Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

– To continue my pix display of art for an animated Jabberwocky, I’m posting here a few of the images from my short adaptation of the poem. I tried to mimic a style I’d used in my oil paintings and felt it was a bit successful. I don’t think the filmed version is all it could be – it was rushed to complete a package which included the 19 min. film, The Hunting of the Snark, as well as an animated documentary done about Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poems. Of course, the video package wouldn’t have made sense without including Jabberwocky.
(click any image to enlarge.)

But I’ve scanned these images from the actual artwork and realize how well they’ve held up. I’m going to redo the film digitally and see where I can go with it.

Here are some of the images:

‘Twas brillig and the slithy toves,
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!”

“Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!”

He took his vorpal sword in hand;
Long time the manxome foe he sought -

So rested he by the Tumtum tree
And stood awhile in thought.

And as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,

Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! And through and through

The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!

He left it dead, and with its head

He went galumphing back.

“And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”
He chortled in his joy.

‘Twas brillig and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;

All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

- Yesterday I pointed to some Casper shorts on line. I was amused to find two of my old Sesame Street spots on YouTube.

Chicken Crossing here.
Crocodile Smiles here.

I did both of these after just starting my company. These are two of the first three spots I produced for Sesame Street. I think they were done in 1982. Edith Zornow was the genius at Sesame Street who did magnificent work with all the different animators. For the longest time, I considered her my guardian angel. Just when business had gotten at its worst, she would call out of the blue with a half dozen spots to do. I had lots of freedom in all of them and really learned my business doing them. She died in 1991, and I still miss her.

Maxine Fisher wrote lyrics and stories for both of these spots (and about 30 more.)

Chicken Crossing has a funny soundtrack that Harrison Fisher put together for me.

Crocodile Smiles has a great score by Ernest Troost. He mimicked grand opera as if it were recorded in 1936, and it’s hilarious. Ernest and I have teamed up many times; I’m a big fan.

- Animator, Larry Ruppel brought an interesting little find to me last week. When we met after the panel session at the Museum of the Moving Image, he showed me three dvd’s (one of them is pictured here.)

Apparently, some of the stores, called generically “99 cent stores,” have been selling some interesting video finds. I’m going to quote Larry who sent me a follow-up letter:

you have to be careful and only get either the “Cartoon Craze” series from Digiview Productions (these are the best – they have a great Superman series as well), or from East West Entertainment.

It’s quite a crappy minefield in the 99 cent DVD world, you really have to be careful. Felix and Popeye cartoons are most likely their 60′s TV incarnations – always check the titles.

I always treat my search as a treasure hunt. You never know what you’ll
find.

There are two links with information that Larry sent me, and they’re worth sharing. Accelerated Decripitude and Community Live Journal which gives titles.

If your local community doesn’t have a “99 cent store,” check out Walmart. Apparently a lot of these can also be found there.

Talk about Happy Feet. Here are some frame grabs from the first of the Van Buren shorts on this “Tom & Jerry” dvd:

(Click any image to enlarge.)

– The Hunting of the Snark, by Lewis Carroll, is one of my favorite poems. It is also, among the films I’ve made, one of my favorites.

Two of my favorite illustrators, Ralph Steadman and Quentin Blake, have both illustrated versions of the Carroll poem.

I didn’t know either of these books when I made the film, and I’m pretty sure they weren’t familiar with each other’s adaptations of the poem.
Yet, it’s interesting how similarly some of the illustrated settings are given only Carroll’s poem.

I thought it might be entertaining to post some of the illustrations from the two books, both in B&W, along with some frame grabs of the similar sequences from my film.

The cover of Steadman’s book is to the left.
(Click on any image to enlarge.)

The original book was illustrated by Henry Holiday.

I was never particularly fond of his images and found little inspiration, there, in adapting the poem to film.
He was an English Pre-Raphaelite artist who didn’t seem to do more than illustrate the poem, despite the fact that he supposedly delighted in the project.

I don’t think Carroll found an equal to Tenniel in Holiday.

For those who would like to read the poem, in its entirety, you can find it here.

Quentin Blake’s title page.

The opening sequence to my film.

The Butcher and Beaver meet.

Blake’s landing of the crew.

Steadman’s landing.

Chasms and crags.

Blake’s hunting.

“They walked along shoulder to shoulder.”

Steadman’s Butcher & Beaver “walk along side by side.”

It was a “Boojum,” you see.

Blake’s Vanishing

Steadman’s Vanishing

The End

-Back to Gertrude’s Follies, the film.

I talked last week about my excitement over the comic strip by Tom Hachtman, Gertrude’s Follies. We worked up a storyboard and script for a feature. It was a bit of a rush since I found the distributor of a low budget comedy film who asked for something similar in animation. I thought we could get him interested. I wanted to strike while the iron was hot. The guy didn’t get it, thought it wasn’t funny, didn’t even understand it. His company folded six months later. A one hit wonder.

We tried to stay close to many of the strips and found a direction.
Here are two weeklies from the strip.

