Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

- Do you remember the old days, when construction sites used to rip holes into their barricade walls so that pedestrians could watch the inner workings of the construction site? This was something we’d see animated in many a Looney Tune. Those holes actually did exist and were often occupied by people who were curious.

Today, probably because of insurance demands, those holes are gone. Your average construction site offers no way for people to peer into the workings beyond the street level. This also makes people like me more curious to know if something dark and nasty is going on within those walls.

I thought of this while passing the three construction sites I have to walk around each morning on the way to work. One is rather large and has been under way for the past six months (and they’ve just begun to complete the foundation), and the other two are relatively small (brownstone buildings being replaced.)

(Click any image to enlarge.)

You’ll notice that this large site on 29th St & Park Ave takes up a full
quarter of the city block. They’ve erected scaffolding to walk under and
a big blue fence to keep roaming eyes out. No peepholes.

Sneaking a peek within the locked, gated blue wall gave me
a good view of this large buildling under construction.

A smaller site close to my studio, works hard to be the most at
inconveniencing pedestrians and their attempts to keep people from
checking it out are more extreme than on the larger site.

I was able to sneak my camera into the locked fence and get
these two photos – above & below – which really don’t offer a
whole hell of a lot of information, other than that they’re guarded.

However, on the weekend, I was able to get a decent shot of the
inner workings of this site by sticking my camera in and shooting blindly.

Walking away from this site and continuing about half a block
you come upon another even more secretive site.

Here, they’re placing these large, ominous looking tanks into the
base of the developing building. It’s not a large space, so one wonders
what will possibly be the purpose of these white tanks.

They sure have enough of them. Maybe they looking for a large boiler.

You can’t even get to that side of the street to see what’s going on.

There are many sites underway in the City. This one, downtown,
has been on my horizon for almost a year now. I watched it grow
from scaffold with a crane sitting on its roof to what you presently see.
One wonders, given the current economy, who will rent those spaces.

- In posting ads the other day, I found the one for the Goldscholl Associates (reposted below), a pair of animation producer/designers, Morton and Millie Goldsholl, who have been completely overlooked in this “new era.” Mort was a prominent industrial designer who turned to film and commercials working with wife, and fellow designer/director/animator, Millie.

Trying to keep the memory alive, I went in search of any articles – even puff pieces I could find to give more info about them for those interested. I found this Millimeter Magazine article in their April 1975 issue about animation companies in Chicago. The latter half of the article was about several other Chicago companies, but my focus is on the Goldsholls.

The Loop
bu Sherry Seckel

Historically, the first commandment of film production in and around Chicago has been that fat budgets go to the coasts and lean ones stay here. On the surface, that principle holds true for animation productions, especially in the area of commercials coming out of Chicago advertising agencies. But to say that the animation talent in Chicago is low-budget would do an enormous disservice to the producers and clients alike, many of whom are finding unique production capabilities right in their own back yard. In addition, clients from outside the Chicago area have discovered that the diverse talent and facilities here can make production in Chicago a matter of choice, not just necessity.

The most successful of such animation producers is probably Goldsholl Associates, located in the Chicago suburb of Northfield. What makes Goldsholl so attractive to national and international clients alike is their ability to take a project from conception through completion almost totally in-house.

At the top of the organization is Mort Goldsholl, whom Bob Rowe, Director of Sales, calls a true “conceptualizer.” With an extensive background in design, award-winning Goldsholl has invented an optical lens distortion technique for animation which takes a two-dimensional piece of art and, in camera, makes it appear three-dimensional. Another revolutionary technique with Gold-sholl’s stamp on it is his rotoscope animation, recently used in Gillette commercials. Working closely with Goldsholl is his wife, Mildred, who is a producer, director, writer and editor, also with a background in design. Animation Director is Peter Dakis and Production Manager is Tom Freese, a cinema-tographer known for his fluid head method used in Hallmark commercials.

Backing up the talented staff is sophisticated hardware to match. Along with a sound stage, 16mm and 35mm cameras recording equipment and editing equipment with Moviolas and a Kem is an automated Oxberry animation stand, designed by staff member Jim Logan.

After some 34 years in the business, Goldsholl Associates is firmly entrenched in its position as a consummate animation production studio. Says Bob Rowe, “Heretofore, if you needed a slick piece of animation, you had to go to the Coast or New York. We don’t have a stable of animators and painters; we want to retain our uniqueness.” Mort maintains that he does not want to be everything to everybody.

- For those of you who haven’t seen it, there is a blog devoted to artwork and photographs and some film clips of animator, Fred Moore. It’s a Spanish site run by Pedro Daniel. (Thanks to Matt Jones for directing me to it – again.)

