Animation Artifacts &Hubley &Story & Storyboards 09 Nov 2009 08:40 am
Doonesbury Start
- Today it’s back to the Doonesbury well. Tissa David was brought on to do the sequence where the kids put on the Christmas pageant. Through these materials we can see how the sequence takes shape even before the animator/director gets to do any character posing.
She, of course, was given the script as well as the original voice track for the sequence. These are the pages for the sequence:
Cov
J1(Click any image on this post to enlarge.)
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J2 
J3Tissa also had a copy of the storyboard that John Hubley and Garry Trudeau did for the film. (Note that there’s no dialogue indicated. This is the way John and Faith worked. They’d memorized the track by the time they did the board.)
Tissa then took a bunch of specific frames from the board and blew them up. With these she decorated her walls all around her drawing table.
These drawings weren’t so much to act as models but as inspiration.
She plucked them from many different parts of the board even ones
that she did not work on.
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Here’s a drawing by Garry Trudeau that hung with the others.
Then, Tissa did her own board. She modified the scene arrangement and cutting. She always did this with John’s boards. He trusted her implicitly and gave her free reign to alter.
I only once saw them disagree about a scene – it was more about how it should be drawn. John won. he was the director.
This rough board Tissa did was only for herself. The drawing was quick and rough, and the images were small.
Finally, here are frame grabs from the actual sequence. Sorry, the colors are all over the place. The transfer is soft, and the colors never remain true.
J1
J2-3
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J5-6
J7-8
J9-10
J11-12
J13-14
J15-16
J17-18
J19
on 09 Nov 2009 at 10:31 am 1.richard o'connor said …
Trudeau’s drawings here are terrific. It makes me wish the strip was still drawn with his hand.
The rare case when an illustrator’s work is more expressive than Tissa’s.
Do you have her pencil drawings from this segment? It’d be interesting to see them before they were “cleaned up”.
on 09 Nov 2009 at 4:15 pm 2.Grant said …
Neat. But where’s the art for the fantastic special “Carlton, Your Doorman?”
on 09 Nov 2009 at 4:18 pm 3.Eric Noble said …
Great post. Those are fantastic storyboards. I actually like the Doonesbury comic strip. I haven’t read it in a while, but I remember reading it and I liked it. Thank you for sharing these. I wish somebody would bring this out on DVD, along with John Hubley’s other work of course.
on 09 Nov 2009 at 4:29 pm 4.Michael said …
The Carlton the Doorman special was by Fred Wolf and Chuck Swenson. There was recently (Nov. 3) a retrospective Jerry Beck held for Fred Wolf; perhaps that show was part of that event (I realize your question was meant to be a snide joke, but it was a serious show for those who made it.)
on 09 Nov 2009 at 7:57 pm 5.richard o'connor said …
This was released on DVD:
http://www.amazon.com/Doonesbury-Special-Various/dp/B001WAXX0G/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1257810924&sr=8-2
It has two other shorts, one by Faith and another from the 70s (my copy in on loan but I’m sure Michael knows what’s on it.)
on 10 Nov 2009 at 8:36 am 6.Michael said …
There was also a green-packaged DVD for Everybody Rides the Carousel which also contained Doonesbury and Faith’s My Universe, Inside & Out.
on 10 Nov 2009 at 9:30 am 7.Charles Brubaker said …
Richard,
I should point out that Trudeau does still draw the strip. All of it except for the inking and lettering, which is by somebody else.
I’ve seen the pencil work and it’s very, very tight.