Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

- A week or so back, Bill Peckmann treated us to an issue of the NYDaily News‘ television guide from a typical Sunday issue. Here, Bill completes the issue with some images of Entertainment figures of interest to most older Boomers out there. If only Romney had won, this is the world we’d have seen more of. I still find it interesting that the magazine pictures are in color though color TV hadn’t been introduced as yet. From the “A little memorabilia never hurt anyone” department:

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Bob & Ray lookng a bit like Abbot & Costello

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- For the past few Thursdays, I’ve been posting a notebook that animator, Eugene Salandra compiled. These were notes he’d taken of classes taught by Tissa David in New York during the late 1990s. These notes and the notebook, itself, were completed with last Thursday’s post.

However, Eugene did one better. He reviewed the notes, typed them into a presentable form and revised them for the sake of clarity. Looking at these encapsulated and abbrieviated version of the noteboo, I feel it’d be remiss not to post them as well as the rough version that we’d already posted. So, thanks to Eugene’s generosity, here is a labor of love he put together. We’ll all benefit from them.

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You can see the earlier parts by going to these links:
_______________part 1, part 2, part 3. part 4, and part 5, and finally, part 6.

- Robert Lawrence Productions was a thriving studio in New York in the days post-UPA. Many of the animators moved from UPA, once they closed, to Robert Lawrence. Grim Natwick/Tissa David worked there (freelance), Lu Guarnier/Vince Cafarelli worked there, and consequently, Vince collected a lot of artwork from the spots he did. This post features a lot of that artwork. You’ll see how great the design and styling was at the studio, even though I don’t know what clients or sonsors they were done for. The designers certainly took off where UPA left off.

But first, let me share two in-house studio gags done at UPA.

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At UPA – NY, Lu Guarnier was the only animator
who had a window. Vince Cafarelli and Pablo Ferro
were Lu’s Assistants/Inbetweeners, so they also
had the luxury of a window.

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- OK, now onto Robert Lawrence. The more I look into this company’s work the more impressed I am. The quality of designers and animators on board was extraordinarily high. I have a lot of Layouts for films that are completely lost. I’m not sure what most of the images are for or what the stories of the spots was. I just have drawings, and most of them are impressive, even more so in some ways than much of the UPA work I’ve seen.

So let’s take a look.

First there is the promo art. As an introduction to the company, here are four self-promo pieces that were used as trade ads for the company.

I’ve assumed that these images were created for a print ad in some magazine or another. There are three of them; one comes in a 2-color version.

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Now we get into some of the fun stuff. Here are the layouts done in a million styles, all beautifully drawn and designed. I feel like I want to say thank you to some of the artists involved. If only I knew who the artists were. The drawings and cels were all done on paper with a “Signal Corps” hole-punch. (Looks like Oxberry, but the center hole is the same diameter thickness as the square pegs.)

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This is a beautiful gag told a million times,
but done perfectly in this drawing.

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The inked arms in #1 are the variant. (Possibly a correction?)

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A cel not opaqued but beautifully inked.

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Obviously #5, 6, & 7 are the same characters in development.
It looks like #5 is probably the finished model.

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This looks a bit like Howard Beckerman’s style, but I’d
probably bet against that. The characters aren’t cute enough

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There’s a whole series of chef models

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Then there’s a series of Cowboys.

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Then there’s the farmer milking the cow. Casting problems.

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How adorable is that?
for Jello.

- From 1991-1992, Tissa David, taught a class in animation which was open to anyone who wanted to attend. R.O. Blechman offered his studio, The Ink Tank for a loction where the classes were held after hours. Those who worked in the day could attend the evening sessions..

Eugene Salandra, a talented young animator, took notes in the classes, and recently I’ve been posting those notes here, with his permission. Some of the lessons seem a bit dated since they were done for 2D animation which was shot under a camera. However, all of the notes are important since learning the information will help you understand the proper use of the “camera” even if the camera is a computer.

Unfortunately, this is the last of the notes. Eugene also did tighter notes which were more cleaned up, and I may post those as well. I have to read them all before I decide one way or the other.

You can see the earlier parts by going to these links:
____________________________________part 1, part 2, part 3. part 4, and part 5

Here is part 6:

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(Click any image to enlarge so as to be legible.)

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- As I’ve shown in a couple of past posts, Millbrook Bread was a profitable series for the young animation studio, Goulding-Elliott-Graham. See posts 1 and 2.

Vince Cafarelli collected a lot of drawings from various commercials that he worked on over the years, and there’s an abundance of art from this small studio. All of it good to great. Unfortunately, very little of this art is well labelled, and a lot of the ordering of the artwork is pure conjecture to get it to fall into place. I’ve grown quite attached to some of the material from this series and its characters. The design, to me, is just very attractive. Consequently I can’t hesitate to add more to view. Here’s models and art from two more spots.

“Minny” the Baker Model 1

“Minny” the Baker Model 2

Ray Model

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- Goulding, Elliott, Graham was a company made up of comedians, Ray Goulding and Bob Elliott (“Bob & Ray”) and designer/director, Ed Graham. After the Piels Bros beer account did so well, Bob and Ray realized that they should have a larger piece of the pie, so they set up their own studio to produce commercials that featured their voices and their writing talents. This was an instant success which soon dissipated until the studio closed only two years later.

But they had a nice run. Vincent Cafarelli, obviously, had a good time at the studio (he’d left assisting at UPA to work there). In his collection of animation artifacts, there’s a folder of storyboards for commercials they’d made. I’ve put together a number of these boards and will show them here. I do notice that the writing is interesting (compared to any commercial on the air today) and the design is often exceptional. I hope you agree.