(Click on any image to enlarge.)

The equivalent part of the storyboard follows. To give a short syopsis of the story thus far:

Trying to be somewhat current, we built the story around an upcoming, all-encompassing exhibit Picasso was going to have at the Museum of Modern Art. At the same time, Gertrude had just sent off a big book to her agent in NY. A party was in order, and we join them in this section of the storyboard as they prepare for the party. There’s a guided tour going on at the house as they prepare, and Hemingway arrives early.
(This is about 20 mins into the film.)

- We had a job last year that was a curious production.

Scholastic teamed with Fisher-Price to produce a series of specialized dvd’s. Read With Me featured an adapter that read the dvds and turned them into inter-active games for young children. The idea was to adapt very famous kid’s books in animation. Then the same books would have interactive read-along type; lots of clickable games and alternatives, teacher advice for parents and lots of goodies.
(Click any image to enlarge.)

Each dvd had about 40 minutes of animation in toto. The stories were roughly 5 minutes, and the rest was game/alternates. We basically had to learn a new organizational language in dealing with the Scholastic methodology. It all flowed rather smoothly given how much animation was being done for so little money and with so small a crew – seven people did everything.

We did five of these book/disc adaptions.
The Little Engine That Could, Corduroy, Dr. Seuss’ Green Eggs & Ham, Alexander and the Terrible Horrible No Good Very Bad Day, and Chicka Chicka Boom Boom.

Some of the titles were fun and turned out beautifully, others were an enormous chore and turned out good.

The read-along story part of it looked much like a read-a-long book, but animated. We stayed exactly faithful to the books we were adapting, and had to find a way to capture the illustrations exactly. The type animated in sync with the narrator’s reading. I have to say I wasn’t always pleased with the readings, but that wasn’t in my ability to alter. Since the client had a lot – I mean a lot – of comments and changes, I was glad not to have the soundtracks to rework. We plugged in a lot of sound effects, but if they wanted anything more, they found their own way to add to it.

The films were animated quickly in varying ways. Alexander, for example, had four animators working on the story reading; another three people including a full-time editor did animation and stills for the game parts. The games were dependent on the read-along section, so they were always waiting for us to finish scenes to pass on to them.
The Little Engine had five animators doing the story, whereas Corduroy (my favorite) had three and Chicka Boom had two.

It was all a tense, coordinating challenge. Adrian Urquidez did a brilliant job of keeping it all together and on schedule. However, when the job came to an end, we were ready to take a break. It was a year’s hard work.

Some of the credits included:
Production Coordinator: Adrian Urquidez
Animators: Michael Sporn, Matt Clinton, Diego Turcios, Lisa Crafts, Nouri Zander, Ray Feldman and John Dilworth
Editor: Paul Carrillo.

- One of the pieces done in my studio which still leaves me proud is a title sequence done for the Sidney Lumet feature, Garbo Talks. In the film, the character played by Ann Bancroft has had a life that, in some small way, was shaped by Greta Garbo’s feature films. This is a small bit of backstory in the live action film, until the end.

(Click any image to enlarge.)

For the credits, I chose to develop this aspect of her story, and Sidney agreed on the approach. We told her life in a caricature of Ann Bancroft‘s character, growing up. The sequence ends with her at her current age, an elderly woman, and the live action begins. Hence, we were giving the life story of the film’s lead character before the film started.

The idea was to use the device that had been developed for TV in the 50′s & 60′s of the caricatured characters whisking through the sitcom titles. (See Bewitched or The Carol Burnett Show.) However, it was our intent to treat it in a serious way.

Tissa David did a stunning, tour de force of a brilliant piece of animation. It was a dance that the character went through, and the credits played off the animation, which played off stills of Greta Garbo’s films.

There was a small crew on the piece, which ran about 2 ½ minutes. Tissa animated, I did whatever clean up was left. Robert Marianetti single-handedly colored everything; Janet Benn and Christine O’Neill did additional I&P. Gary Becker filmed it, and Edith Hustead edited.

We worked with the film’s composer, Bob James (a great jazz musician and the man who wrote the Taxi theme song), developed a piece of music that Tissa animated to. He developed a beautiful waltz, and Tissa animated to every beat, every note.

After a preview screening, that didn’t go well, I expected my credits to be dumped. No, only Bob James was dumped and replaced by Cy Coleman. His music for the opening ignored most of the beats, and he wrote a lush waltz to replace it. It never quite matched in the eyes of Tissa and me.

- I guess I should have been crowing last week about the fact that my film, The Man Who Walked Between The Towers, is now available on ITUNES.
Just go to: ITUNES MUSIC STORE,
go to: MOVIES, click on “SHORT FILMS,
click on “SHORTS”. It costs $1.99.

- Speaking of this film, I say, with a bit of humility, that I’m overwhelmed by some of the recent comments about this movie of mine. Particularly so about Mark Mayerson‘s review on his site. Since I have such respect for Mark’s articles and posts, I was a bit overwhelmed at first. Let me tell you, it’s certainly nice to read such positive comments about the work. Thank you.

