Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

- Steve Fisher has been sending an assortment of great photos these last few weeks, and I haven’t posted much in the way of recent photos lately. So I’ve chosen some architectural beauties from the past number of pictures he’s sent and will post them today. Enjoy.

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

Many thanks to Steve for the great pictures.

Happy New Year

- A beautiful bunch of rooftops. Manhattan offers a world of views of interesting rooftops when viewed from the ground. (I’m sure they’re also interesting when you get up there, but the ground’s eye view is all we have.) The Pillars of my City.

Here, Steve Fisher offers us a variety of different views when looking up.

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

This group was taken around the Metropolitan Museum of Art

9

10

11

Merry Christmas

- Walking to the studio this morning (Robbie has to be fed before I can start my Christmas)
I passed through my favorite park, Madison Square Park. There was my Christmas tree.

1
Coming up on the entrance at 26th Street, you can see the tree.

2
It sits in the empty reflecting pool. In past years,
they’ve had smaller trees surrounding it. I guess
the recession has hit the Christmas decorations.

3
Walking beyond the tree on the way downtown to 23rd Street.

4
Just before exiting the park at 23rd Street, you can still see the tree.

5
20 minutes later, heading into NYU’s Washington Square Park,
the sunlight’s beginning to rise and the colors are more alive.

6
From the other side of the arch, you can see that the back of
the tree is not decorated. More recession or just lazy?

Have a Merry Christmas everyone.

- Steven Fisher caught the following photos in the back yards of Queens, NY.
Wildlife remains wild, even in the City. This is a hawk feeding on a small animal it’s caught.

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

Many thanks to Steve for sharing the photos.

- Has anyone else noted that the world has gotten meaner? Just watch one of the Republican debates for proof positive of that. Or take a look at what’s happening to the protesters of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Pepper spray anyone?

Remember the comic strip Pete the Tramp by C.D. Russell? no, it’s probably before your time. Pete was a tramp who stole pies from windows and got in trouble with the law. He was the typical hobo in comic strip form, and the strip started during the depression and lasted through 1963. I read it in color in Saturday’s NY Journal American.

Pete usually slept on park benches under newspapers and got his feet slapped by the cop. I noticed park benches this week and wanted to call attention to the way our society has handled tramps, hoboes, homeless people. In New York, they’ve made them uncomfortable.

This is the park bench I noticed.

It’s a bench in Madison Square Park, and I noticed it because it’s become a relic of the past. A person could actually sleep on it.

This is the newer model. The only way you could sleep on it is if you only had a torso. They’ve put dividers there, so it makes it handy to sit and not touch the person next to you, but you couldn’t really lie down on it.

See. There are lots of these now. Madison Square Park is made of mostly these benches, but there are still a couple of the old kind.

The new little park down on Bleecker and 6th Avenue only has this type of bench.
No vagrants wanted here.

Even the old, tiny private park on Bleecker has these newer benches. (I did see someone sleeping on them, but I couldn’t get close enough to photograph the way he mangled his body to get some sleep.)

A building up on 28th and Madison made sure no one could sleep on their public seating area.

Subway benches have also become completely inhospitable.

This type bench has very tight dividers. Wearing winter garb, one hardly fits into the space. However, these benches aren’t quite so bad in that the dividers aren’t mercilessly high.

Look at these uncomfortable things at West 4th Street. (Plenty of homeless used to be downtown.)

You could hurt your back trying to sleep here. Though, I have seen some people stretched out over these partitions. That’s how desperate it gets in the winter cold.

It’s not too much better on the subway. The seats are lumpy – shaped for the bum (I don’t mean vagrant-like bum) in bright colors. It’s a tight squeeze.

The few longer seats are “Priority seating.” This means bums have to get up for older people. I’m not sure what it means if the bum is an older person.

__________(Click any image to enlarge.)

.

This is a repost from January 2008. The world has gotten even meaner since then.

- Yesterday, with a couple dozen other hearty souls, I sat through the screening of the animated shorts to narrow them down to a short list of about ten. The 44 films took ten hours to screen (including a 45 min. lunch break and three other 15 min. breaks.)

The first 1/2 to 1/3 of the program was brutal, and it looked like it was going to be the worst screening of films we’d ever attended. But then things got much better, and a lot of excellent films showed up in the mid third group. Then the end portion of the program turned up even a greater number of brilliant films. The end result was that it was one of the best screenings I’d seen (quality wise.) You can see the full list with some links on Cartoon Brew. The top ten should be a good group (given that a few of the choices usually turn out to be clunkers – there’s no accounting for taste.) I’m looking forward to hearing what will be on the short list.

