Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

Remember when. Here are some baby pictures I first posted back in January 2007. I love this post so much, I ejoy showing again.

- Here are some of the grouped staff-shots we used to do a lot. For some reason we haven’t done any in the past ten years; maybe it’s because the numbers of people working here are quite a bit fewer. I guess it’s still worth while for posterity’s sake. We’ll do it soon.

I love these.

The Lyle crew, back in 1987:

These are, Back row L to R : Lisa Crafts – animator, Tom Repasky – coloring, Susan Tremblay – coloring, Madeline Fan (full pic w/T-shirt) coloring, Caroline Skaife (leaning on Madeline) – coloring, Mark Baldo (w/puppet Lyle) coloring, Doug Vitarelli (leaning on Caroline) runner, Theresa Smythe – asst. animator.

Front row, sitting, L to R: Caroline Zegart – coloring, Steven Dovas – animator, John Schnall – Prod. Coordinator/Animator, Ray Kosarin – Asst. Animator/coloring, Michael Zodorozny – Layout, Bridget Thorne – Art Director/Bgs.

The Abel’s Island group, 1988:

Back row (L to R): Betsy Bauer (colorist), Ray Kosarin (asst animator/colorist), Laura Bryson (behind Ray) (colorist), Robert Marianetti (Prod Mgr), Theresa Smythe (colorist), Mike Wisniewski (asst animator/colorist)
Center row (L to R): Steve MacQuignon (colorist), George McClements (asst animator/ colorist), Greg Perler (editor)
Bot Row (L to R): me, Bridget Thorne (Bg’s)
Not pictured in the photos is Kit Hawkins, my assistant, who took them.

After the move to 632 Broadway a small group working on Baby’s Storytime:

Back row L to R: Theresa Smythe, Mike Winiewski, Ray Kosarin, George McClements.
Sitting L to R: me, Jason McDonald, Steve MacQuignon, Mary Thorne, Masako Kanayama

Here’s a birthday party in 1992:

The whole staff and party:
(Back row L to R) colorist – Christine O’Neill, Masako Kanayama, Sue Perrotto, Steve MacQuignon, Ray Kosarin, Liz Seidman, Marilyn Rosado
(Fron row L to R) Ed Askinazi, Jason McDonald, Xiaogang He, Denise Gonzalez, Rodolfo Damaggio. I’m probably off camera still looking at the picture, or else I’m taking the picture.

A Christmas party back in 1996:

This is the crew just after the Secret Santa and just before the party.
Back L to R: Ed Askinazi – editor, Liz Seidman – prod coord, Matthew Sheridan – asst, Stephen MacQuignon (hidden) – colorist, Denise Gonzalez (in yellow) – publicity/asst, Sue Perotto (in red) – animator, Jason McDonald’s head – colorist, Masako Kanayama – production supervisor, Rodolfo Damaggio – animator, Marilyn Rosado – office manager.

This is the staff during the making of a pilot for Blackside Entertainment, The Land of the Four Winds. It’s another birthday picture. Lots of color deterioration in the photo. The exposure isn’t great – you can barely make out Champagne’s face.

Sitting around the table L to R: Farid Zacariah (runner), Greg Duva (Asst Anim), Adrian Urquidez(I&Pt), David Levy (Asst Anim), John "Quack" Leard (Asst Anim), Jason McDonald (design, I&Pt), Ed Askinazi (Editor), Robert Marianetti (Prod Coord), Heidi Stallings (casting), me.

Here’s one a couple of months later (a better photo by Kit Hawkins – who was also on staff then.) It celebrated Farid’s last day – our all around guy.

Back row standing L to R: Miho Moyer (I&Pt), Robert Marianetti (Prod Coord), Christine O’Neill (I&Pt), me, Jason McDonald (design, I&Pt), Tara Dolgopol (I&Pt)(in front of Jason), John “Quack” Leard (Asst Anim), Adrian Urquidez(I&Pt), Laura Kurucz(I&Pt), Francisco “Cisco” Sanchez(runner), David Levy (Asst Anim).
Front row kneeling L to R: Farid Zacariah (runner), Laura Bryson (Bg’s), Madeline Fan (Asst Coord), Greg Duva (Asst Anim), Ed Askinazi (Editor)

I’m sure this is boring for a lot of you, but I had fun.

