Animation &Books &Daily post 10 Dec 2012 06:58 am
Heath Book – 2
- Last week I posted the first twenty pages of the Heath book, Animation in 12 Hard Lessons.
As I mentioned back then, this book was always for sale in the back of animation magazines and film articles about animation. Not only did they sell the book by Bob Heath and Tony Creazzo, but they offered a lot of equipment, somewhat similar to Cartoon Colour. Paper, cel vinyl and portable drawing tables were all available through Heath.
I never really had the chance top go through the book, though I always had a curiosity about it. I had come across Tony Crazzo’s work. He was the assistant to Vinnie Bell, one of my favorite animators on the East Coast. I have to say, I loved his work on the Letterman series that I coordinated for the Hubley studio. I never did get to meet, or even speak with him though. Vinnie used to bring in his own work, already beautifully assisted in a strong and juicy line.
So here at Buzzco is a copy of the book. I can’t help but share the piece with you, knowing that it’s not for sale on the market anymore. At least I haven’t seen it out there in quite some time.
Here’s part 2:
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
on 10 Dec 2012 at 11:25 am 1.drew said …
good job!
on 10 Dec 2012 at 12:22 pm 2.Stephen said …
I never got around to finishing all 12 lessons, I got up to the little chef lesson. I use to do two or three at a time and line test them on my super8 and then wait a couple of weeks to get the results back. I couldn’t afford the acme peg bar and punch so I used a two hole punch and a couple of round metal pegs as a peg bar. The dialogue lessons were guess work without a track, if you’d never animated dialogue before.
on 10 Dec 2012 at 4:04 pm 3.RodneyBaker said …
I find myself wondering what could have been… if only I had had a clue. If only… I’d had access to this book. But I didn’t know what I didn’t know.
I am so enjoying the look back into this book (as I am to the recent posts recalling lessons from Tissa David). The young cartoonist in me is thrilled to see gaps from 30+ years ago filled to overflowing. (So that’s what I was missing!) For those that had access to this book, what a great companion piece to Preston Blair’s books it must have been.
Thanks for yet another reason to love the art of hand drawn animation.
on 11 Dec 2012 at 11:45 am 4.Tom Minton said …
I owned this book in the 1970s and, while it was somewhat useful in imparting a certain level of understanding of the process, I couldn’t get past the flat drawing throughout the thing. It was (and is) hard to see how the principles of basic character construction, so well articulated in the Preston Blair books, apply to such flat, geometric characters. Yet the Heath book, the Blair books and the obscure, long out of print Dr. Roy P. Madsen book entitled “Animated Film: Its Concepts, Methods and Uses,” together comprised something of a beginning for me. The Madsen book contains a succinct explanation of clear core and black core mattes as that kind of work applies to 2D animation photography, using the Oxberry camera as its photographic reference. Also in the 1970s there were more options for the ordering of animation supplies and hardware than would be the case later. In addition to Cartoon Colour, suppliers included Heath, F&B Ceco, Alan Gordon Enterprises and Chromacolor. Today Cartoon Colour in Culver City, CA remains but I don’t know how they’re still making a go of it in the world of CG.
on 11 Dec 2012 at 12:10 pm 5.Michael said …
Tom, you weren’t alone. The poor drawings, not so much flat as badly drawn, were what kept me away from this book altogether. I found other, more expensive books which I assumed offered the same information. It turns out that this book had a lot more to offer than I gave credit for.
on 11 Dec 2012 at 1:37 pm 6.Tom Minton said …
I neglected to mention J-K Camera Engineering, a firm once located in Oakland, CA that sold its own line of relatively inexpensive animation related hardware. I bought one of their cel punches for something like $325.00 in 1974, a product made of cast metal and wood which was able to handle up to about six cels at a time and could be ordered with either Acme or Oxberry hole punches, to suit the customer. Today when one can even locate such an item it is outrageously expensive and probably not made nearly as well. J-K also made and sold a type of 16mm optical printer that photographed frames at a very slow rate but offered the rare affordable option for an individual to own and operate such arcane cinematic hardware, sidestepping exorbitant lab fees for optical printing work. Today all of this stuff would belong in a museum, alongside a Linotype machine.