Animation &Illustration &Independent Animation &SpornFilms 26 Feb 2011 08:34 am
Nuts to Notes
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- Xeth Feinberg has recently been doing comic strip panels. He and his witty strip can be found on The Huffington Post – some pretty wide exposure. Quite a coup for Xeth. The only other animator involved with The HuffPost is Bob Blechman who did some animation for their original masthead and has had several commentaries posted there.
Xeth, of course, is famous for his early Flash animated pieces that flew across the internet in the early days of such things. Bulbo In The 20th Century is a brilliant piece of filmmaking that came out of this period.
Queer Duck, his biggest character, grew out of this work. The Queer Duck shorts poayed on Showtime with the Queer As Folk show; Xeth went on to make a DVD feature (called Queer Duck).
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- Another animator who has his own blog is Doug Vitarelli. Doug has created a character named Olifant, a dinosaur who lives in New York City’s Central Park. The site is dedicated to Olifant. As Doug points out, “It’s a website for kids, 2-6, with stories, games and activities.” This is a good place for animators to turn when they have children.
Doug worked for me years ago. In 1987, he interned on a film I did called Santa Bear’s High Flyin’ Adventure. It was a monster of a picture that struggled throughout its entire lifespan. One of those.
At the same time, we were doing Lyle Lyle Crocodile with another staff in another space. That one was the dream that just was fun to work on and flew out easily as a great film.
One of these days I’ll write more at length about those two films. We had 86 people working on Santa Bear and only about 15 on Lyle.
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- And speaking of other blogs, I thought I’d take a moment to promote another blog that I have that doesn’t change much but has a lot on it. Poestory.net features a lot of art bits from the preproduction of my Poe feature. The Production Updates page is about all that’s been changing lately. I write infrequent notes about Edgar Allan Poe and the film several times a month. When the film actually does get into production I’ll do it more regularly and frequently. (We’re expecting the funds to come through soon, as expected, and we can get our hands into the work.)
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on 26 Feb 2011 at 10:20 am 1.Piere said …
Two comments:
Your observation about studio sizes is very interesting.
I was constantly amazed that DMI Productions could turn out a Weston Woods piece every three months or so with just a staff of three to four people responsible for al the animation and artwork. Everyone pitched in and did a bit of everything, which made for a very rewarding place to work.
When I did animation for educational CD-ROM games, we also managed to finish a large amount of artwork with just two or three people in roughly three month’s time.
Whenever the staffs got larger, the projects became more and more unmanageable. Lean and mean, I say.
My second observation is that the clip from your Poe film is just beautiful. I can’t wait to see what you and your staff come up with! I didn’t know about the website and am going to check it out now.
on 26 Feb 2011 at 12:43 pm 2.Eric Noble said …
I look forward to what you and your studio make of this film!! I hope it gets to play outside of New York and here in Seattle. I would pay to see this.
on 26 Feb 2011 at 1:34 pm 3.Stephen Macquignon said …
Looking forward to your post about Lyle and Santabear
on 26 Feb 2011 at 2:11 pm 4.Michael said …
Part of the difficulty, for me, in setting up this film is to make sure it gets some exposure. We want a real distributor to take it on, and we’re not settling for less. I can’t see working 2 years on a film (not counting the five it took to raise the money) and not having the film properly distributed.
on 26 Feb 2011 at 3:01 pm 5.Dave Levy said …
Xeth Feinberg has been one of my favorite talents since I saw his work in the late 90s. He and I have worked together in freelance and pitches and films for most of the last year, and it’s been great! We’re actually readying two brand new pitches to present this coming Friday. Xeth is an idea machine, and those are the best people to work with when creating original material.
Love his work for Huffington post, too!
on 26 Feb 2011 at 11:47 pm 6.The Gee said …
Xeth’s stuff is always enjoyable.
And, the test looks intriguing…heck, the entire project is intriguing.
Dave, I hate to ask this here but: were you ever at Flickerlab?
If I’m mistaking you with someone else with whom i was in touch years ago, sorry ahead of time.
on 27 Feb 2011 at 3:33 pm 7.Jeremiah Dickey said …
Hi Michael, the background studies for the Poe film are stunning! Congratulations on finally embarking on full fledged production!
on 27 Feb 2011 at 4:09 pm 8.Michael said …
Thanks, Jeremiah, but we still haven’t moved into production. Waiting on funds. They’ve been approved, but you know how it is; things take time. I pray for March so I can stop worrying about the rent.
on 27 Feb 2011 at 5:06 pm 9.Doug Vitarelli said …
thanks!
and i too am looking forward to reading more about the santa bear/lyle era.
on 28 Feb 2011 at 9:49 am 10.Dave Levy said …
Hi “The Gee,”
I’ve never even set foot in Flicker Lab. Not by choice… just never had the opening in my schedule to work for them, although they have a long-running project (that will hopefully see the light of day) that I am attached to direct.
on 28 Feb 2011 at 1:32 pm 11.Anik said …
The excerpt from Poe has such an appealing look, I love the beautiful textured environment and the humour in the movement. Really looking forward to this film!
on 08 Mar 2011 at 5:23 am 12.The Gee said …
“I’ve never even set foot in Flicker Lab. Not by choice… just never had the opening in my schedule to work for them, although they have a long-running project (that will hopefully see the light of day) that I am attached to direct.”
Gads. I completely forgot I asked.
Shows you how things are for me, I guess.
Well, I’m not sure if you will even see this but if I spot your comment elsewhere sometime down the line, I’ll try and point to this or recap it.
That’s cool that you haven’t been associated with the studio but I do hope something does come to fruition soon. Just cuz. As for why I asked, it was me not remembering clearly. Last decade was a long decade. Looong.
Best to you.