By the way, you can enlarge all images by clicking them.

Tissa David study for The Marzipan Pig

- During the summer months, it seems that HBO is airing one of the Sporn films every day and screening each film twice. Once at 7:30am and again at 10:00am (EST). You can locate the complete schedule on our main website. Just click the “August” button.

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- In case you haven’t seen this yet, here’s a photo of the original desk Walt Disney built in his Uncle Robert’s garage when he began work on his Alice in Cartoonland series. This was just after his move to California. Having finished the first of the Alice films, he was able to sell Margaret Winkler on this new series. Fortuitous timing. She was distributing the very successful Felix series, and Pat Sullivan was pulling out from her distribution after his contract expired. She needed a new series to take its place, and hoped that the Alice series would do just that.

The camera, itself, was bought used for $200. Walt built the stand, himself, and used the camera for both the live action and the animation. Presumably this was the stand on which Steamboat Willie was shot. The photo was taken in the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles where Disney donated the stand.

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- From the “Hard to keep a good man down” department, Robert Zemeckis is signing with Universal Features to bring his Imagemovers company to their lot. This is the group that was just pushed out of Disney after the losing track record of Mars Needs Moms and Beowulf. The Universal deal would be an overall production pact. Terms and length are still being finalized, but the arrangement would call on Zemeckis to develop and produce both live-action and motion capture projects.

It’s not yet known whether the film he just contracted to do for SONY, How to Survive a Garden Gnome Attack, would be done on this deal. The good news is that we can still see a motion capture version of the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine.

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– Lee Corey writes that he recently completed 30 sec PSA with the music group he designed, “Walleye and the Fish Band”. The PSA is playing in 360 theaters in the Great Lakes area. The spot confronts the problem of about VHS disease, (viral hemorrhagic septicemia), a disease which has decimated 17 species of fish in the Great Lakes, and while it is not contagious to humans, it is severely affecting the aquaculture of the region.

On completion of the PSA, Corey was hired to do a two minute music video featuring the band singing its “hit” song “Help Save Our Waters” with lyrics suggesting tips anglers and boaters can take to help stop VHS disease.

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- Bill Plympton and Pat Smith have put together a program of new 2D films to be screened in Williamsburg, Brooklyn next Sunday night. They call it the Scribble Junkies Festival of Drawn Animation. Hallelujah! Someone is still giving drawn animation some respect. We need more of this. Tony White’s 2D or Not 2D Festival is another incarnation of this on the West Coast, and we hope lots more start showing up.

Drinks start at 7pm, screening at 8:30. It includes recent work by animators Ryan Woodward, Bill Plympton, Patrick Smith, David Chai, Colleen Cox, Rebecca Sugar and more! Hope to see you! For more info go to the blog.

Sunday, August 14 at 7:00pm
Location: Nite Hawk Cinema, 136 Metropolitan Ave.

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- The Rauch Brothers, again, this year will have short films accompanying the POV show on PBS. No More Questions and Miss Divine are scheduled to air on Aug 23rd.

- Last week I posted a bunch of beautiful covers to Walt Disney Comics from the 40′w. For the most part they were done by Walt Kelly, and they were stunning. Here, thanks to another beautiful lode sent me by the inestimable Bill Peckmann, are some more of these wonderful covers by Kelly (except where noted). They are all gems. You can see the hint of Pogo starting to peek through in the non-Disney, secondary characters. Such clear composition and such clean design.

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This is Carl Barks’ second cover that he did for “Comics and Stories”.

Many thanks, again, to Bill Peckmann for sharing his immense and invaluable collection.

I’m reading Walt Before Mickey: Disney’s Early Years. 1919-1928 by Timothy Susanin, and I’m really enjoying it. I’ll give a review when I’m done with it. Interesting that Karl Cohen sent an article my way about silent animation. I did a short skip and a hop and found a couple of others (though none about Disney). So, today’s post will be some of those articles.

Karl Cohen of ASIFA San Francisco sent this article by Wallace Carlson about his “Dreamy Dud” series from the Movie Pictorial magazine.

cover of issue

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But then I found this article to pair with it.

