* Asterisk Animation *

Preparation

2009-12-15T07:07:00.000-05:00

Researching a project on Thomas Eakins.

He was one of the great draftsmen of his time. His figures have weight, fluidity and emotion.

One thing that's not evident is the amount of preparation he put into his painting. I don't simply mean his then-controversial experimentation with photography and use of nude models for figure study (can you imagine that as controversial in art study?).

He planned out his work thoroughly beforehand.

Perspective study, including vanishing point.

Separate perspective study for wall.

Combination.

In the painting we're working with ("John Biglin in a Single Scull" -not the one pictured here) he went so far as to do a study of the piece -in oils -before executing his "final" watercolor.

"The Oarsmen" painted in 1874.

Great work comes from hard work.

Guinness Would Have Called This

2009-12-14T05:46:00.001-05:00

The gayest cartoon on Earth. And we wanted to make it.

I've written before about Maurice Vellekoop and how we love his illustration. We've developed a few projects with him, nothing has materialized yet.

A few years ago Logo (the gay oriented cable network) invited us to pitch show ideas. We began by reworking a great concept we had developed for a general audience.

Maurice had some new characters and created some -as usual -beautiful pieces of art for it.

After a lot of initial excited from the network, they claimed poverty. While we felt this was the sort of production a channel could build its identity around (much like Comedy Central did with South Park, then briefly Chappelle and now The Daily Show) it may have been a little too out of the ordinary.

Yes, that is Liza Minnelli.

They Call Me Energy

2009-12-13T05:41:00.000-05:00

One of our favorite projects to date remains WNET/Thirteen's "Curious".

Gail Levin introduced us to Mark Mannucci while we were working together on the pilot for Little Pim. A few months later his producer, Tara Thomas, sent us an email to see if we were interested in working on their science show.

The first assignment was to design an "artificial leaf", or the graphic explanation of it anyway.

The trick with science pieces is to be both accurately informative and at the same time clear enough that a layperson can understand. I'll mention that beautiful design is paramount, but feel as though that should go without saying.

Here is one of our initial design studies with a variation.

See the final segment here. It ultimately turned out very differently, but the tactile look of the graphics remains intact.

Links/Credits

2009-12-12T06:14:00.000-05:00

We've been fortunate to have some terrific artists in the studio recently -most working on the Buddha.

As that project wraps up we would like to share some of their websites.

Doug Compton has done a lot of the animation. While he hasn't been "in the studio" per se, he has done a few thousand drawings.

Larry Ruppel also animated a sequence.

As did Fran Krause.

And Elliot Cowan.

Ed Smith doesn't have a website, but he did a terrific job on one segment.

Carolyn Green has worked with us on and off for the past few years. She's done a lot of assistant work on this.

Liesje Kraai has been helping on this and several other projects. For the Buddha she's done mostly compositing and art production with some assistant animation.

I liked Kelly Gallagher films a lot. I was surprised to find out she did them all the old-fashioned way. She's been helping with with art production.

And few without websites: Kristen Collins and Jessica Ng both worked in the studio for the past two summers, Kristen has stayed on part time through the school year. Jonny A has done art production three days a week for the past few months.

Marina Dominis has been responsible for the lion's share of the design.

"Most Valuable Player" award goes to Christina Riley who did a little (well, a lot really) of just about everything. Animation, assistant work, compositing, art production and good deal of figuring out. Without her, there's no way a complex and diverse project like this could get done.

And the biggest credit of all goes to David Grubin who concocted the crazy notion of using animated segments to personalize the story of the Buddha.

Lower Thirds

2009-12-11T06:58:00.000-05:00

Doing a lot of documentary work -graphics, animation, editorial -means we've had to deal with "lower thirds" more than any sane would care to.

Wednesday I spent most of the day dealing with this on three projects.

One was a one-day job.

Elliot Cowan did the design on this. I just knocked out the versions (right/left, different names).

That's not actually the Health Secretary.

That was fairly straightforward. News broadcast, tight deadline.

The lower thirds for The Buddha are more complicated.

First we're designing and drawing the lettering. There are about a dozen total.

The bigger issue is the "cut off".

The film is produced in High Definition, 16x9. The above layout fits the safeties.

The distributors want the titling to ALSO fit within NTSC 4:3 title safety since some broadcast affiliates might just "center crop" instead of letterboxing. Needless to say... "ugh" (on so many levels).

Here's the difference:

The white is the full HD broadcast. The light pink is full NTSC raster, medium pink is "action" safety, dark pink is title safety.

So when the lower third is placed into NTSC title safety, this is what we get (and keep in mind, this is the most visually pleasing example).

