Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

- This is the final photo/page of the Ken Anderson board for Sleeping Beauty. John Canemaker loaned me the series (which I’ve posted on the past few Mondays) that includes Sequences 18 & 19 of the film. They’re the climax of the film – Prince Phillip’s battle with the thorns and the dragon, ultimately killing off Maleficent.

This is the whole photo as is:

(Click any image to enlarge.

Here, I’ve broken the photo into rows cutting the rows in half. This way I can post them as large as possible for viewing.

- There was a short article in the New Yorker recently about someone in New York who had a shark tank in a window which was visible to pedestrians from the street. This had me wonder about windows and how much we could see within windows from the street. Generally, speaking.

The answer is not very much, and I actually wondered about that shark tank. I’d thought about this subject before this point. Standing at a bus stop on 30th Street and Park Avenue, one could look into a picture window I’d seen quite a few times. I was never quite sure whether it was an office or an apartment, and in all the years I’ve gazed into that window, I haven’t seen any people. Nor have I seen the interesting furniture moved about. The place looks like what one might think an old time editor’s office would look like. This makes me think it’s probably a living loft for someone.

For the most part there’s an enormous glare coming off windows and, fortunately for the sake of privacy, we can’t see very much of the interiors of these apartments. However there are all sorts of windows out there and they all look very different while, in another sense, they all look the same.

I suppose we can blame housing regulations for this. In the not too distant past, the City dictated that all landlords would be responsible for making windows energy efficient. There seems to be only one brand of window that fits this category (at least they all look alike – except for color) and almost all windows seem to have filled this bill.

To the left an older wood style window that isn’t very energy efficient
and is in the extreme minority among windows.
The right shows a newer casing that has been given some small sense of design.
This isn’t generally what you see.

The standard is less attractive from outside. Whether they move up and down (L)
or slide left and right (R) they’re not very pleasing, aesthetically speaking.

Many windows depend on the tenant to dress them up with plants and such (L),
however some older buildings have attractive lintels that
merge with these newer casings (R).

French shutters (that don’t seem to close – they’re just for dressing)
helps hide the standardized casings.

There are some attractive variations such as
the french style window that opens inward (L)
or the casing can open outward (R) – a bit less interestingly.

There’s also the shape of the window. I imagine these are much harder to
maintain or replace. I’m also not sure the casing is energy efficient.
But they sure are pretty.

Similar type windows appear midtown, but they’re probably more likely office windows.

Of course, in the older midtown office buildings there are plenty of attractive windows
that have been well maintained (despite the signage.)

There are also plenty of ugly windows even though the building, itself, was
obviously attractive at one time. Disrepair has set in like an old subway station.

I’d hoped to find that shark tank from the street level, as the New Yorker article
suggested, but it’s not quite that obvous to the pedestrian. I couldn’t find it.
I did find this house in construction (or is it deconstruction?).
Perhaps, the shark got loose and ate his way out of the building?

- It’s time to plug a couple of new dvds I have in stores.

If you’d ask me which are the favorites of all the films I did, three of these four being released would be among my choices. Other than The Hunting of the Snark, I’d have to name The Marzipan Pig as a great film. I also love Abel’s Island and The Story of the Dancing Frog. The fourth film, Jazztime Tale was for me a daring experiment. I tried for a musical climax since the film was about Fats Waller. It’s a purposefully soft movie that comes together during a performance by Fats. It’s not my favorite film, but it’s one that sure has become popular and successful.

You can find these dvd’s on Amazon for $12.99.
They’re $9.72 direct from the distributor, First Run Features.

I found this good review here.
Mike Barrier had nice things to say here. I’m proud of his comments: “The Marzipan Pig is the kind of book that would scare the pants off most Hollywood animators, skating as it does along the very edge of preciosity—and Michael uses every word of the book—but the Sporn version is mysterious and touching, and often beautifully animated.”
I also love all 9 reviews that appear on Amazon for the vhs tape of The Marzipan Pig.

From my blog:
Here’s a piece on Bridget Thorne‘s great backgrounds for Abel’s Island.
Here’s a sample of some of the storyboards for The Marzipan Pig that appear on the dvd.

Here’s a character from The Marzipan Pig. Tissa David animated the entire film, herself, and did a caricature of herself with this woman whose purse is stolen by an owl.
Stephan MacQuignon colored the drawing and Robert Marianetti added shading. Christine O’Neill did the cut and paste on the drawing to cel operation.

The followup to this pair of dvd’s will be a boxed set of six dvd’s to be released in October. You can see what all six dvd’s contain here.

The box set packaging appears below.