And as long as we’ve posted that one, we may as well offer this Photoplay Magazine article by J. R. Bray from the January, 1917 issue.

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Finally, here’s an article Bud Fisher wrote for the Motion Picture Herald July 1920.
(This one took a lot of cleaning up to get it to be legible.)

Continuing with my recaps of Bill Tytla’s Disney animation, I’ve put together a couple of past posts to show you some of the beautiful drawing Tytla did on Fantasia‘s Night On Bald Mountain sequence.

- Here’s what for me was a real treat to scan and post. I had some limited access to actual drawings by Bill Tytla of the Devil from Fantasia. The drawings are mostly roughs by Tytla, and they give a good sample of what his actual work looked like.

I don’t need to write about it; let me just give you these mages.

A good example of a Tytla drawing.

Here’s the clean up of the same drawing.

Later in the same scene.

Some Tytla sketches.

Animation roughs don’t get any more beautiful than this.

A side-peg pan.

Rough heads.

Art. What else need be said?
The individual drawings are stunning, and they’re
in service to a brilliantly acted sequence.
It will never get better.

- Going under the assumption that there never are enough of Tytla’s Devils on the internet, I’ve got a few drawings to show here.

These were photographs of drawings taken (rather dark exposure that I lightened a bit) of what appears to be some cleanups. Most of them are from one scene; one drawing is from another. They’re all treasures.

How do you go from delicate Dumbo’s bath to this? That’s acting!

(Click any image to enlarge.)

- We return to the Disney Action Analysis notes for the classes held at the studio in after hours in early 1937. (You’ll remember that we left off with the April 5 notes that were posted out of order. Thanks to Mike Barrier contributing those notes that I didn’t have.)

Here we have the notes for April 19, 1937. Screened is a loop of a Charlie Chase action. Chase was a Vaudevillian who slipped into silent movies, became a star in the Hal Roach studios. When sound came in his star fell a bit. He performed minor roles in many films including Three Stooges comedies. He died in 1940 at the age of 46.

Taking part in this session are the following: Bill Shull, Ken Peterson, Bernie Wolfe, Roy Williams, Robert Leffingwell, Milt Neil, Joe Magro, Paul Satterfield, Jimmie Cullhane, Stan Quackenbush, Izzie Klein, Jacques Roberts, and Bill Tytla. They are definitely looking at him with the dwarfs in mind.

Here are the notes:

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Acts as the cover page

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A small note on these documents. Some of you may have noticed that infrequent peg holes show up on some of the scans on the left side. This is because the originals were printed on 5 hole animation punched paper. A couple of the documents I’ve posted came from originals, but many of these are copies of copies and the image of the holes has vanished into the old Xerox ether.

- We’ve been looking at the Disney multiplane camera, but let’s keep going back in time. The Fleischer studio had its own 3D setup, and it was very different from the Disney version. Little cartoon sets were constructed on a horizontal setup with the cels being placed in the foreground of the set. These sets could move east and west or in a circular motion. The 2D animated cels stood in front of the moving set and it gave the effect of a 3D world behind them. The end result was to show the 2D cels moving in front of a 3D set.

Here are some stills and artwork showing how the contraption worked.

Images from the patent application for the Fleischer 3D multiplane camera.

The actual camera at work.

How it worked.

Images above from Modern Mechanix/November 1936

One of my favorite cartoons that really showed off this process, was a color cartoon called, The Little Dutch Mill. There was a lot of rotation of the characters running and skipping around the mill, which, of course, had the blades turning. It felt like the rotation was 360°, but that certainly couldn’t have been the case. But it was well planned to make it feel as though that were happening. Here are some grabs of scenes that employed the specialised camera.

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Disney still had the rights to Technicolor, so the
Fleiscers used the 2-strip Cinecolor – orange & green.

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Here’s the first scene done as flat art.

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A LS of the 3D mill . . .

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. . . which revolves as the kids enter the scene.

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The closer shot of the kids looks flat, especially with that animated windmill blade.

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The mill isn’t revolving here.

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But the camera zip pans across to some 3D scenics.