Cover

2009-12-10T06:28:00.001-05:00

Sometime in the late 1950s Ed Smith took over editing the NY Animation Union Newsletter.

The most obvious change was his introduction of design and illustration to the monthly paper.

Animators like to think that UPA represented cutting edge art and graphics from the era, even the most avant garde of their productions (whether James Thurber, Saul Steinberg, or John Hubley's designs) were still a decade or so behind the young design lions of the day. UPA was exploring ground tilled by Ben Shahn and Works Progress Artists years prior.

Until about 10 years ago, print has always predicted trends in motion pictures. This newsletter cover from January 1964 anticipates where commercial animation was heading.

Cut Arrow

2009-12-09T06:39:00.000-05:00

Here's an unproduced storyboard from The Buddha.

We're finishing up this week and next. Things are on schedule, but hectic.

Buddha Tour

2009-12-08T05:29:00.001-05:00

Dan Sonnett from Sonnett Media came by yesterday.

He's building the companion website for PBS and David Grubin Productions' "The Buddha" for which we're creating 20 minutes of animation.

The site will contain a lot of our work and also "behind the scenes" into the process.

rough storyboard of composite and transition

Brian and I walked him through the process.

Research, boarding, rough designs. That's Dan in the foreground.

Marina Dominis, doing the thumb thing as proof she's an artist, working up production art/models for one of the final sequences.

Dan is incredulous when Carolyn Green tries to explain how many drawings it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop.

Brian explaining to Elliot Cowan how much he loves him.

The site should be up a running with a lot of animation content in a couple of months.

America

2009-12-07T06:06:00.001-05:00

While doing some cleaning found this map of the United States.

It was for the credit sequence we produced for a short film "American Dream".

Keiko Kuramoto drew it. I did one that was awful to show her the idea and she came up with this.

Valentine Notes

2009-12-06T05:38:00.000-05:00

Here are notes from Tissa David's animation class of 2/14/1991.

The first part gives tips on "treadmill walks" also called "cycling in space" in which the character remains in one place while the background pans behind.

BG moves at the same speed as animation
Legs should not shorten.
Legs should be on different level (to connote space/perspective)

There's then a diversion (pedagogically the diversion can be the strongest teaching tool) into a horse's tail.

Horse's tail should have straight lines to give the feeling of bone. Also gives more flow.

Page two

Pippa Pieces

2009-12-05T06:08:00.007-05:00

The Private Lives of Pippa Lee opened nationally last week.

I'll assume Verizon has once again screwed up on phone service, preventing the avalanche of new work from advertising bigwigs and movie moguls.

It's currently playing in two Manhattan theaters, Long Island, White Plains, and North Jersey so I assume most Americans will have a nearby theater screening it.

As I've written previously, our little bit of animation was very difficult to produce.

The characters were more like portraits than caricatures, making the reproduction exceedingly difficult. On top of that Leah Tinari's painting style is specific in its shape and shading, but our production required too many shortcuts to match each of these specificities.

We did animate a shadow pass. Here's an example on the Winona Ryder character.

Doug Compton did the animation. Several young artists worked on the assisting.

We also asked Leah to create the backgrounds herself. Placing the animated approximations of her characters into an environment fashioned by her own hand gives them some authenticity (we hope).

Liesje's Painting

2009-12-04T07:00:00.001-05:00

I looked at several Fred Mogubgub paintings a few weekends ago.

He turned from animation to painting in the late 1970s. The earliest dated painting I have noted is from 1980.

While some of the work is quick and rough, it's all meditative. Most move very far from his 1960s films -in form at least. The connection is not overt, not obvious but the more you live with these paintings the more their connection to that vibrancy becomes evident.

The melancholy of his film "Unknown Reason" from the early '70s carries through in much of the work, its ethereal spirituality even more.

Through this a pop sensibility remains. Many of his canvases he "defaced" with broad strokes of color overtop of intricately detailed portraits.

Liesje Kraai picked up this piece.

It's initialed, not signed, dated 1985.

This was after his work on "The Soldier's Tale" and a few short years before his death.

Princess and The Frog for Christmas

2009-12-03T07:11:00.000-05:00

It's going to start getting "Christmasy".

We've already gotten our first card of the season (thanks Buzzco!).

A few months ago we received an early Christmas card, of sorts, when Doug Compton sent his film, "Nuttin For Christmas". He'd been working on it for a year and created the whole thing himself. Drawn, scanned, digitally painted.

The most amateurish question we're asked (with surprising frequency) is if animation is on "one's" or "two's". The polite answer is "The best animation mixes it up." I won't write what the response should be out of fear of being labeled an obscene site by Google.

