Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

- 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.

- We’ve seen lots of weather in the past two weeks. A blizzard on the day after Christmas bottled up New York and all its garbage collection. Then there were several days of spritzing rain and warm weather. Everything got wet and black. Then another snow storm that didn’t really stick, and we’re expecting more on Tuesday.

Amid all this, Steve Fisher caught the town off guard when fog rolled in. Here are a bunch of his photos making NY feel like London in the 60s.

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Happy New Year
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- When Cartoon Brew posted their comment about Yoni Goodman‘s site, DailyMation, I didn’t expect to be clicking into a daily inspiration. But that’s what it’s become.

Goodman, the Israeli animation director of Waltz With Bashir, says that he designed the site because he was tired of moving cut-outs around with Flash and wanted to break loose with some free-form animaton based on moving masses and having fun with it.

This shows. The pieces he puts up frequently are filled with life and are great to watch. All of the film clips are animated bits he’s pulled from life – his children are a major source of inspiration. This is alien to most American animation I’ve seen lately which seems more designed to rework other animated films rather than on the real world.

I wonder how many times Milt Kahl or Marc Davis went back to study past animated scenes? We study and learn from these old masters, but there has to be a time to let go and start looking at how real people act and react. This is what we have to animate. Yoni Goodman is doing great work, and it’s hard to understand why I’m not doing the same, myself.

I will.

- Aardman Animation seems to have fallen into good hands. Sony has just agreed to a deal which would have them distributing the new features coming from the Bristol-based factory. The first of their joint films will be Arthur Christmas, a film Aardman had in the works which employs hand-held cameras in a cg environment. The film, Sarah Smith and Barry Cook are directing from a script by Peter Baynham, would be released next November.

A sampling of Pirates!

They’re also planning a difficult and elaborate stop-motion film in Pirates! based on “”The Pirates!”, the best-selling series of books by Gideon Defoe. This film will be a swashbuckling affair directed by Peter Lord.

Hopefully, this deal with Sony will be more productive than the one they had with Dreamworks.

– Darrell Van Citters‘ blog Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol seems to be going right up to the wire. Will posts continue even after Christmas? After his Abe Levitow career bio, he posted information about the films UPA did immediately after Magoo’s Carol. and there’s also the “Unknown Christmas Carol”, segments that were deleted from the show even after being planned and animated.

The film recently played to full houses in LA at the Egyptian Theater and the Aero Theater. It was a treat to see it on a big screen when they screened it last year on the occasion of the book’s initial publication.

As I said back then, this book is a gem, self-published by Darrell Van Citters. I highly recommend you get it for your collection.

The first time in 372 years that a Lunar Eclipse took place on the Winter Solstice. (There was also a meteor shower.)
Many thanks for sharing, Steve.

A couple of weeks ago, Steve Fisher contributed a bunch of photos taken in Maspeth, Queens of some depressed, balloony Christmas lawn ddecorations. He’s since revisited those lawns and found them all blowed up. The new pictures were taken at night, and make the poor decorations seem more exciting.

Before . . .

. . . After.

Before . . .

. . . After

Bearfore . . .

. . . Bearfter

Before . . .

. . . After.

The whole depressed balcony . . .

. . . blown up real good.

Here’s the front of the house.

It’s Balloony-land!

Let’s add two more pictures that aren’t balloonimals but are just as crazy:

Check out flagpole Mickey.

And we couldn’t end without a religious front-yard.

- As I’m sure you’ll learn from many blogs that today is the anniversary of Walt Disney‘s birth. His 109th birthday.
Just as importantly, to me, this is the anniversary of this blog. This is the fifth year I’ve been writing these posts on a daily basis and having fun doing it. Here’s hoping for another five years.

- My good friend, Steve Fisher has noticed a trend in New York, at least in Queens. There’s a depressed state taking hold of Christmas. He comes with evidence in these photos. I’m glad to share them, and only hope that things will perk up.

Well, Santa may be ready, but I’m not sure anyone else is.

One Frosty, down for the count.

Mickey’s a bit deflated.