And speaking of Matt Jones, he has a great post on his Ronald Searle tribute blog. it tells of his “pilgrimage” to meet Searle. it’s a great read.

Oswald Iten‘s blog offers intelligent and thoughtful consideration of a number of films, but his writing on 101 Dalmatians is excellent. Currently, he discusses the voice of the narrator throughout the film as it changes perspective. this has been one of my principal concerns in making and watching films. Who is telling the story? Whose perspective are we supposed to be viewing? When films slip in and out of this, I grow too easily annoyed. Lately, there’s been a lot of lax storytelling; many film makers have gotten lazy and are not telling the story properly. It makes for a good read on Oswald’s blog.

Also, if you haven’t read some of his consideration of the color design of the Dalmatian film, you should take the time to read.

- For some reason, I have this photo/clipping in my folder. These are Walt Disney’s hand prints. The image came from a Life Magazine issue. I’m not sure if I actually scanned this from the magazine (I think I did since I own the issue) or if I lifted it from someone else’s blog. If I did, I apologize, but the image is a great one.

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- My friend Stephen MacQuignon has his first two published children’s books for sale on Amazon.

I’d like to congratulate Steve and direct you to the link. It’s been a long time coming, and he deserves a little praise for the fine work he’s done for so many years. Steve was THE principal colorist on my film,
The Red Shoes and many others.

Go here to check them out or buy them.

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- Finally, it’s always fun watching the year’s choices for the Film Bests of the year. The LA Film Critic Assn chose Wall E as Best Picture of the year, but Waltz with Bashir was the Best Animated Feature. Is that telling or just confusing?
The NY Film Critics Circle named Wall E as Best Animated Feature.
We’ll hear from Boston and Chicago in the next week.
I have to admit that there was a good crop of features this year. I’d call Waltz with Bashir the best Flash animated feature I’ve seen, but that honor belongs to Sita Sings the Blues. Nina Paley’s Sita Sings the Blues is certainly the best of the lot though it’s $220,000 away from the possibility of a release. Bill Plympton’s Idiots and Angels is possibly his best feature and deserves more attention. Officially, though, it won’t be released until next year.

- Flipping through some old film and animation magazines, I couldn’t help but look at all the old ads for the many animation companies that were ever present and are now gone. In a way, back then, you were pleased to see the small companies that promoted themselves regularly in all the film mags.

You have to remember that animation wasn’t all present back then. It wasn’t easy to find a lot about the medium. Now you just turn on the computer, but back in the ’70s you bought a magazine and cherished the few articles. And when you found something like the Film Comment issue of 1975 (though there were no ads for animation companies in that issue), you kept the magazine close and read and reread the articles. Then you looked at all the ads for the boutique commercial companies.

The following ads all came out of three issues of Millimeter one from 1976 two from 1977.

Zander’s Animation Parlour was the largest commercial company
in NY in the 70′s and their ads were the biggest and most entertaining.
They often appeared on the back cover of these magazine issues.

Ads changed from issue to issue, so someone in the studio
kept designing them. Jack Produced the spots with animators
Doug Crane, Dean Yeagle and Bill Railey on staff.

Phil Kimmelman’s studio, PK&A, was also a dominating advertiser.
Though their ads changed, as well, this one appeared often enough
to be recognizable.

Phil Kimmelman ran the studio with Bill Peckman supervising and
doing layout. Jack Schnerk, Sal Faillace and Dante Barbetta were
regularly used animators.

Perpetual Motion was another large studio run by Buzz Potamkin.
Their ads weren’t as obviously frequent as the other two, but
they did focus on their art.

Buzz ran the studio in NY with animators Vinnie Cafarelli and Jan Svochak
on staff. Candy Kugel was the up and coming star to emerge.

Bill Melendez, on the west coast, did the Charlie Brown shows, but
his studio also did commercials (often featuring Charlie Brown.)

Kurtz and Friends, in California, was hot.

Herb Stott’s Spungbuggy Works certainly caught my eye.
That name for a studio was genius.

Murakami Wolf, Swensen was a diverse animation studio that seemed to do everything from “The Point” to “Biker Mice From Mars” to commercials.

Mort and Millie Goldscholl ran the largest studio in Chicago, Goldscholl Ass.
Their focus seemed to be graphic animation.

IF Studio was run by cameraman, Carlos Sanchez. They filmed animation
and produced a lot of graphic animation.
Bajus Jones was a hip studio operating out of Minneapolis. They caught a lot of attention and did excellent character animation.

