Animation Artifacts &Hubley &Layout & Design &Tissa David 03 Oct 2011 06:53 am
Eggs recap
Leading up to the Hubley show next Monday at AMPAS in NY, I’ve said I’ll be posting a lot of Hubley artwork. Today and Wednesday I have a couple of pieces from EGGS.
- I have a lot of artwork from the Hubley short, EGGS, which was wholly animated by Tissa David.
One of the two characters starring in the short is a skeleton, symbolic of death and destruction. The other is a nymph, who represents fertility. The show is basically about the complications overpopulation has presented to the world.
I thought it appropriate for today to post some of the drawings and models for the death character. The images displayed are cropped from the full animation sheets; when you click these displayed it’ll enlarge to the full page. Here they are.
The first model of the character came close to the final.
This is a drawing by John Hubley.
He soon solidified in this model by Hubley.
Tissa David finally worked out some of the problems for herself
and created this working model sheet.
Here’s a beautiful working drawing by Tissa as
she started to pose out the scenes.
Tissa’s roughs are deceptively simple but convey so much. These drawings
are for her eyes only, usually, she’ll clean it up somewhat for animation.
Unfortunately the dvd is a bit soft partially because of the nature of the
underlit final artwork. Perhaps someday there’ll be a better digital transfer.
Fertility is oozing sexuality in every drawing. This is part of the
same scene as she converses with death about the human race.
Eggs was a short film which was rushed out at a low budget for a PBS show called The Great American Dream Machine, which was produced by designer, Elinor Bunin.
The film follows the political thoughts of John and Faith; they were concerned about overpopulation (there are at least four shorts they made about the subject) and were able to blatantly make a political short for this TV series.
These three drawings are character Layouts by John Hubley.
This is a BG Layout John gave Tissa.
This drawing and all the remaining are Tissa David’s drawings.
She would block out her own rough Layout
before jumping in in to animate.
It gave her the chance to thoroughly think out what
little information John had given her. Usually just a
conversation with some very rough sketches.
This is Tissa’s Bg Layout for this scene.
Here’s a YouTube interview with John & Faith Hubley done in 1973. They discuss Eggs and Voyage to Next.
The video of EGGS starts at 4:50.
on 03 Oct 2011 at 9:21 am 1.Eric Noble said …
I love this short! I especially love the designs of the two main characters.
on 03 Oct 2011 at 11:46 am 2.Paul Spector said …
Ooooh, I love roughs.
on 03 Oct 2011 at 12:00 pm 3.The Gee said …
The YouTube link to EGGS sez:
it is no longer available for viewing.
As much as these days I have a like/Haaate thing towards YouTube/Google…. that is the cutest
explanation of a legal matter I’ve ever seen. It is mainly a sentence written in legalese but its short and to the point. The other two elements seal the deal.
Though, I did wish to see EGGS though.
And, now after finding out about the Great American Dream Machine I would love to see that, too. It sounds amazing.
on 03 Oct 2011 at 1:34 pm 4.Michael said …
Thanks for the info about the YOUTUBE clip. The other link has the film embedded as I note above.
on 03 Oct 2011 at 6:00 pm 5.The Gee said …
no problem.
I’ll watch the interview later then. Thanks.