With that in mind, and the Princess and Frog on nobody's lips, I thought I'd post frame grabs of a single scene. Which demonstrates Doug's terrific sense of animation timing and spacing.

Each drawing is number according to the frame it appears in the shot. Missing numbers are holds. Example: there's no 8, 9, 10, 11 because 7 holds for those frames.

It's a lot of drawings but well worth the study.

Flame On

2009-12-02T05:45:00.000-05:00

We've had to do a lot of "effects" or dynamics animation for the Buddha documentary.

Many of it is stylized, such as this sequence in which water and flame shoot from every part of the enlightened Siddhartha as he walks a jeweled path in the sky.

Here's an early pencil test of the "shooting".

Christina Riley did the animation.

A few of the scenes were dropped. The close of the nostrils, for one, we felt was a little too snot-like.

Oh, Tiger

2009-12-01T06:37:00.000-05:00

This segment we produced at The Ink Tank for Between the Lions might shed some light on recent headlines out of Florida.

Tiger Words.

I did some of the animation. I think this also contains some of Patrick Smith's work. We did about six of these and would take parts from all of them and put them into the others. Steve Dovas did a lot, Tony Eastman may have done some. A few assistants around the studio did some scenes too. I'm pretty sure Scott Dodson did Tiger fumbling through his bag in this one.

I was very proud when we could make a whole two minute film by reusing 1:45 and just swapping out backgrounds.

Maciek Albrecht designed the characters. He storyboarded the first one too. After that, he just designed incidental props for new segments. The rest was auto-pilot.

Also, Fred Newman does the voice over. He did a good job.

Famous Cat

2009-11-30T06:16:00.002-05:00

Murray the Cat was recently hospitalized for week.

He's fine now.

Our friend Abby Denson recently published "Dolltopia" in which a cartoon Murray plays a part.

A former production artist at the studio created this painting of him.

And here's a portrait in felt on a scarf Dame Darcy made for me.

Old Tricks for New Dogs

2009-11-29T06:14:00.001-05:00

Here's a little cameraless animation experiment. Its on clear 16mm leader with colored Sharpie.

I'm not sure if I did this, I might have. But it's more likely the work of a super talented former intern, Victoria Harris, who was last heard of entering her second semester at SCAD.

Incomplete Claim Form

2009-11-28T06:02:00.001-05:00

We pitch or "bid", on average, about a project a week. Fortunately, we have pretty high success rate -mainly because most of our work is repeat business or personal referrals.

Sometimes we'll create artwork for the pitch, more often we'll be contracted to make some pitch art -a stipend generally, but a demonstration of a "serious" client.

It's easy to forget to these little jobs. Occasionally I'll come across remnants from one.

In honor of the likely passage of our nation's first universal health care legislation, here is art from an aborted corporate video.

Illustration by Matthew Stoddard.

On The Leeds Side Streets

2009-11-27T07:13:00.000-05:00

Why do hundreds of thousands of children dream of being rockstars? Why so few longing to be animators?

So Disney is opening a new picture this weekend. So Cartoon Network is cutting back on its programing. So Nickelodeon is doing something too.

If I were 8 years old I might care. By the time I turned 9, I had discovered the turntable and my father's record collection. I discovered a digestible artform which was mysterious and exciting, and artform which continued to speak to me as I matured.

Cartoons? Not so much.

And just as pop music loses its excitement, something unexpected comes along and reminds why its so powerful. The first time I heard Cornershop in 1995, even Belle and Sebastion (better than Disney, not up to Cocteau) a few years later, The Handsome Family's "Milk and Scissors"; these sounds and stories make profound visceral impact.

Animation has done that to me maybe four, five times. JJ Villard's "Son of Satan", Hubley's "Eggs" (not surprisingly, it was probably the music), Fierlinger's "Drawn From Memory".

Live film emotionally connects with mature audiences as a matter of course. When I hear people bemoan the goings on at Disney or another behemoth corporation that entertains toddlers it's hard to imagine any relevance to my life.

Thanks

2009-11-26T07:06:00.001-05:00

Today I give thanks for my exciting and charmed life.

Could my parents and grandparents have imagined the interesting people I've known and the incredible things I've been a party to?

For many years I celebrated this day with the Blechman family in their elegant Central Park West apartment.

One of my appearances there was documented by Lee Friedlander.

This is same room (with maybe the same camera) in which Lee Friedlander captured R. O. three decades earlier in this iconic photo.

Apparently, that was a mean cat.

Frame-able

2009-11-25T07:22:00.001-05:00

The glue binding is dried and cracked, popping pages from the security of the covers to an out-of-line inch. The pages are prematurely yellowed.

