Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

- I promised back in Dec 2008 that I would tell the story of how I met Ray Seti. He was a very nice, very experienced guy who had his own, small, one-man studio back in 1971 when I entered the world of film.

But first I have to back track to the point where I entered the business. I had a long hard time getting into the Hubley Studio (this is a long-ish story that I’ll tell another time, if I haven’t already.) When I’d gotten out of the Navy in October 1971, I was unemployed, and had just started to receive unemployment checks. I was receiving $72 a week for a couple of weeks when I’d done a mass-mailing of intro letters to every name in the Backstage Annual of studios that listed themselves as doing animation.

Back in those days, there were no computers, and copies were Xeroxes done on a shiny, coated paper. You couldn’t send copies of letters to many people without individually typing them up. So I did. I wrote and typed about a hundred letters to all these different studios, knowing full well that only about a dozen or two really did animation. A lot of small studios credited themselves as doing animation rather than lose a job. After all, how hard was it for them to hire people to do the work, if it actually came their way? But, what the hell, if one of those studios wanted to hire me, I’d prefer the work than the unemployment check.

The day after I dropped those letters into a mailbox, I got a call from Hal Seeger, himself.

Seeger was an ex-Fleischer animator, production manager who’d set up his own studio in the early 60s and did Out of the Inkwell, Milton the Monster and Batfink cartoons. Now he actually had a bunch of studios all under the one umbrella called Channel Films.

My letter to these studios was humble enough. I said I would do anything to work for them including mopping the floors. Seeger introduced himself and then asked, “Did you mean it?”

I had a job. It paid $10 less than unemployment. I was a runner for the company. This meant I would help out editing as much as I could (they were doing a lot of work for ABC films.) My first job was to cut the commercials out of 120 episodes of The Smokey the Bear cartoon shows that were going to be sent to South America. By the end of that day I knew how to hotsplice, and my wrists were sore.

I spent a lot of time at labs (learning the lingo and the insider view of the labs), mixes (meeting big time sound mixers and seeing how it was all done) and working in Channel Sound helping Roy Valle create sound effects. Roy had worked at Paramount cartoons making S/Effx and had brought the Maurice Manne library with him to Seeger’s studio. I also did a lot of transferring from 1/4″ tape to 16 & 35mm mag tape.

Oh yes, I also swept the floors once a day and mopped once a week.

Lenny Bird was the guy at Seeger’s studio. He pretty much ran it, and he edited all those docs for ABC Sports and edited local trailers for NY’s Monday Night at the Movies. (Then it was Tues, Wed, Thurs etc. Night at the Movies.) I assisted Lenny in the editing, mostly 16mm. He taught endless amounts of film craft and really took me under his wing for the time I was there.

One night, Lenny, knowing I was interested in animation, said he was going to do some freelance work and wanted to know if I wanted to go with him to meet an animator, Ray Seti. I was there. Ray’s studio was literally around the corner. We were on 45th St; he was on 46th St.

It turns out Lenny had taken some freelance work editing a porno feature. Ray was lending his space (and editing equipment) to his friend, Lenny, to help out.

I spent a good hour talking with Ray. He was a brilliant draftsman whose animation business had reduced to his doing animatics for commercials. They would do these test commercials, then test them. If they worked, the films were made; if not, the agency didn’t spend millions. Ray had become the king of the commercial animatic in NY. He did all the work by himself and made a comfortable living.

After the hour’s chat, I said goodbye to Lenny and Ray and went home. Ray’s final advice to me for getting ahead in animation was to move to California.

I got to meet other animation people via the Seeger studio. Hal Seeger, of course, would infrequently tell me stories about the old days. He was a pretty big person in his telling, so I’m not sure how much truth was there.

Myron Waldman would come in a couple of times a month. He used Seeger’s space as his own NYC office and would work out of there. He and Seeger were close and did a couple of small jobs during the time I was there.

Seymour Mandel operated and serviced the three fully functioning Oxberry cameras that Seeger had in the space. He was an old Paramount cameraman and
I practice inbetweened this ugly scene while at Seeger’s______had worked with Seeger since the early 60′s. He had a lot of free time and would answer my questions if I could get him in a good mood. The trick was that he was usually pretty cranky.

Six months later, I was about to be promoted to a full-time Assistant Editor. I said NO. It was all right to do it in the job I’d had, but actually doing the Titled job meant I was on the wrong career path. I wanted to be an animator and I had to quit.

This meant taking a gamble. It paid off in three months when the Hubley Studio came through. It gave me three day’s work that turned into a career.

Ultimately, Seeger folded his company into a bigger venture, Today Video. It was run by Beverly, his wife, and David, his son. I used their facility often (and never got a discount). Leny was the production coordinator for the tape house, and stayed with them until he retired somewhere in the early ’90s.

Trackback This Post | Subscribe to the comments through RSS Feed