- Fred Mogubgub was a rare bird in animation. He was truly out there. Maybe today we’d say he was ahead of his time.

He was a close friend of Vincent Cafarelli’s and did some creative work with their studio. He also left a residue of artwork behind him. I located a folder of layouts and such artwork.

There’s also the program for his Memorial service. I’ve decided to include that here in this post.

Invitation to the Memorial Service.

The cover to the Xeroxed program.

The program, itself. Undoubtedly a Catholic service.

Here are a series of drawings Fred did for a Yakov Smirnoff “Funfacts” piece for ABC tv. These were 20 second spots for the network.

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Fred had to balance the commercialism with the art.

- Continuing on with the Vincent Cafarelli collection of artwork, I ran across some more Fleischer/Paramount models. One piece among them, I think, is something of a rarity. Here they are:

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This seems to be a rarely seen model. “Wags” the dog from Gulliver’s Travels.
I think this was cut from the film, at least I’ve never noticed him.

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This, of course, is not Fleischer but a later Famous short.

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This appears to be from a later Paramount cartoon.

(Thad Komorowski identifies this as Bill Tytla’s
HECTOR’S HECTIC LIFE in the comment section of this post.)

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- Here is something even rarer than that Gulliver “Wags” model sheet.

Apparently, new hirees at Famous Studios (at least in 1956) would go to an art school, of sorts. The following drawings are on reduced animation paper (although they’re the actual pencil drawings, not copies) and stapled – with two staples, one on either side – to black illustration board. Each has additional registration marks drawn at the bottom. Each is one of two drawings that are slightly different from one another. Presumably, they were designed to teach inbetweening. The pencil drawing line work is particularly thin, so I suspect these were projected with an overhead projector. I’d guess that the art student, new employee, would copy the projected drawings and then have to inbetween the pair of drawings.

The drawings start with simple lines and get progressively more difficult until it’s a full sized image of Popeye ready to throw a punch. For the sake of space, and since the first drawings aren’t very interesting, I’ve enlarged only the last half of them. The thumbnails for the first group are small, so you can see them and enlarge them, if you like. If you’re new to the field, try copying and inbetweening at least the last five pairs. It’s amazing that Vincent Cafarelli saved these, and fortuitous for us to be able to see them. Have a look:

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- I have the CU drawings done by Richard Williams for a small scene from Raggedy Ann & Andy. I had thought the original animation was done by Spencer Peel, though I’m not sure. The drafts seem to credit Gerry Chiniquy.

For the first half of the film, Dick spent much of the film holed up while assisting and inbetweening many of the animators at the film’s start. In doing this, he was also able to rework and retime the animation and, thus, have control over it all. Once Dick became involved in a scene, it’s hard to say who animated it.

The problem was that the director has bigger things to do that affect the big picture.

This scene, beautifully cleaned up, is typical of these playroom scenes. And yet, as far as I can tell this was eliminated from the final film. I don’t have time to check the actual film, but the drafts indicate that scene 2.1 / 16 was taken out of the movie. I’ll look at the film just to make sure, but it looks pretty certain to me.

This is a model sheet taken from a similar scene in Raggedy Ann.
It’s obvious that his POV has shifted from left to right, and that may be
the reason for eliminating the scene pictured below.

The scene started out with 32 drawings, but it seems that Dick eliminated three of them (27-29) to hit an accent a bit harder than was done in the original animation.

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Dick had a unique animation and cleanup style. He would draw
his drawings incredibly light going quickly through the entire scene.

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The pencil line of that first round was almost invisible.

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Then he’d go back and work over those lines
just as lightly and just as quickly.

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then he’d do it again, and again, and again.

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This gave him the opportunity of changing and adjusting as he went along.

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It also is a method somewhat similar to the one
that Tytla and Ferguson used in the 1930s. They’d
go for the “forces” and then go back and build up from there.

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Williams used his light pencil lines to build up around his forces.

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Oddly the animation style is unlike Tytla and Ferguson and
more like the tight constructed, planned style of Babbitt.

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Here’s a QT of the cycle with a mix of one’s and two’s.

- In searching through the archives of work at Buzzco, where Vince Cafarelli‘s collection is housed, I came upon some MTV artwork. Some of you may remember that MTV had some wild art bumpers when they first started out. Buzzco did the lion’s share of these early logos. Candy Kugel did the artwork for them, and Vince Cafarelli wasn’t involved. These were done when Perpetual Motion was breaking up and Buzzco was coming into being. Buzz Potamkin would pull Candy into another room and give her the new assignment so that no one at Perpertual knew what she was up to. Once the split happened, Buzzco kept the account.The colors have deteriorated a bit in some of these. I’ve done some minor photoshop adjustments to brighten the colors a bit.

But first let me show some rough sketches for the very first promo for MTV in 1982. This came before the MTV campaign, “I want my MTV.” I vaguely remember this, but am not sure of it. I wasn’t a confirmed MTV watcher in those early days.

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Drawing by Candy Kugel

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Drawing by Fred Mogubgub

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Drawing by Fred Mogubgub

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Drawing by Fred Mogubgub

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Drawing by Candy Kugel

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Drawing by Candy Kugel

Here are eight of the color pieces. I’ll display two versions of each setup: the full artwork first, then the screen-sized art following so that you can see the proper framing.

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David Bowie

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Madonna

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John (Cougar) Mellencamp

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Madonna again (she was popular)

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Hall & Oates

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The famous Moonwalk

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Joe Elliott of Def Leppard

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