The boxed set will include these titles:
The Hunting of the Snark, The Marzipan Pig, Abel’s Island
Whitewash, Champagne, The Talking Eggs, The Red Shoes,
The Little Match Girl, The Story of the Dancing Frog,
Jazztime Tale, The Emperor’s New Clothes, Nightingale

– We started slowly on Everybody Rides the Carousel. There was a six month schedule for about 72 mins of animation. Three half-hour original tv shows for CBS about 24 mins each. They’d air in the late summer of 1975 just prior to the start of the new tv season. Each show would air a day apart from the others – three nights in a row.

John and Faith spent a lot of time – a lot of time – at RCA studios on 45th Street. (It’s
____ The carousel was bottom lit & became soft focus.____-_ now an IRS office.) They recorded many of voices playing the numerous parts in their show. I tried to time meeting them there a couple of times hoping to meet some of the actors (I particularly wanted to see Jack Gilford in action. He was doing an hilarious part with his wife, playing a couple of cranky old people in a diner.) It didn’t work out that way, but I did see the facility and heard parts in process.

The key staff working IN the studio (not counting animators who would, for the most part, work freelance) included Ida Greenberg. Ida was a brilliant checker/coordinator who’d started back in the Florida days of the Fleischer studio. (She told me a few great stories about Gulliver’s Travels.) Ida was a great woman, with the thickest New Yowk accent, who never seemed to buckle under pressure. I grew very close to her. I tried after that to have Ida everywhere I worked. She led Raggedy Ann’s I&Pt and R.O.Blechman’s special._____________ Art Babbitt animated some of the mimes.

Kate Wodell was a student of the Hubleys at Yale. She was a talented artist who’d moved into production during the making of Cockaboody and continued on staff there. Sometimes she colored, sometimes she animated, sometimes she did whatever was necessary. This was exactly how I moved into the studio and loved the experience. She worked with Faith for many years after John died.

Earl James was an animator who’d worked in the backroom of many NY studios from Paramount to Terrytoons to NY Institute of Technology. He also had done some comic strip work.

Earl was given the carousel to animate. This came from a couple of elaborate drawings John did. Earl worked 16 fld. using a 96 drawing cycle. It gave us a lot of opportunity to move in tight or stay wide. However, it was a nightmare that took forever. Joe Gray was hired to assist Earl. (Joe started during the Terrytoons strike and never left. He was a lifetime assistant like a handful of other noted names in NY.)

This scene moved so slowly through production that I kept jumping in to assist as well. I was a fast assistant, but that carousel slowed even me down. 8 horses moved in perspective in a circle; you got to see 96 different rotating views of all the horses. I’d guess the scene took about 10 weeks to complete.

I was also doing layout and animation of a lot of connecting scenes throughout the production. These were scenes that would have to blend from one animator to another, or John had decided to go in tight for a closeup. In one case with Art Babbitt’s mime character, I was asked to change it from two’s to four’s with a dissolve technique John taught me (he said they’d used it on Fantasia.)

There were four people in my room, Earl, Joe, me and Mark Hubley. He worked alongside me for most of the film. He colored artwork given him by Ida, who was working in the larger room next door. Mark and I had a good releationship going back the many years I worked there. He joined the studio once he completed college. Emily Hubley worked alongside Kate and Ida.

Two younger, more experimental animators were brought in by John. Adam Beckett had made a name for himself with the films he was doing at CalArts.
Fred Burns was doing some incredible work at UCLA. They both were very different and added their unique touch.

___________ Adam Beckett’s scenes included these two surreal images.

Adam did a scene a couple of scenes wherein office furniture floated about in a very complicated surreal cycle. Fred did this amazing scene of a roller coaster from the POV of the rider. He and I worked together a number of times after that, and we’ve stayed friends.

______________ Fred did this very elaborate sexual roller coaster.

I decided, last week, that I had a lot to say about this feature film. Hence, you’ll have to excuse me for reminiscing over the series of pieces I’m going to write. I also have some artwork – other than frame grabs – that I’ll try to share in future pieces.

- Last week I posted the first half of the book How To Make Faces by Frank Webb. This was a book on “how to draw faces” published in 1940.

I initially posted part of this book in August 2006. Its popularity inspired me to repost it with the remainder of the book added.

The first half takes the alphabet and builds up from there. This part takes simple shapes and does much the same.

When I initially posted the book I received an interesting letter worth posting again:

Hi,
Frank Webb was my great uncle, and I am very pleased to have found someone who still knows of him. I have a bunch of his stuff, and know a bit about his history, including him publicly proclaiming Walt Disney a crook! One of Franks drawings ended up in a sale to Disney, and renamed (from “Dippy Dog”) to Goofy. Thank you for including him here.

Darren Reese

Here’s the second half of the book.