Ray Seti was an animator who opened his own one-man studio. He did a
lot of animatics for commercials and thrived for quite some time.
I have a funny story about meeting him that I’ll hold for another time.

George McGuinnes and Mark Howard ran The Image Factory. They did
dynamic graphic animation. I think I did the only drawn animation for
them – which they used for a graphic spot.

– After posting the fine drawings by Bill Tytla, and following with the “Washing sequence” board drawings it’s on appropriate to offer one of the Action Analysis classes Tytla gave at the Disney studio, after hours. This one took place on December 10th, 1936 – 72 years ago today.

Tytla and Fred Moore were the leadaing animators of the seven dwarfs – supervising and handling seven wholly different personalities each with relatively little screen time to relay their individual traits.

This article is chiefly concerned with the sequence of the dwarfs gathered around the wash tub cleaning themselves for dinner.
__Click image to enlarge to see full dwg._._Grumpy, of course, sits out the experience.
____________________________________They sing the washing song, “blblblbl.”

1 2
(Click any image to read.)

3 4

5 6

7 8

9 10

- Bill Tytla‘s animation of the devil from Night on Bald Mountain, featured yesterday, couldn’t be further away from the dwarfs he animated in Snow White. (Fred Moore was his partner in the task of supervising the dwarfs.) In this film, he had seven characters to animate, seven characters to give real characterization in somewhat short screen time. All seven had to have personalities that could be recognized within moments. It helped, of course, that they were defined by their names, but getting that across without cliché was no mean feat.

Here are some storyboard drawings, art direction sketches which would have helped lead through the washing song sequence.

(Click any image to enlarge.)
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I featured Tytla’s animation for this sequence in another post – here.
A couple of drawings shown below.

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Doc kisses Grumpy. How the times have changed.

This one looks like it might be a Tytla rough.

Soup’s on!

This is a bar of soap that occupies a fly.

This is the washtub.

This is the exterior background where the setpiece takes place.

- This sequence of animation drawings by Bill Tytla is undoubtedly available elsewhere on the internet, but who cares. Thumbing through John Canemaker‘s beautiful book, Treasures of Disney Animation Art, one can’t help but be struck by these drawings, printed at their finest. Large reproductions with beautiful color (that didn’t scan as well in my scanner, but they aren’t bad) show off Tytla’s glorious work. This surely is one of the highest moments in animation’s history.

(Click to enlarge any of these drawings.)

Not only are the drawings stunning, but the movement, timing and rendering couldn’t be better.

The artwork in this sequence is the highlight of Fantasia.
Animation is an art form here. The acting (without depending on a voice) is probably the best ever done in the medium – to date. The drawings, when studied, couldn’t be more beautiful. The rendering of the scene is every bit as good as the Nielsen illustrations done in design of the film.

The piece takes Modest Musorgsky’s ballet and performs an animated poem – a dance by way of Stanislavsky. It hints at the potential of the medium – a potential that was never fulfilled. I’d urge you to take these drawings one better, and look at the film again. Be inspired by Tytla and try to do as well.

- Nothing makes New York City feel more like a small town than Christmas and some of the Christmas decorations.

Sure there’s Rockefeller Center with their 2000 ft. glossy tree, but on the other side of town things get a bit tinier and significantly more personal.

This week the City started to dress up for the holiday, and I began to take some pictures. I’m a sucker for some of this stuff. (It’s obvious, since I probably posted the very same story last year.) Of course, Madison Square Park always gets my attention; I walk through it every morning, early, on my way to the studio.

The tree stands on its little wooden box, which will probably end up hidden and surrounded by a bunch of smaller trees. They’ll all be lit with big round ornaments that look like styrofoam during the day hours, but will light up blue at night.

I like seeing Madison Square Park develop so slowly and exactly.
This is the first sign of their big tree in the “reflecting pool.”

The tree is held upright by these cables. Last year there was a violent storm.
Rain, sleet and heavy winds didn’t knock down the trees or decorations.

Meanwhile, on the Southern side of the park they’re setting up
more trees and some tables. I’m not sure what this will be.

The art piece – treehouses – will look down on the new installation.

The usual tree stores have been set up outside of many of the bodegas.
A tree can be bought any time of day or night from many of these 24 hours stores.

I have to admit that I enjoy the pine scented areas
as I pass them on the way to the subway.

The local Portuguese church has already set up their Nativity booth.

Christ will join them on Christmas Day. Something about the wire mesh and
the glass casing takes a bit of the glory away from the setup.

Also caged is the hay poodle wearing eyeglasses sitting in front of twinkling lights.
This is an eyeglass store, and the late night gate guard is down.
I like the home grown decorations.