The content, strikingly vibrant.

In 1978 George Griffin, along with Victor Faccinto, Al Jarnow, Kathy Rose and Anita Thacher published "Frames", a paperback featuring work from roughly 80 experimental film and animation artists.

At the risk of violating the first page's "No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form with the written permission of the individual artist" -I'm going to get all "fair use" on y'all and post a three of my favorites.

Here's the letter sent to the contributors outlining the plan. Note: halftones must be veloxed (QuarkXpress doesn't seem so bad now, does it?).

The letter explains, eloquently, the term "animation"

"Animation" refers to both a frame by frame technique and a frame by frame awareness, including optical re-photography. In contrast to cinematography, which records real events, animation constructs a synthetic universe of time and space, resulting in the most radical form of illusion in cinema. By "personal" we mean work which transcends the technology so necessary to filmmaking, reflecting the artist's sensibility in every stage of the production process. Though "experimental" can inclue film made through new techniques it refers primarily to work which invents its own form, makes its own rules, thereby stretching the definition of the medium. This can apply to any of the various tendencies of independent animation: abstract, cartoon, conceptual, figurative, narrative.

This drawing by Suzan Pitt my immediate love upon flipping through the book.

The many of the artists featured in the book are still working today: Suzan, Candy Kugel, Karen Aqua, Tony Eastman, Jane Aaron, David Ehrlich, Sally Cruikshank, Ken Brown, Lisa Crafts and many more. Some are icons: Larry Cuba, Jules Engel, Robert Breer.

Others, their names have fallen from animation circulation and the simplest investigation makes you ask "why?" The work created by these artists in the late 1970s eclipses the independent animation produced today -and many are still creating interesting work across media.

Mary Szilagyi is a name I had heard, but knew nothing about. I knew she worked as an assistant "The Soldier's Tale" (and my memory may be failing, but I think R. O. Blechman told me she worked with Fred Mogubgub to make his segments camera-ready and fit into the rest of the film).

Her piece reminds me of Winsor McCay crossed with Lauren Weinstein.

Speaking of McCay, John Canemaker's contribution is a knockout. What a rare talent, an astute critic, a diligent historian, and a sublimely sensitive artist.

The collection showcases a wide range of artists, all using different techniques with different ends (although the recurrent influence of Steinberg is an obvious flavor for many of the contributors). Beyond that, the optimism -which springs from an intellectual understanding of what it means to animate - pervading the volume expects animation to a beautiful and profound art.

Big/Little

2009-11-24T05:13:00.000-05:00

Joey Ahlbum just posted his Sesame Street film "Tall Short Texans" on the YouTube.

Sesame Workshop could make a mint by publishing DVDs of their animated shorts. I'd buy at least two copies -so that's $40 right there. More than they're making off them now.

With Joey's knack for dichotomies in mind, we've been developing a pre-school series with him.

The Kindness of Strangers

2009-11-23T06:18:00.001-05:00

First, here's a great post on caricature and his lecture at SCAD by Steve Brodner.

*************

Last week I got an email from a collector in Long Island.

He recently purchased a lot of Fred Mogubgub paintings and invited me to see them.

This portrait is about two feet by three feet. It's covered in a glaze which gives it the look of a Byzantine icon -also preserving the paint to the point you can spill grape juice on it with little effect.

Also this painting, which needs a little repair.

A nude boy (or is he "naked" if he's wearing a jockey's cap?) conversing with two mermaids.

The front is titled "Jockey Club".

But the back is labeled "Still Pond" and priced at $3500.

Detail:

February 8, 1991 - Some Notes On Walks

2009-11-22T05:56:00.001-05:00

Here are notes from Tissa's talk on walks.

Click to enlarge.

1) Leg is always in the middle of the body
2) Foot is never level
3) Leg is always in an arc
4) Size of leg is always the same

In a walk, one foot is always on the ground.
In a run, one frame where no foot is on the ground.

Whatever your animation is on (ones, twos, etc), move the background on the same exposure.

Run: shorter the amount of drawings the funnier the run.

Huevos

2009-11-21T05:39:00.002-05:00

I can't remember exactly why I wanted to post this.

Oh, the animation. Tissa David animated. Igor Mitrovic assisted. From boards and design by Carlos Aponte.

A great animator can one thing very well. Tissa excels at soft, flowing animation with loose and beautiful lines.

But an even greater animator can do more than one thing.

Here the design is stylized and the movement, although on twos throughout is also stylized.

She told me that she hated animating these characters because they were so "hard" (the line and the angles -opposed to "soft"). Despite the difficulty she had, she did a great job. This is one of my favorites from The Ink Tank.