolor washes.

Posted below are the drawings for that 18 drawing walk cycle.

(Click any image to enlarge and view whole animation page.)

Now, excuse my driving a point home for the fifth time. Please observe that the feet are on two different planes. The two feet do not hit the same horizon line; one is drawn behind the other, consequently it’s drawn slightly shorter.

Most students today (if they actually draw both legs animated instead of repeating 1/2 of the cycle over and over) have both feet touching the same line on the horizon.

- Of Men and Demons, to me, has some of the finest artwork in any of the Hubley shorts. As I pointed out, once before, Tissa David told stories of reworking some animation by Art Babbitt, which was done on 12-15 levels and had to be reworked to come down to four levels. It was a monster of a puzzle for her and included reanimating some of the bits that were too complex to work properly in their reduced form. She then had to take over the sequence and complete the animation of it.

Here is a short piece that Tissa did of the little woman character seeding her front yard. There’s so much grace in every one of these drawings and enormous information in the walk, itself.

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(Click any image to enlarge to full animation sheet.)
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And here are the matching frame grabs from the film.

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Seeding crops PT & Final Color

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Click left side of the black bar to play.
Right side to watch single frame.

- Continuing with yesterday’s piece, I’m completing the posting of all the Tissa David‘s drawings for this scene from The Midsummer’s Night Dream that she directed and animated with a few other Dutch animation friends.

I’ve backtracked a bit and include a couple of the drawings from yesterday so that the full movement is on display here.

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Titania Dances with Bottom

I took a guess at the timing of this putting the
action on three’s and adding two short holds.
All drawings from this scene (both posts) are included in the QT.

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Click left side of the black bar to play.
Right side to watch single frame.

- In the past, I’ve done a number of posts about Tissa David‘s work on The Midsummer Night’s Dream. (see them here.) This was a film she directed and animated with three other people: Kalman Kozelka photographed, xeroxed the cels and coordinated it, Ida Kozelka-Mocsary color styled it and did most of the painting, and Richard Fehsl did the Bg designs and animated any of those Bgs.

The film aired on the BBC in 1983 and was released on VHS by Goodtimes Video

I’d previously posted a couple of the cels from a scene, and here I’m posting all the drawings. I do think the film looks better in pencil test, but then I’m partial to Tissa’s beautiful drawing style. Here, again, are those cels:

And Here are those drawings:

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Titania Dances with Bottom

I took a guess at the timing of this putting the
action on three’s and adding two short holds.

[ Javascript required to view QuickTime movie, please turn it on and refresh this page ]

Click left side of the black bar to play.
Right side to watch single frame.

All drawings from the scene (both posts) are in the QT.