- There were a couple of great blog posts this past week.

Amid Amidi, on Cartoon Brew, gave us one of the blockbuster pieces of the year. He catalogued a number of Asian-Americans who worked in animation during the golden years and offered a brief bio of them as well as links to more information on all. It’s quite a serious bit of writing and I’ve saved it for my own records. I don’t think anything comparable has been done before re animation’s history.

The amount of work Amid put into this could only have been enormous, and my gratitude couldn’t be stronger. I assume most of the readers of my blog have seen that post; if not go. Here’s the link again.

- Speaking of Amid, he’s also updated his other site, Cartoon Modern. He’s started the Cartoon Modern Tumblr where he intends to post a picture a day of art from the period. The drawing to the left, from the Tumblr is by Ed Benedict.

- Mark Mayerson pointed us to the upcoming celebration of Chuck Jones’ work on TCM next March. This is all centered around the new documentary Chuck Jones Memories of Childhood, directed by Peggy Stern. The film records a conversation with Chuck Jones as he reminisces about his childhood in 1920′s Los Angeles. The half-hour program blends family photos, clips from classic Jones shorts and original animated sequences directed by John Canemaker, drawn from drawings Jones made during the interview filmed in 1998.

Some of the Jones shorts to be screened include: Prest-O, Change-O (1939), Sniffles and the Bookworm (1939), Elmer’s Candid Camera (1940), Duck Amuck (1953), One Froggy Evening (1966), What’s Opera Doc (1954), and The Dot and the Line (1965). Mark gives the complete schedule.

– Over the Christmas holidays the Film Forum will be screening a beautiful 35mm print of Fleischer’s second feature, Hoppity Goes To Town.

This remarkable film opened Dec 4th, 1941. Pearl Harbor occurred three days later, and the fate of the feature’s financial success was settled. Paramount closed the studio and fired the Fleischer brothers.

Dec. 24th through Jan. 1st you can see the film paired with “Betty Boop’s Rise to Fame,” a 1934 short starring Betty and Max Fleischer.

Tatia Rosenthal‘s feature, $9.99, is about to make its debut in LA with an Oscar qualifying run at the Laemmle Theater. The film is a stop-motion feature done in Australia. It stars the voices of Oscar-winner Geoffrey Rush (“Shine”) and Golden Globe winner Anthony LaPaglia.

You can watch the trailer here.
The film’s website can be found here.

If you live in LA, make the effort. Support the film, check it out.

- There’s a newish blog in town (meaning NYC) that’s worth the visit. It’s an addition to the ASIFA-East website. Called The Exposure Sheet (do studios other than mine still use these things?) it reports on business and events involving NY members of ASIFA.

The most current of these articles is the big lay-off of workers at Nickelodeon and the shutting of the doors of this last big network studio in NY.Linda Beck writes an informative piece about the actual events occurring here, and for a reality check it’s worth the read.
The article listed above has been removed from the blog. There’s no given reason. Perhaps Linda felt she’d misstated something. Perhaps someone will post something more.

- Finally a big congratulations to Nina Paley. Her film, Sita Sings the Blues, won the Gotham Independent Film Award. Theater Near You category. It took home the $15,000 prize from Artists Public Domain and D.R. Reiff & Associates.

Nina’s also been been nominated as “Someone to Watch” for this year’s 24th Independent Spirit Awards. That’s a brilliant coup for Nina. I believe this is the first time an animated film has been nominated for a ‘Spirit” in any category, and if there’s any justice in the world she’ll win. I’ll be watching on Feb. 21st with fingers crossed.

- Another marked day. Today, of course, is Walt’s birthday. As a result, I’m posting one of my favorite, treasured drawings. It’s an Ub Iwerks drawing from Plane Crazy. I know it’s Ub’s drawing since he drew every frame of that film – chained to his desk in a locked room, so that no one would know what was going on. I bought the drawing during Raggedy Ann. Animator – soon to become special effects wizard, John Bruno offered to sell it to me when he learned how interested I was. I jumped, I love it.

(Click image to see the full drawing.)

Wouldn’t it be nice if, somehow, the Disney company actually commented on their founder’s anniversary? Won’t happen.

- It’s also the anniversary of this blog. We’re into our third year. It feels like five. This blog has become part of my life, and I enjoy it. It’s borne me above and through some low animation points in those past coupla years. A voice allowed me to get it out of my system.

- Today’s also the date the judge promised to sentence OJ Simpson. I suppose we’ll be hearing about that later today. A diversion, just in time for the weekend.