Post Card Post

These are some postcards Maciek Albrecht made in the early 90s.

As a (less and less) frequent user of the postal service, I have great appreciation for the post card.  The back -the letter side -doesn't have room for too much blabber but the front -the image -is worth, well, a few thousand words.

Maciek is a brilliant guy.  First class film maker and terrific artist.  These cards are a special treat.

He gave me these right around the time I was making little airbrush post cards.  If I find any that aren't too embarrassing I'll post them.

There may have been one or two more in the series, but postcards aren't worth anything if you don't post them.

Color Models

After the client bought off on Maciek's storyboard which was posted yesterday, he designed models for each scene.

These are scans of color copies of his layouts.

The conceit was to follow the make of a film from inspiration through premiere.

This is the most important step in the creative process.

I have a vague recollection that these were painted in Photoshop, but I think that's a false memory -conflating this with a later project.  Most likely they're acrylic on paper.

The ultimate project was shot on film.

 

We'll be starting up a project using Hirschfeld illustrations soon.

I mention this because we were discussing the Disney Hirschfeld recently.  As everyone knows, they "improved" on the master so much that the style is almost unrecognizable.

For us, it's a point of pride to reproduce the illustrator's work as closely as possible.  Even in something as idiosyncratic as this.

Sure, sometimes we fall short.  But c'mon -Hirschfeld.  You can't do any better than that.

So tomorrow we'll post the final (if I can find it.) And we'll how successful Maciek was in applying his illustrative vision to film.

This production process is obviously for live action if the score is coming this late in the timeline.

The Old Days of Future Television

Way back in the 20th Century a bunch of now-defunct phone companies got together with some snazzy Hollywood agents in an effort to create an on-demand television service over phone lines.

That venture, TeleTV, was ahead of its time in many ways.  We're now seeing increased on-demand through cable and most notably Netflix.

In more ways, TeleTV hit at the wrong time. The Clinton Adminstration's Telecommunications Act of 1996 opened up long distance services to regional carriers (the "baby Bells") which effectively forced the regional companies behind TeleTV to focus on new markets instead of new technology.  It also created the atmosphere which merged these regional phone carriers back into Bell Telephone sized megaliths.  The late 90s advent of the internet also threw the business for a loop.   Individuals gravitated towards this new medium and had little interest in the futuristic expansion of the old.

The good thing was that they still produced graphics packages.  We pitched a bunch at The Ink Tank.  We'll post some of the unsuccessful ones later.

First, here's a board which was produced.  Designed and directed by Maciek Albrecht.  We'll post the color models and final spot later.

Barenaked Things Come Out In Animation

Yuri Norstein's talk at SVA the other day reminded me of the last under camera cut out film I worked on.

The technique, for better and for worse, has been taken over by technology. It's the simplest method of animation and can be accomplished with minimal skill in any number of digital applications: anything from Final Cut Pro, a high end Discreet Logic/Autodesk (Flame, Smoke, Inferno, etc), Commotion, AfterEffects, Flash, and on and on.

One of the issues Norstein brought up with his technique is how "things come out in animation". A shot which was planned to be 3 seconds (OK 6 seconds, he's Russian) might go on twice as long.




We were given about ten days from first phone call to broadcast to produce a two minute concert opener for The Barenaked Ladies. The assignment was open, but they wanted us to incorporate the cover art from their album. They may have also said "kung fu", I don't remember.

This film was produced at Maciek Albrecht's place on Bedford Avenue. It was a tight crew, Maciek and Ellie, Matthew Salata and Megan Whitmarsh. Alex Reshanov may have helped out too.

The first step, as always, was the storyboard. We then created the art. Pieces were made in Photoshop, printed, affixed to bristol, cut out, edged (coloring the side of the board to match the color of the face) and attached into puppets. Many fingertips have been severed in the service of cut out animation.

A few days into shooting, Maciek pops out from his camera area and exclaims: "I am making a three minute film!"

"Maciek," I reply, still getting my "producer" sea legs, "it's only supposed to be 90 seconds, and it's due in three days."

"Some things come out under camera..."

He wound up filming a little more than three minutes, which Dave Courter edited down to 2:15.

One of the things that "came out" under camera was a missing right hand. The back up was also destroyed, but we had an extra left hand.

Maciek came up with the split second decision to backlight the characters into silhouette so you couldn't tell the hand was wrong. This also made the whole piece more dynamic. That's just one example of what a brilliant guy he is.

The piece was shot in color, but it looked better in black and white (another unconscious nod to Norstein, perhaps), so we drained the color in the Avid and made a hand delivery to backstage at Madison Square Garden.  Thousands of screaming teenagers whooped at the film which wasn't even a dream less than two weeks earlier.

Tito The Frog - Storyboard, Part Three

 

The animation for this was done by Krzysztof Giersz, Igor Mitrovic, Maciek Albrecht, Helena Uszac with a few revised scenes (after the piece was filmed and edited) by Ivan Abel -his first US job, I believe.