- Thanks to Amid’s Cartoon Brew notice about the article in the NY Times. This is a survey of the recent spate of cg feature failures glutting the market.

I expected, eventually, to read such an article since it’s been obvious that things haven’t been going well for some of these features. (Open Season opened this weekend to cheers for the $23 million take – bringing it into first place. But that is a far cry from the $90 million negative cost – not to mention the ad budget. It doesn’t look promising as a success story.

However, as Amid points out, the article gets interesting when we are able to hear, for the first time, that there is poor blood between Aardman and Dreamworks. Obviously, in making Flushed Away, Dreamworks tried to take some creative control, and the fur flew. Hence, they have separated ways, and Dreamworks will no longer be distributing Aardman‘s films.

More power to Aardman for not giving in despite the loss of a nice contract. It’s not often one hears of animators who stick to their guns despite probably financial loss.

- I thought I’d take this opportunity to announce a deal that’s just been struck.
Next Spring I’ll have two dvd’s released by First Run Films. These will both be a collection of my Hans Christian Andersen films: #1. The Red Shoes & The Little Match Girl and #2. The Nightingale & The Emperor’s New Clothes. (The last was not released on video or tv before. The video company that helped finance, forgot about releasing it before going out of business.)

(The Marzipan Pig – Click to enlarge.)

Then in the Fall another two will be released including: Abel’s Island, The Dancing Frog and The Marzipan Pig.

All four dvd’s will have extras: additional commentaries, documentaries produced, and lots of stills and graphics. These are fun to make, and we’re starting to plan now.

- Mark Mayerson pointed me to an article in today’s NYTimes about aging Independent Film makers. As an aging Independent Film maker, I found it very interesting. I like thinking I’m in the same category as John Sayles, Christine Vachon, and Errol Morris.

The actor, Mako, died Friday at the age of 72. He was a Japanese born American whose work I first came upon in Robert Wise’s film, The Sandpebbles. This is the role that brought him a well deserved Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor.

In 1976, I saw Mako live in Stephen Sondheim‘s brilliant musical, Pacific Overtures. As the center of the show – the reciter, shogun, emperor and American businessman – his voice dominates the soundtrack record which I played over and over until it was virtually one long scratch. His lines ever in my head. Unfortunately, I can only hear them spoken in his voice – other readings of the lines don’t work for me. It’s not the same.

In the middle of the world we float,

In the middle of the sea.

The realities remain remote

In the middle of the sea.

When it came time for me to cast my version of The Nightingale, I sought out Mako’s talent. We had shifted the Andersen story from China to Japan, and I got to play off some of those memories of Pacific Overtures. He was the consummate professional. He had just about memorized the script when he arrived; he recorded it quickly, and we parted. His voice is the strength behind my soundtrack.

Mako also was the voice of the Evil Sorcerer in Samurai Jack.

The NY Times obituary.

- Time to recap:
Last week I’d posted some Letterman comic strips I’d done for the Electric Company Magazine way back in 1973. My server went down, and a couple of my July posts were lost. I’ve decided to put these back up, adding two more strips to the batch.

Between the second and third seasons of Letterman, I was kept on staff with the Hubley Studio to draw a comic version of the animated pieces we’d been doing. The strips had to accompany the airing of the shows within each monthly issue of the magazine. John Hubley gave me complete latitude to do what I wanted with the strip. (This was how he worked with his animation as well. If he trusted you, he let you go. He worked with animators exactly as he worked with the actors doing the improvised Voice Overs.)

1a 1b
(Click on any image to enlarge.)

I pretty much had to bounce my scripts off the shows’ scripts, but I was asked to make it interactive, if possible. Teaching kids was everything, and each show had its instructional guide lines.

2a 2b

In conjunction with the editor at CTW, I came up with the corny idea of the shoebox theater (outdated even back then in the pre-computer days), but I thought it was retro-funny. I also started the strips with all the dialogue in balloons, but slowly removed the words from the balloons as the strips progressed. The idea was to get the kids to fill in the appropriate dialogue – or any words they wanted. It was also designed to be a coloring book.

3a 3b

The only time John Hubley looked in on me, was to comment on the line work I did on the strip. For the animated shows, we originally took the linear style from Krazy Kat – including the simple cross-hatching that Herriman used. When it came time for the strip, the lines had to get a bit bolder (cheap printing; make it a coloring book). John had seen some drawings I did in which I manipulated the ink line by copying over every line, and he was curious to see what it would look like with Letterman. I played with that a bit trying to maintain the original feel and get it to be fun. Looking back on it makes me cringe a bit, but it was a long time ago.

4a 4b

I think I did six strips, two pages each. It enabled me to keep working on some pet projects going on at the studio, pay my salary, and give me a small bit of autonomy. A good deal for everyone involved.

5a 5b
(To see this episode animated, go to this link.)