_____________________

I originally ran this piece in November 2006. I’ve made some slight adjustments to bring it up to date.

- Today is photo Sunday.
Having recently pored over some of the artwork from Raggedy Ann & Andy (the NY contingent of the 1977 feature film), I wondered if I had any photos that I could post. There weren’t many that I could find quickly, but the few I did find are here.

The first two stills were taken for the John Canemaker book, “The Animated Raggedy Ann & Andy.” I think only one of the two appears in the book.

(Click any image to enlarge.)

Obviously, that’s Dick Williams with me looking over his shoulder. Oddly I remember being in this position often during the film. It’s probably the first image I have of the production when I look back on it. Dick and I had a lot of conversations (about the film) with him “going” and me listening.

When I did actually grab time to do some drawing, this is my desk. It sat in a corner of a room – across from Jim Logan and Judy Levitow. There were about ten other assistants in my room, and there were about seven rooms filled with assistants on the floor. I had to spend time going through all of them making sure everybody was happy.

This slightly out of focus picture shows Dick Williams (R) talking with Kevin Petrilak (L) and Tom Sito. That’s Lester Pegues Jr. in the background. Boy were we young then!

These guys were in the “taffy pit,” meaning they spent most of their time assisting Emery Hawkins who animated the bulk of the sequence. Toward the end of the film, lots of other animators got thrown into the nightmarish sequence to try to help finish it. Once Emery’s art finished, I think the heart swoops out of that section of the film.

This photo isn’t from Raggedy Ann & Andy, but it just might have been. That’s the brilliant checker, Judy Price showing me the mechanics that don’t work on a scene on R.O.Blechman‘s Simple Gifts. This is the one-hour PBS special that I supervised after my Raggedy years. However, Judy was a principal on Raggedy Ann, and we spent a lot of time together.

Ida Greenberg was the Supervisor of all of Raggedy Ann’s Ink & Paint and Checking. She and I worked together on quite a few productions. I pulled her onto any films I worked on after Raggedy Ann. She was a dynamo and a good person to have backing you up.

I’m sorry I don’t have a photo of her from that period.

This is one of my favorite photos. Me (L), Jim Logan, Tom Sito (R). Jim was the first assistant hired after me – I’m not sure I was an assistant animator when they hired me, but I was being geared for something. The two of us built the studio up from scratch. We figured out how to get the desks, build the dividers, set up the rooms and order the equipment.

To top it all, Jim kept me laughing for the entire time I was there. I can’t think of too many others I clicked with on an animation production as I did with him. He made me look forward to going into work every day.

We frequently had lunch out, he and I, and I think this is at one of those lunches when Tom joined us. It looks to me like the chinese restaurant next door to the building on 45th Street. Often enough, Jim and I would just go there for a happy hour cocktail before leaving for the night.

I should have realized how important that period was for me and have taken more pictures. Oh well.

- It’s the annual “oh my god, will you look at the colors of those leaves” post. Steve Fisher has captured some of the highlights in the City replete with birds. Here are those images:

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

- Continuing the jump about NY, I have a stash of new pictures from my friend, Steve Fisher. These are shots from all over the city. Whether Manhattan, Queens, or Brooklyn, they’re all great photos. I hope you like them.

Twilit Buildings

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12
The UN

Swings

13
.
14
.
15

Geese

16
.
17
.
18
There’s always one malcontent.

.

- My friend, Steve Fisher, went to the celebration for the Statue of Liberty’s 125th anniversary. Here are a couple of photos he took:

.

.

.

.
- A view from the other side of the bridge.
.
The Chrylser Building is probably my favorite building. I find it extraordinarily attractive. I was even able to endure The Bonfire of the Vanities for the wonderful shots of the gargoyles within the film. There have been some great pictures made of this outstanding bit of architecture. Steve Fisher has a collection of pictures he’s taken of the building from Queens. I asked him to send me an assortment of these pictures and I’m happy to post them today. These are they:
.
1
.
2
.
3
.
4
.
5
.
6
.
7
.
8
Golden gargoyles
.
9
.
10
.
11
.
12
You couldn’t get a better shot.
.
13

And here’s one from Brooklyn:

- Steven Fisher sent me an assortment of photos that I found beautiful. He’s an architect, and his interest in architecture is obvious in many of these images. My interest in the beauty of my City is the reason I have to post them. Steve has a fresh look in the photos, and he’s totally in sync with the way I feel.

The first is an image of a chateau in France. It leads into a lot of similar shots of rooftops in Manhattan.

1
chateau at Chambord

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18