Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

– Following up yesterday’s posting, here’s the last of the phographed storyboards loaned to me by John Canemaker. It was a board done by Bill Peet and Bill Cottrell. Since Cottrell, Disney’s brother-in-law, didn’t draw, he undoubtedly did a script adaptation from the Virginia Lee Burton book.

Don’t forget to look at John Canemaker ‘s book The Art and Flair of Mary Blair. This book goes well into the design of this film with lots of illustrations.

Here are links to the other 4 parts of this
Little House storyboard fiesta:
______Part 1 ______Part 2 ______Part 3 ______Part 4

This is the 5th photo of the storyboard as it stands. To allow you to see the images larger, I’ve split the board up into sections.

1a
___Click any image to enlarge.

1b

2a

2b

3a

3b

4a

4b

5a

5b

6a

6b

7a

7b

8

- As I noted, when I first started posting these storyboards by Bill Peet, which were loaned to me by John Canemaker, there are a total of five oversized photographs. I’ve displayed and broken down three of them in the past weeks.

This is the fourth, and possibly the largest of the boards. It seems to be a reworking of the entire film. There may be a bit of repetition from other boards.

The fifth, and final, board is the conclusion of this version. I’ll try to post it tomorrow. (It takes a lot of time to break it down so that you can see the images slightly larger.)

This is the full storyboard. You’ll see below that I’ve broken up so that it enlarges a bit more than this original.

1
(Click any image to enlarge.)

2a

2b

3a

3b

4a

4b

5a

5b

6a

6b

7a

7b

8a

8b

- Earlier this week, I posted John Canemaker ‘s loan of a couple of storyboards by Bill Peet from Bill Cottrell’s script for The Little House. This was adapted from the children’s book by Virgina Lee Burton.

Today I’ve got a fifth board. I’m not sure it’s storyboard; the images look a bit more like background layouts. Perhaps it’s something in between the two. I’m not even sure the drawings are by Bill Peet.

This is the actual board. However, I’m posting it as I did the others in pieces so that it can best be enlarged for good viewing.

_
- Mary Blair was the dominating design force on this film, and her work stands out vigorously.

John’s exceptional book, The Art and Flair of Mary Blair includes a number of key pieces of art for this short. I think it might be remiss for me not to post them alongside these storyboards to see how Peet and Blair worked together. With thanks and apologies to John and his excellent book, here are the color scans.
_

(Click any image to enlarge.)

- Here’s the second of five storyboard pages loaned me by John Canemaker. The boards were drawn by the brilliant Bill Peet.

The Little House was a short, and is part of the Disney Rarities dvd still available. The image to the right comes from that dvd’s extras.

Mary Blair was the key designer of the film. Her color work is exceptional, and I’ll try to give some examples of her art in future posts.

All of these boards are small photos that I’m blowing up large, so you’ll be able to see them. It involves heavy scanning of oversize work, then cutting them up and reconstructing them so that they’re in order. Sorry that I have to take a few posts to make them all available. They’re worth the trouble.______________ (Click images to enlarge them.)

Here’s the second page of this board.

This is the full second board as it looks before I cut it apart. You can see that the image is small and I had to cut it up so you can enlarge it enough to make it visible.
The blue nunbers below the panels represent the row of images displayed.

Page 2 – 1a

Page 2 – 1b

Page 2 – 2a

Page 2 – 2b

Page 2 – 3a

Page 2 – 3b

Page 2 -4a

Page 2 – 4b

Page 2 – 5a

Page 2 – 5b

Page 2 – 6a

Page 2 – 6b

Page 2 – 7a

Page 2 – 7b

Page 2 – 8a

Page 2 – 8b

- John Canemaker loaned me these boards by Bill Peet for the short, The Little House.

These storyboards are five dense pages.
The photo images on them are small, so I had to break them apart and reassemble them so that you’d be able to enlarge them enough to study.

They’re an excellent example of an extraordinary story artist developing a pre-existing story, the children’s book by Virginia Lee Burton (who also wrote Mike Mulligan and His Steamshovel.)

This is the first of these five pages. It’ll take a few posts to get them all in.

This is the full first board as it looks before I cut it apart. The image is small and I cut it up and reassembled it. The blue nunbers below the panels represent the row of images displayed.

Page 1 – 1a____ You’ll have to click images to enlarge them enough to view them properly.

Page 1 – 1b

Page 1 – 2a

Page 1 – 2b

Page 1 – 3a

Page 1 – 3b

Page 1 -4a

Page 1 – 4b

Page 1 – 5a

Page 1 – 5b

Page 1 – 6a

Page 1 – 6b

Page 1 – 7a

Page 1 – 7b

Page 1 – 8a

Page 1 – 8b

The following are three images from the dvd extas to give an indication of color.