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We follow a woman carrying water as she walks . . .

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. . . into town. 3D movement on the BG.

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The woman, the picket fence level, and the
churning family have to match the BG movement.

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We stop on some kids & a woman churning butter.

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A dachsund leads a cart with a lazy guy.

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The town moves in 3D perspective.

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The dog & cart cycle is repetitive.

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The cart turns toward the camera leading us toward . . .

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. . . a shoeshine boy carving away at the wooden shoe.

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Weird zip pan back.

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. . . to countryside that we seem to have seen before.

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Continue panning to . . .

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. . . the old miser/villain of the short.

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He rattles his nasty complaint.

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He steps on three tulip plants.

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He stops to beg a coin from a fat guy with a pipe.

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Another Zip pan to screen left.

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Back to the revolving mill. The kids are dancing with their duck.

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They continue to dance around the mill.

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Cut to some flat art as the miser approaches the mill.

There are a lot of other scenes that reuse the master BGs of the mill.
There’s only one other scene I want to feature which isn’t repeated frequently. Within the miser’s home, the town saves the day by cleaning things up. We get a pan across the place once the town has wiped everything down.

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We get a simple pan across the mill interior.

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The pan shows off the 3D camera well. Everything is modeled and well constructed.

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There’s no animation in the scene, so the BG looks great.

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Most of the other interior shots of the mill are flat art,
so this scene is a stand-out.

Basically, other than a sweet story creatively told, there’s little more than the wonderful scenery moving. Oftentimes there’s not even animation or there are animated cycles moving in front of the panning BGs. The one regret is that the film hadn’t been done in
3-strip Technicolor.

- As any follower of this blog knows, I am a fan of the thousands of Psychics that fill New York’s stores and streets. I have always been intrigued with them, and only when I’d read a New Yorker article about 12 years ago (I haven’t been able to relocate it) did I learn what those people were doing in there and how they were paying their rent. (Mostly selling crystals.)

Lately, all those storefront shops have been moving upstairs. I’m sure the rents are enormous for them to cover and available space is probably a problem. There seems to be a predilection, these days, for the Psychics to move on up to the 2nd floor of buildings. This means they have to get attention downstairs – passing out flyers, having big signs that you could trip over, and taking out cheap newspaper ads.

I photographed a few of these 2nd floor psychics and present them here.

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This is one store I noticed up on 46th Street as I was coming home from the theater.

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This is all that can be seen of one I shot on Prince Street a couple of weeks ago.
Upstairs are apartment windows. It’s not a commercial space.

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This is the entrance to one on 29th Street and Sixth Avenue.
I’ve never seen the street floor open.

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Here’s the upstairs store of the 29th Street Psychic.

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This is the entrance to a shop on Fifth Avenue and 30th Street.

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It leads upstairs to this shop.

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This sign greets you on 29th Street and Lexington Avenue.

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Upstairs they’ve designed it to look like the street floor restaurant
is part of the business. The place just looks huge.

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Here’s their upstairs sign which I find very attractive.

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This is actually the first of the 2nd floor psychics that I noticed. About five years ago.
It’s located on Varick (Seventh Ave.) and Houston Street. A busy street corner in Soho.

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Though, in fact, I didn’t really notice that it was a Psychic’s shop.
I saw the blue, and I read the “Mystic Visions” but I never put two and two together.

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The entrance on Houston next to an uptown subway stop.

There are quite a few others. You just have to keep looking up.

- A month ago, I did a post on the use of the multiplane camera in Peter Pan. Thanks to some comments and questions by Milt Gray, I was made to question whether the flying sequence from the feature was done with multiplane or many-leveled out-of-focus-painted clouds. One quote in Bob Thomas’ original book, The Art of Animation, settled the question for me. In listing some of the great sequences done using the multiplane, Thomas lists this flying sequence: “Another memorable sequence: the flight over London in ‘Peter Pan,’ with the runaways (or flyaways) sailing through the clouds. The scene was painted by Claude Coats.”

But now, Hans Bacher, on his brilliant site One1more2time3′s asks the question again. This time Hans, in his stunning way, has reconstructed the enormous Bg of this scene, then reconstructs the layout of the scene (with its many complicated rotations and pans), and finally details why he believes it did not use the multiplane camera. This is an amazing post and is throughly deserving of a long look at what Hans has constructed. I’m in awe.

