Animation &Animation Artifacts 15 Jun 2011 07:19 am
DeMattia’s Tubby
- Not every animated film is good, nor do they have good animation. But there’s usually a preponderance of workmanlike animation done for these films. Tubby the Tuba is a dog that was produced by my alma mater, New York Institute of Technology. Alexander Schure was the head of the school, and he brought it from Manhattan to Old Westbury, Long Island. He was an animation buff and wanted to be the next Walt Disney. He used his money to build an animation studio working out of his college. The studio ran through a number of heads from Sam Singer (Courageous Cat) to Alexander Schure, himself. Johnny Gentilella ultimately became the director of the project. The film took a couple of years to make with a lot of “B” animators, many of them culled from Los Angeles.
A footnote on the school was that Schure ultimately invested in some early computer animation, and though he was determined to compete with Saturday morning, limited animation quality via the computer, he financed some of the future cgi developers for animation including Ed Catmull, Ed Emschwiller and Alvy Ray Smith.
Ed DeMattia was an animator on Tubby the Tuba who did a number of scenes. I pulled one of them to give an idea of his animation. It’s surely not something worthy of study.
Since some of the drawings are just mouths calling for TraceBacks, I don’t post most of those.
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The following is a QT of the entire scene with all the drawings included.
Since I didn’t have exposure sheets, I calculated everything on twos but
since there were only every other drawing most of the action is on fours here.
on 15 Jun 2011 at 2:49 pm 1.Bill Benzon said …
“…some of the future cgi developers for animation including Ed Catmull, Ed Emschwiller and Alvy Ray Smith.”
Which is to say, that Pixar came out of NYIT, though it was the graphics division of Lucasfilm before it went independent.
on 15 Jun 2011 at 3:03 pm 2.Pierre said …
This post is particularly fascinating because I have only read about Tubby the Tuba but have never seen any animation from it. The book “DroidMaker” by Michael Rubin is a fascinating history of the digital revolution and talks at length about Albert Schure’s attempt to create this film at his Long Island studio.
As you mentioned, a number of people were hired onto this project including Ed Catmull.
“DroidMaker” is available at Amazon.com and it’s a really fascinating story about the early days of digital technology in service of film-making, thanks to George Lucas’ desire to create a digital editing system as well as other digital film-making technologies.
Here’s a link:
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_c_1_10?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=droidmaker&x=0&y=0&sprefix=droidmaker