Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

- On October 10th the Motion Picture Academy will present a program of films by John & Faith Hubley. John Canemaker and Emily Hubley have assembled the program and although it is composed mostly of films by John (I’m not sure he would have been happy about that), there will be a lot of his early films like Flathatting (for the Navy) and The Magic Fluke and Rooty Toot Toot (for UPA.) There will also be recently restored prints of Adventures of an * and Tender Game as well as the late film, Voyage To Next. The show will have plenty of surprises of very rarely seen and hard-to-find material.

To reserve a seat go to Oscars.org. Academy members – $3.00. General Public – $5.00. or you can pay by mail with a form you’d get on line. Don’t wait; it’s probably sold out by now.

I will be posting as much of the Hubley art as I can in celebration of this show. To start with here’s the storyboard for Cockaboody.

– I have a photostat copy of the storyboard to John and Faith Hubley‘s short film, Cockaboody. So I thought I’d post it to give a good demo of a storyboard from a master. The board was done in 1973.

I had worked at Hubley’s for four months on Letterman and was layed off when that work ran out. They started preliminary work on Cockaboody while I was working on the feature Tubby The Tuba.

I left that project in time to get back to see the final scenes of Cockaboody colored, and I did a little animation of a rocking chair, with the two girls cradling it, at the film’s end. I didn’t do enough work on the film to receive credit, but I can still see my pencil lines on those two girls at the end of the film.

The film tells the story of two girls playing in a room next door to their babysitter. They laugh they cry they laugh they cry.

The audio track was improvised by Emily and Georgia Hubley in a recording studio years before they started the film. From the edited tracks a story was culled, and a storyboard formed. John did all of the drawings in storyboarding it.

There are 17 pages of board in all. I’ve inserted frame grabs so you can see how the final turned out. Tissa David animated the entire film.

The storyboard, with all of the drawings done by John, was developed in conjunction with the Hubley’s class at Yale. The students actively discussed the board and offered their participation in the growth of the film’s origin. A documentary was also produced showing the production of the animated short.

You’ll notice that the action in the film varies from the setups in the storyboard. This undoubted had to do with Tissa’s involvement. She would often rework things with John and alter the filmmaking. John, and most of the directors Tissa works with, was open to this. She has a masterful sense of camera placement and uses it throughout this film.

The film was an outgrowth of an early recording John and Faith made of their two daughters, Emily and Georgia. While teaching at Yale the Hubleys worked with the students in their class to help develop this storyboard. One of the students, Kate Wodell, came to work in the studio and was a mainstay there for many years and continued for a while helping Faith on many of her shorts after John died.

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