(Click any image to enlarge.)_______

As I mentioned, every other page is a “Practice Page” where you’re supposed to try to draw the characters. For the first half of the book, these practice pages are blank (except for the type “Practice Page”), however in this second half some of the pages have an exercise at the bottom. These pages look like the one to the bottom left.
I’ve taken all of the remaining exercises and have ganged them up onto the image to the lower right.

__

- Back in 1976, I was working on John Hubley’s Bicentennial flm, PEOPLE PEOPLE PEOPLE. This was a short film, about four minutes long, that had about a million scenes. It told the history of the US (from the standpoint of populating and overpopulating) beginning 17760 BC and ending in 1976 AD.

It started with some lengthy scenes. As the film moved on, the cuts came faster, until they hit about 6 frames apiece toward the film’s end. The final scene, from space, was the longest in the film.

There were no characters that appeared in any more than one scene. That meant that with each scene, there were new setups, new characters, new colors, new everything. As a result, it took much longer than other films and was a difficult one to pull off. But like all other Hubley efforts, it was fun. Tissa David, Jack Schnerk, Lu Guarnier, Phil Duncan and Bill Littlejohn animated it. I colored about 2/3 of the film and animated at least a dozen or two scenes (some really were only 6 frames – like that auto shot posted). I also assisted/inbetweened all of the animators.

Swedes cut down all the trees in PEOPLE PEOPLE PEOPLE.

The studio, at the time, was buzzing because John and Faith had just sold a dream project to CBS. Everybody Rides the Carousel was an adaptation of Erik Erikson‘ 1956 book, Eight Stages of Development. Erikson was a psychologist who theorized that man goes through eight stages of development from birth to death, and he proceeds to break them down. The Hubleys took this book and broke these eight stages into horses on a carousel.
The three half hour Special shows for CBS would be about these carousel horses and the ride.

Each of the stages would be broken into two different subsets, and these would be depicted through stories which were roughly developed visually by John and Faith. Once the funding started to tricle in (about $450,000 for all three shows) they would cast their many actors and have them improvise in the recording studios to the storyboarded set pieces.

While those recordings progressed, the small studio staff was busied in completing animation, artwork and rendering of PEOPLE PEOPLE PEOPLE.

The man on the moon and the Irish immigrants.

Jack Schnerk animated the French trapper sequence. There was such a rush
on the scene that I remember Jack bringing it in saying he hoped it would work.
He’d done two drawings of snow for the blizzard. Both wildly different from each other.
He asked me to ink them, then flop the drawings and ink them again.
He’d exposed the four drawings on fours. He also had the trapper with
snowshoes walking on fours. He felt it would help us feel a struggle in his
walking through the snowstorm. He felt the fours might add weight.
The scene worked beautifully, and was excellent the first time out.
Not quite the way they’d have done it at Disney. Tricks of the trade.

Tissa animated a majority of the film. The ending, the man going to the moon to escape
the overpopulated earth was hers. I have the drawings somewhere and will post some of them soon.

- Last week we left off Part I of this storyboard sequence 19 with Phillip cutting his way through the forest of thorns trying to make his way into the castle. Maleficent watches from a distance and is getting more and more angry.

This is Ken Anderson’s storyboard presentation. The photographs of the board were loaned to me by John Canemaker, and I am indebted to him for it.

This is this photo of the board as is:

(Click any image to enlarge.)____________

Here are the rows of the board broken into two so that I can post them a bit larger.

1a

1b

2a

2b

3a

3b

4a

4b

5a

5b

The conclusion of this sequence remains.

If only he knew what he’s to face next.

- Walking up Bleecker Street (a block away from my studio) at 6am recently, I noticed a truck putting up the “Welcome to Greenwich Village” sign.

This sign is a mainstay of the Christmas decorations that don’t go up until October, so I was curious what it was all about. I assumed it had to do with tourists and Greenwich Village and summer.

I snapped a couple of photos and went onto work.
_________(Click any image to enlarge.)

You can see that the Christmas star is attached to the “wreath”-like banner.
Despite this people walk around in summer attire.

Then, yesterday morning at 7am I walked into the scene of people raising tents.

Workers are busy constructing their tents, working out of vans and trucks, busily building a small market which runs about four or five street blocks (about a ¼ of a mile.)

Here’s a scene at 7am and again at 11am after things have opened.

This is what Bleecker Street looks like from the other side of 6th Avenue.

All summer long, New York becomes littered with street fairs and festivals.
Automobiles travel an obstacle course through the city trying to move in and around
these outdoor markets.

All sorts of food is the main attraction from crepes to gyros . . .

from thai food to . . . thai food.

All this fresh fruit will add up to a lot of smoothies.
Anything that can be carried and eaten can be sold.