- I continue, here, my posting of the two boards filled with artwork from Dumbo’s Pink Elephants sequence, there’s a lot of delightful artwork.

Again, the photos I have, graciously loaned to me by John Canemaker, are smaller than I’d like. (You can get an idea, by clicking on the image to the right, as to how dense the boards are.)

I’ve scanned them at a decent resolution and have broken them up into smaller panels so that you can enlarge them to a viewable size. I’ve had to piece the photos together to keep them in order, so it’s been a bit time consuming. However, I think the boards are worth it. Again, I’ve interspersed some frame grabs from the final film to show how it ended up in color.

The following images were in the gallery part of the dvd. These are the color versions of some of the images above.

_ _

_ _

_ _

- What better way to issue in the New Year than with models/sketches and drawings from the Pink Elephants on Parade section of Dumbo. Once again, thanks to John Canemaker, I have several photo images to display.

These are rather small images, so by cutting up the large boards and reassembling them I can post them at a higher resolution, making them better seen when clicking each image. It’ll take two days to post them all, so this will be continued later this week.

I’ve interspersed some frame grabs fromt the sequence to give an idea of the coloring.

(Click any image to enlarge.)

- Thanks to the site 1000 Frames of Hitchcock (and thanks to Mark Mayerson for leading us there) we can view a frame by frame analysis of Hitchcock’s works. This is essential for any film lover or storyboard designer. These films are the masterworks and our foundation.

North By Northwest features one of the most studied film sequences of all time. By going to the photo-site, you can truly look at how the scenes break down into their montage.

This encouraged me to put up the boards I have in a book entitled Hitchcock’s Notebooks by Dan Auiler. Auiler says that once Alfred Hitchcock completed the script with Ernest Lehman, they handed this sequence to storyboard artist Mentor Huebner and gave him free reign to do as he thought fit. If you study the photos from the film, on the new site, you’ll see that one doesn’t exactly duplicate the other. I caught a mispublication in that some of the drawings were printed out of order in the book. Regardless, certainly the mood of the sequence is here, and the cutting style is established.

This is Huebner’s board:

1
____(Click any image to enlarge.)

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

John Alden Carpenter ‘s symphony, Adventures in a Perambulator, was to be part of Fantasia II when that film was on the boards. This was just prior to the original Fantasia‘s theatrical release when they were planning number two and were getting set to go. Apparently the Carpenter piece was to have depicted a baby’s eye view of the world from his carriage. There were other sequences in the planning as well, including the Clair de lune sequence which ultimately became the “Blue Bayou” sequence when it was reworked for Make Mine Music.

Carpenter was an extremely popular American composer in his time. Many of the leading conductors and orchestras performed his music, and the choice by Disney to animate this symphony shows just how popular he was.

Now, thanks again to John Canemaker, I can post this rare piece of documentation. These are watercolors which were done by the British artist, Sylvia Moberly Holland for this segment. She was closely involved with the Nutcracker segment of Fantasia as well as segments of Bambi and Make Mine Music. (For more information about her work, see Canemaker’s book Before the Animation Begins.)

Here are two photographs of two boards. I’ve broken each up into three parts so that I could download them at a very high resoluton, for you to better see them (when enlarged.)

1a
(Click any image to enlarge.)

1b

1c

2a

2b

2c

You can view a production background from the deleted “Blue Bayou” sequence on Didier Ghez’ Disney History site.

- Thanks again to the enormous generosity of John Canemaker, I’m able to post this board of artwork from the Baia sequence of The Three Caballeros.

In this segment from the film, during a big dance number, Donald Duck falls in love with Aurora Miranda. The great Brazilian musicians dance and swing with the birds and other animals in this very colorful and evocative sequence.

(You can watch this number on YouTube today – it might be down tomorrow) in case you don’t know the film.

Here’s a beautiful production drawing with Donald and women from the film. This came from the Latin Baby blog (however it might have been cribbed from Blackwing Diaries.) It’s devoted entirely to the Latin films of Disney. Naturally, Three Caballeros is featured prominently.

The photographic boards come in a very long first page (which had to be broken into two photos) and a more controlled second page. To enable me to post it as large as possible, I broke that first, long board into four parts – each row of the board represents one part. Hence, 1A, B, C, and D are really just one very long board shifted around in photoshop.

Board #1 actually looks like this. However, due to space constraints I can’t post it at a high enough resolution to make it clearly visible. Consequently, I broke it into the four boards just below this.

1a
(Click any image to enlarge.)

1B

1C

1D

2

Hans Bacher ‘s site Animation Treasures (now defunct) included this beautiful reconstructed rendering of a Bg from the sequence – see board 1A.
Art such as this will be missed with the tear-down of Hans’ excellent sites, and I can only hope that he’ll be able to get some newer site – not blog – together for this great artwork.