There were a few assistants.  One has gone on to "great things" in animation, but he did a terrible job on this and treated the project in a disrespectful way.  Despite talent, I will always remember how poorly he behaved towards this film.

  

At the time I was very excited about the character design. Maciek was working much looser than he typically had, the Steinberg influence was less and less apparent.

I had been helping Helena and Krzysztof write some pitches for Nickelodeon and shared the preliminary designs -also a ploy to get them interested in working on it.

Helena, inspired by them, reworked some designs she was doing for Nickelodeon.  Those drawings eventually morphed into "Dora the Explorer".

In true Viacom fashion, I will now take credit for "Dora the Explorer" based on this anecdote.

  

I met a person from Nickelodeon once and a film we had produced came up.  "I produced that!"  I was told.  With finishing school politeness, I managed to convey that my studio had actually made the thing and that it was such a fun difficult project we were happy for all the help the network gave us.

Of course, I was thinking "Who are you? How come I had no contact with you of the dozens of people I dealt with at the network?   Don't you think the $2000/week you got paid to 'produce' this film would have been better spent on the ACTUAL FILM?  Or at least bubble gum and comics?"

At least he had seen the piece, which is more than I can say for me and Dora.

   

 As I mentioned earlier, this piece was shot on film.

The backgrounds were all done in Photoshop, mostly by Maciek but Elli probably did a lot too.

They were printed on decent but not expensive paper.  Just about everything was animated at either an 8 field or a 10 field to accommodate for this.

  

The first scene and the last scene go through the doors of a little wooden house.  This was rigged up and shot (stop motion) on Maciek's downshooter.  It was on glass and the background was on a plane below.  The "house" was leveled on a makeshift multiplane which could move towards camera as the camera trucked in.

Reflections were an issue, and shadows, and general lighting.  Maciek managed to figure most of this out.  Ivan probably helped a lot too.

It's been awhile, I'm old and forgetful.

 

On the few scenes were we had to go to a twelve field, or longer -we simply cut print outs together.

The trick to that is to cut based on objects or patterns in the paper, not just straight lines. It also helped that the designs were "painterly" so a little texture would go unnoticed.

The "multiplane" set was only used for one other shot, a long pan with a forground character moving in.

Tito The Frog - Storyboard, Part Two

All of the voice work for Tito the Frog was done by John Leguizamo.

It's one of my favorite performances.

At the time Leguizamo was performing his one man show "Freak" on Broadway. This meant 8 performances a week which required two continuous hours of full strain on his voice.

His doctor told him not to speak at all between performances in order to reduce strain on his vocal chords.
 

This last panel is my favorite line.  "He's got no sense of humah!"

 

John Leguizamo had already agreed to voice the film before being put on mandatory voice rest.  Honoring his commitment he came, signing to us between takes, and delivered great take after great take.

This is one of the few films I've worked that has been "made" by the voice track.  Many have worked because of the music, but I can't think of any other with standout voices.

 

At the same time we were working on another piece for this same show using the voice of a VERY FAMOUS comedian.

That performer didn't bother to read the script before the record -patched fiber optically from the West Coast.  A fact made all the more embarrassing by his apparent inability to read at a 2nd grade level.  This turned to anger and a refusal to read the innocuous script on "moral grounds".  Amy Schatz, HBO's producer/director did a remarkable job of coaxing him through.  Ultimately, the whole reading was unusable and the voices had to be reconceived/recast.

 

The music was post-scored.  It's "standard" in a lot of films, but it's a process I don't like.

It's not a coincidence that all of the best animation is based on a solid music track.  

 

 

Tomorrow, we'll finish this board and write a little about the design and animation.

Tito The Frog - Storyboard, Part One

I've surely written before that Maciek Albrecht is one of our favorite people to work with. It's been too long since we've had the pleasure, so here goes dredging up the past.

"Tito the Frog" was produced for HBO's "Kids Are Punny" special produced and directed by Amy Schatz.

We produced this three minute in the Spring/Summer of 1998.

I'll post the storyboard in three parts.

 

This film was produced through The Ink Tank but production was done in Maciek's studio at 241 Bedford Avenue.

 

I may be confusing it with another project, we did a few films together in that space, but whenever I think of this film and that studio, I think of Elli Albrecht's  homemade bigos and her valiant attempt to cater to my very-non-Polish vegetarianism.

This may have been one of the last film projects at that space.  Soon after everything went digital.

 

Maciek had the seemingly great idea to make table sized light boxes by attaching a lucite ledge to the wall and affixing light fixtures every few feet.  After a few minutes the trapped air would get scalding hot, so the artists would have to resort to portable lightboxes.

Experiments sometimes fail, have a backup plan ready.

This board is a good example of the boards I've seen from Maciek's films.  They're not overly detailed, but they're not vague either.  They good idea of staging, expression and camera without jumping ahead to the perfect layout pose.