Et tu, Snoopy?

Charlie Brown for company.

Down and out like laundry out to dry.

Mary watches from a drainpipe in silence,
waiting for Christmas.
What fools these mortals be.

Here’s a piece that appeared on this site in February, 2006. Every day, I see Rodolfo’s caricature of the Studio-past hanging in my studio-present. It’s worth repeating this post.

– Lots of birthdays have been celebrated in my studio over the years. Photos are often taken.

Here’s one from the past in which the gang gave me a caricature that was done by Rodolfo Damaggio. Rodolfo was an animator in the studio who drew like gangbusters but wanted to draw comics. He left to become a star in that field and also does boards for live action Effx films.

I posted the image once before and put it up again for reference to compare with the photos.
Pictured:
(back row standing) Sue Perotto (animator), Elizabeth Seidman (production coordinator), Ray Kosarin (animator), Stephen Gambello (colorist/runner), Masako Kanayama (designer/Production Manager), Marilyn Rosado (studio manager), Rodolfo Damaggio (animator), Jason McDonald (colorist/storyboards/designer).

Two people never made it into the caricature: Christine O’Neill and Xiaogang He. When Rodolfo went to draw he had no photo reference of either, and they weren’t around that day to offer one. Or so I’m told. Christine is the only person from that period still working in the studio.

- Every Fall people make a mad dash upstate to view the changing colors of the leaves. Well, it’s taken a little time, but New York is facing a quick changing of the colors. We had a mad rain a week ago, and any leaf that clung to the tree made it to the ground.

Steve Fisher photographed a lot of shots of leaves, and he wrote this:
After the punishing rains that pelted prisoner leaves free of their branch shackles had ceased, after the warm air mass that slipped off shore had left a crisp stinging cold, after the winds that wildly swept leaves across streets had piled them into drifts along walls and fences, nothing remains but a shadow of the fall and the hint that next season will soon be upon us. Color is gone. Get your snow shovels ready.

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- One of the treasures in New York is the museum called “The Cloisters”. This is a branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art dedicated to European Medieval Art.

Within this small enclave, there’s a wealth of tapestries, paintings, sculpture and utensils (actually used during the Middle Ages.) The building, itself, was reconstructed near Fort Tryon (a Revolutionary War outpost that is commemorated with a small area of the park) from bricks and stones that were made up the actual building, originally in Europe.

The greatest aspect of the place, to me, is the silence and majesty of the surroundings. It’s beautiful and quiet and goldenl something that stands out and apart from NYC.

Steve Fisher recently sent me some photos of parts of the building, without showcasing the art, and they seemed perfect to me. Here they are:

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The Cloisters sits not far from the George Washington Bridge
just this side of New Jersey.

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Within the building are many stained glass windows.

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The windows lead you to the open air.

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Fianlly you reach the courtyard which is a sanctuary of its own,
any time of the year. It sits in quiet and invites peace.

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Al aout the courtyard is a the square walkway with water fountains
built into the walls in the shapes of lions and other animals.

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Some other time, we’ll look at the art.

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Here’s a note I received from my friend, Steve Fisher:

A month ago, I was invited by the Queens Chronicle to participate in a photo assignment involving the tree stumps around town in the aftermath of the tornados that swept through Middle Village this fall. The charge was, ‘Be creative.’ I happily went to work surveying the area and ultimately submitted over a dozen shots that I thought might be worthy of the photo essay QC had planned. Inexplicably, nothing further has come of them to date – nothing has been published in the several subsequent issues of QC, and no response to a number of email queries as to the status of the project. So I’d like to share them with you.

Upon first blush, I felt that a stump was a stump was a stump. But looking around, I began to appreciate that each stump is distinct and has its own story. The challenge became to find the more interesting stories. What makes a photo of a stump artistic, after all? Its color, shape composition. For me, the more successful shots are those that transcend what is being photographed – sometimes using scale to add to the mystery of the image – making the viewer ask, ‘ What am I looking at?’

Needless to say, I’m posting them all. Enjoy.

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