Clothing amounts to baseball shirts (where else will you find
Mets & Yankees side-by-side), scarves, belts or wallets.
Local stores join in by setting up a table and a tent
to sell samples of their merchandise.

Interestingly enough, I noticed last night that there was another one of these little market/festivals about five city blocks away. On the other side of Sixth Avenue at 8th Street (actually it’s Greenwich St.) another group of tents were selling happily.

Just so you don’t miss the current cartoon Barry Blitt (the cartoonist who did the famed New Yorker cover) printed in the NYTimes to illustrate Frank Rich ‘s Sunday column, I thought I’d post it (above). I hope McCain isn’t trying to navigate around the street fairs of New York.

- Here’s a walk I thought funny in the 1938 Popeye cartoon, Goonland. It’s part of Vol. 2 of the Popeye collection.

Drawing for drawing the animation in this film is hilarious. Everything seems to change sizes from frame to frame – just watch Popeye’s feet. They grow, then go back to size. Just the same, the cycle on the legs is very tight and feels as though it has some weight. This is a bit of an animation style that’s lost to CGI.

I’ve forced the drawings into a cycle – they aren’t meant to be. In the actual film, Popeye keeps perusing in other directions as the scene goes on. However, splitting it up like this gives us a chance to look a little closer.

Here are frame grabs followed by a QT movie of the cycle.

12
(Click any image to enlarge.)

34

56

78

910

1112

1314

1516

1718
1920

21__________________________________________
_______________________

[ Javascript required to view QuickTime movie, please turn it on and refresh this page ]

_________-______________Popeye scours Goonland withe very expressive arms.

Michael Barrier hit on something with his reviews of Wall-E and Kung Fu Panda. I’ve been thinking about it for quite some time, but I never really plunged into the thought. Two lines of his review stood out for me:

“The animation of machines is effects animation, and that’s really all we see in the first part of WALL•E.”

“What’s clear from WALL•E and Kung Fu Panda , as never before, is that computer animation is a dead end, a form of puppetry even more limited than stop motion.”

When I first saw Toy Story, I realized that the possibility of computer animation replacing traditional animation might actually exist. Nothing prior to that point led me to think that. What I didn’t expect was that I was watching the high point of the medium.

People concentrated on animating grass (A Bug’s Life), hair (Monsters Inc.), water (Finding Nemo) and, now, machines (Wall-E). Essentially, they were concerned with moving the technical capability of the medium forward and ignored the very real need of moving the characters with any REAL depth. Pixar and Dreamworks gerry-rigged stories around the capabilities of the new medium and animated around those problems. They’ve gotten to the point where they can successfully impersonate the things of real life.

However, if a well rigged commercial can feature computer animation that equals or betters something in Pixar’s best, or a live-action/computer-effx feature (such as Spiderman 2, which has a story almost identical in parts to The Incredibles, or The Dark Knight, which has superior performances to anything in Pixar) works better than the best feature animation scene, what’s the point?

They are animating Special Effects. The animated “Effx” in The Dark Knight are good enough to be invisible as animation. In Spiderman 2 it all looked animated, and I wondered if they were going to try to horn in on the Oscar’s Best Animated Feature category.

Mike Barrier should have gone further in his statement. All computer animation has become Special Effects. Someone moves the skeleton; someone adds the flesh; someone adds textures; someone adds lighting. Who’s responsible? It may as well be a car driving through a rain storm that turns into a desert. Oh wait, was that Cars?

The animation of Kung Fu Panda is closer to what I think animation is, but the movement of the characters has little to do with the actual characters. It’s just fast or slow and derived from the clichés of Kung Fu movies. There’s no character development that the voice over actors haven’t given it. It becomes a lot of little dolls zipping around beautiful backgrounds. Some scenes and animation from Mulan have it all over this feature.

The director is undoubtedly the “auteur” and when you have a Brad Bird who keeps challenging the movement to be more “human” it can work. His films work well, and he seemed to be onto something after The Incredibles. If he ever gets back to animation, perhaps he’ll help advance this medium. At the moment, for me, I don’t see much of a future here. It hasn’t moved beyond Toy Story other than technically speaking.

I’ve seen some recent grumbling about Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, but I think that film was light years beyond anything yet done in computer generated animation. Perhaps, it’s just my own sensibilities and taste boiling over. I’ve watched the Emperor in his new clothes for the past fifteen years. All I’m saying is we’re all getting cold.

The medium is floundering. When you get to see the Honda guy knocking on the glass screen of the TV and are pleased because it’s, at least, animated. No Flash fakery. It’s real animation. It’s alive.

Mark Mayerson has an excellent response to my negative comments on his blog with Babies and Bathwater.