A layout posted on Hans Bacher’s blog

But that Thomas quote still keeps me questioning it. After all Thomas would have been writing the book in 1957 or 58, and surely the people involved in this scnre were among those Thomas spoke to. In fact, Claude Coats is given some strong attention in the book. Would he have gotten it wrong to call the scene a multiplane camera scene? I’m not convinced.

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- Leo Sullivan and Floyd Norman have teamed together to work on an animated short about the Tuskagee Airmen. The short, titled The Tuskegee Redtails, has just been posted to Kickstarter; the film makers are seeking to raise $55,000 for the production.

Some of the description given on Kickstarter reads:

The Tuskegee airmen were so called because most of the African American pilots were trained at Tuskegee University in Alabama during the 1940s. Through their bravery and actions, the Tuskegee airmen joined the ranks of other patriotic Americans who defended the United States of America against the Axis military powers during World War 2.

The animated short will take a snapshot in time of the Tuskegee airmen obstacles and achievements.

The film will be “an animated short in 2D combined with CGI animation approximately 20 minutes.”

Leo Sullivan‘s bio reads: “Leo Sullivan is the President/CEO of Leo Sullivan Multimedia, Inc. a California S-Corporation which produces educational and entertaining media for children ages 5 to 17 years. Prior to incorporating his company, Leo worked in the animation industry as an animator, layout and storyboard artist, director, and producer for various companies which included Hanna-Barbera, Warner Brothers, Spunbuggy Works, Campbell/Silver/Cosby and others. ”

Floyd Norman‘s bio reads: “Floyd has contributed his talent to motion pictures, television shows and comic books for over fifty years. He has the distinction of having worked with the Old Maestro himself when the boss recruited him for the story team on what would become Walt Disneyʼs final motion picture.

A veteran story development artist, Norman has worked as an animator and story artist on at least a dozen films for both Walt Disney Studios and Pixar Animation Studios.”

I’d recommend that everyone take a look at their proposal and help out if you can. You can give as little as $5, if you’re able and would like to.

It’s interesting that just today George Lucas’ film, Red Tails, announced its opening. On January 20, 2012 the film will open, according to this NYTimes article. I hope the announcement brings added attention to Mr. Sullivan and Mr. Norman’s film.

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- This week some attention was paid by the animation community when they learned that the comic srip, Mutts, has been singled out to become a future feature with cartoonist/author Patrick McDonnell writing the script with his brother, Robert McDonell. This was the story from The Hollywood Reporter.

We had the good fortune a couple of years ago of doing a one minute animated piece for King Features Syndicate. We followed the look of the strip very closely and had a lot of fun doing it. Patrick McDonell was quite involved in the production asking for a number of good changes. If ever there were a strip made to be a 2D animated film, Mutts is it. he film will be made by 20th Century Fox. Does that mean it’ll look more like the Blue Sky films’ Horton Hears a Who, or will it be like Marmaduke and Garfield? (Meaning a live action film with animated characters.)

Hopefully, Blue Sky will do the animation if it’s cgi. At least they bring a little dignity to their work. Though we all know it should be a 2D film, but the Republicans are dominating the conversation in D.C. and cgi is dominating the conversation in animation.

All stills, here, are frame grabs from our spot.

Matthew Clinton did the bulk of the animation on this spot.

-Previously, I’ve posted a couple of short chapters from the great Arnold Roth book, A Comick Book of Pets.

You can see this chapter on cats posted a couple of weeks ago.

Arnold Roth was born in 1929 in Philadelphia, Pa. He attended public school and was awarded a scholarship to art school. He started free lancing in 1951 and continues to do so. Mr. Roth has had cartoons published in The New Yorker, Time Magazine, Sports Illustrated, Playboy, Punch and the NY Times. He’s worked briefly in animation for John Hubley and Phil Kimmelman. He currently lives in Manhattan with his wife and two sons.

This was sent to me by Bill Peckmann for posting. Many thanks to him for this generous contribution.

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A double page spread

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