Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

- Today is the last day of the MOMA show. I’ll be chatting with John Canemaker and Josh Siegel on stage. We haven’t really gone through it; we do have a program of clips that skip across the horizon of my studio’s history, but we haven’t really discussed the conversation. Anything goes, I guess. The problem they’ll have is stopping my talking.

Among the films to be shown tonight are a lot of clips from the half hours, the titles to Garbo Talks (which hasn’t come out in dvd). I’ll talk about this piece maybe later this week. We’re going to show two versions with two different music tracks. Bob James, a great jazz pianist (he did the music for TV’s Taxi) did the original.
I have his temp track against a pencil test to screen.
He was stupidly replaced after a test screening.
Cy Coleman did the final version, a more lush and romantic track. Different. It didn’t hit the spots, just glossed over them.

We’ll also show a couple of new pieces. Pab’s First Burger was finished this past July. It’ll start the show. Gertrude On The Beach was finished a month ago. It’s a film I did with Rick Litvin to a song sung by his wife, Lucy Kaplansky‘s excellent recording. That’ll screen toward the end of the program. We’ll end with a clip from the animatic of POE. It’s a section done by Tissa that features Hugh Dancy’s voice.

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- Yesterday, I went to the last two shows which were repeated from Saturday. I have to say that each program was wholly unlike the others. Just a completely different tone. The audiences for both shows on Sunday were about half full. Dave Levy and Ray Kosarin were there, and we sat together. They stayed for both shows. I was told that Saturday’s shows were packed, and I know of about a dozen or more animation people who showed up. I assume there were more since I was told they applauded whenever my name came on screen and did the same for Tissa David with The Marzipan Pig. That also happened a couple of times on Sunday. Ok, maybe I was the one who started applauding, and the rest of the audience followed.

Yesterday morning, Tissa and I had a good conversation about these two programs. We went through them all and talked about what worked and what didn’t, what held up and what seemd to have dated. Of course, we also talked about the fun of making some of them.

Tissa has never liked the backgrounds for The Marzipan Pig (though I do). She was sad when Bridget Thorne wasn’t available to do them since she loves Bridget’s work. (Bridget was having her second child during the course of that production and had bigger things to do.) Tissa would have preferred a delicate watercolor style rather than the oil pastel style I chose.

Watching that film again after all these years was every bit as enjoyable. It’s a really fine movie. Tim Curry‘s voice performance has to be one of the best I’ve heard in animation. He’s such an excellent actor but gets so much trash to do in animated films. I take pleasure in knowing that his first was for me in Abel’s Island.

Mike and Phyllis Barrier, with Bill Benzon, arrived in time for the final program. It was great seeing them again, and we completed the day by going out for drinks afterward. Sardi’s seemed appropriate given the theater strike in progress.

Since I’m a bit tired of all this self-promotion, I’ve decided to dress up this post with paintings I photographed in the museum yesterday.

- Yesterday, the NY Post had an interesting article about BEOWULF. Not the animation vs MoCap issue, but MoCap vs live actors. This is not animation. I repeat: this is not animation. However, there’s a nice chance that studio money could help it get the Best Animated Feature Oscar. This is definitely the time for the Academy to start writing new rules.

Theres an article in today’s NYTimes telling us why it took a year to make the Spongebob Squarepants special which airs tonight. Maybe they’ll be able to switch to MoCap if they do one next year.

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