Hubley 18 Feb 2009 08:50 am
Windy Day 1
- In some ways, Windy Day is my favorite Hubley short. Several shots couldn’t be more perfect to me. The problem is all the white that yellows or grays in later prints and transfers. It’s hard to view the film as it was intended.
Barrie Nelson’s animation is superb and blends excellently with the wispy style used. They washed the ink lines and lit the art from below so that the style is quite delicate. This
probably limited them to three levels including the background. John Hubley built his backgrounds around the animation of the characters, so that they’d be in the clear. However, there are many points where the animation crosses over and is blotted out by the background, but that is accepted as part of the design. There are also a couple of points where double exposures were used for effect or distortion.
Richard O’Connor writes nicely about Sara Calogero‘s watercolor rendering. I suspect that Faith Hubley probably did all the actual inking herself. She’d done that often and sometimes didn’t have the most sensitive hand just the fastest.
(Click any image to enlarge.)
The style is bottom lit, so there has to be a hole open
in the Bg drawings so that the character won’t be obscured.
In this scene, the characters are double exposed into the BG
so that the black areas can be behind them.
This is one of the most beautiful shots in the film.
A character thinking.
The character’s marker coloring is well served with the bottom lit art.
The style is used to its full potential here.
.
This will be completed tomorrow.
on 18 Feb 2009 at 10:02 pm 1.stephen said …
as far as shorts go, you don’t get much better than this. conversational, but still deep. Cute but digestible. all around a joy to see.
Watching the short list for oscar animated shorts I couldn’t help thinking that something in the tone of “windy day” was really missing.
on 19 Feb 2009 at 12:04 am 2.steven brown said …
Windy Day has always been favorite Hubley short as well! To me, it is the most perfect realization of their stream of consciousness sountracs using their children. There were always many shots that puzzled me as to their execution. It is great to get some understanding of how they were achieved.
on 19 Feb 2009 at 8:42 am 3.Stephen Macquignon said …
For any one that has not seen Windy Day I found it on pbs.org Independent Spirits
http://www.pbs.org/itvs/independentspirits/videoWindyDSL.html
A must see
on 19 Feb 2009 at 2:00 pm 4.Jenny said …
Michael, what’s the best resource (apart from this blog!) for getting the dope on the Hubleys? I’d like to read contemporaneous articles where John and Faith talk about the production of these–or more specifically, why this short, for instance. Best book(s)/articles?
on 19 Feb 2009 at 2:33 pm 5.Michael said …
Sorry, Jenny. There isn’t much available. I’ve read a couple of interviews where John talks mostly about the psychological development of the character – almost never about the art. Other than that there are a few surface PR type interviews that offer nothing.
On line Noel Wolfgram Evans offers a bio of John up through early UPA, with almost no mention of his Storyboard Prods work.
There’s a website Independent Spirits via PBS around a doc that was done; it has some interesting material, but it’s sided more toward Faith than John (since she was alive when they made their documentary, and John was long gone.)
Some mention of course also appears in a number of books, but nothing of the depth you’re looking for.
In the years I was able to talk to John, he almost always avoided the subject of his past films. He just didn’t talk about them. I’ve learned more from Tissa David and Bill Littlejohn and Barrie Nelson than I did from John, himself.
Mike Barrier did an excellent and extensive interview with John; maybe someday he’ll post it on his site. Or maybe I’ll get up the courage to ask Mike to allow me to post it. Even there, John seems a bit impatient to me.
on 19 Feb 2009 at 6:29 pm 6.Jenny Lerew said …
Thanks, Michael. What you write confirms my impressions, darn it. I too would love to read that long interview Mike Barrier did.
Funny: the things I’ve read about John Hubley–his personality as suggested by various descriptions and whatnot don’t(if I recall correctly) superficially jibe with these lyrical, dreamlike and very gentle films. Not saying at all that a man couldn’t make them-obviously a man could and did. And obviously whatever Hubley’s style of interacting with, say, his coworkers at UPA was he made tremendous efforts and sacrifices to produce these highly personal films with Faith and his handpicked team.
It’s strange that he’d be resistant to discuss them in depth. Then again, there are a lot of artists of all types who(often quite rightly)are suspicious of being pigeonholed or mired in the past, or letting interviewers or the media keep them there rather than allowing them to keep moving forward into the present and future. Flies in amber of their most “popular” periods. I don’t know if Hubley had any issue with that sort of thing…but anyway, I’d sure like to know more about him and this period.