Repeat Business

Getting a job is difficult. Even if you've got a great reel, competitive pricing, and a good creative strategy there are a slew of things that can prevent you from landing the client.

Sometimes the job just disappears, sometimes someone else is just as good, sometimes (and this happened to Brian while at The Ink Tank) the ultimate decision-maker is an anti-Semite and won't go to New York because its "full of Jews".

Sometimes the prospective client already has a relationship with a vendor they trust. This happens frequently.



That's why it's important to become that trusted vendor.

Last year we had 20 contracts (that's four shorter than quota, but some were multi-film deals). 10 were people who had contracted Asterisk previously, an additional two were with clients Brian has known for over 20 years, four were on recommendation from Gail Levin. Add it up, that's 80% of our work that comes from personal relationships.



Showing right now in Las Vegas are some graphics we did for TMG Communications, old friends we haven't heard from in 4 years. We like them a lot and we're proud of this simple little motion graphics pieces we did.




Natella Kataev is largely responsible for these. Above is one of five clips we created for a trade show. If you like it, it's Natella's doing. If not, that's probably my fault.

Taking Back The Streets

Down the street on Eighth Avenue.

They didn't see me coming.

Fa Fa Fa Fa Fa Fa Fa

A few years back I got a call from the British Consulate, they were doing a survey on something or other.

I invited him over and we talked for about twenty minutes. Ever since I've gotten invitations to select events from the Consulate.

Most people, it turns out, immediately hang up when asked to help about such things. The fruit of politeness.

Last night was preview show of John Lennon: The New York City Years hosted by Prince Andrew, Duke of York.



It's interesting that pop flotsam gets not just a Hall of Fame, but a SoHo Annex to boot. The permanent installation at the museum consists of video displays by decades and genres followed by paraphernalia, mostly broken discards from drunken teenyboopers. The kinds of things you'd find on the walls of a really good TGI Fridays.

The Lennon gallery is a large white room. It contains notes and drawings from his time in New York, 45s, articles of clothing, sundry discards from the basement of the Dakota.

Lennon used his celebrity to an end. Although his philosophy was fairly shallow -its strength was its simplicity. His celebrity, gained as a teenaged heartthrob, was parried to something else. Something beyond him. That's interesting. T-Shirts and photographs of T-Shirts only address the cult of celebrity which brought about his assassination.

Mayor John Lindsay's letter fighting for Lennon and Yoko Ono's deportation is the most moving part of the show. It spells out why Lennon was a great representative of New York (and by extension America) and eloquently takes the government to task.

Second in strength is one of Yoko Ono's "Telephone Pieces". A white phone with a sign to answer when it rings. If it did ring, the artist would be on the other end. A clever use of celebrity -without Yoko Ono's fame, the effect is minimal. Just as she and Lennon used their popularity in the late 1960s for fight for their beliefs, she trades on that celebrity today to supply meaning to the work.

this is a different "Telephone Piece", but the same idea

The final wall of the exhibit is a sheet of paper that will be "delivered to President Barack Obama" upon the close of the show. The signees want "stricter gun control laws" -there is the problem with T-Shirt politics but what else would you expect from a museum for Top 40 skiffle music.

Judging A Tape By Its Cover

It's the longest day of summer and it's barely broken 80 degrees in New York.

Several summers yore, when I still had the stamina to flip through boxes of rubbish looking for treasure (a skill developed as a teenaged record buyer), I found this VHS tape in the cut out bin of Tower Discount.


You may know Tower Discount (or Tower Records Discount Annex to use its fully Christian name) from the Will Smith vehicle "I Am Legend". The film's title refers to the great CD/Video store on Lafayette Street which went out of business years before the sci-fi film's release.

I picked up the tape to sneer at it. What awful artwork. What a shameless attempt to "Disney-up" the package.

Somewhere in the back of my head I remembered that Tissa David had made a film based on Mendelsson's music (What would it be called? Incidental music? Suite?). Lo! That's what this tape contained.

I always say people who don't judge books by their covers are doomed to a life of bad reading.

In this case, that would have been a mistake.

Tissa animated the entire film in Holland. There's a live action intro which is standard orchestra photography -the kind of visuals that make you switch off "Great Performances" or "Live from Lincoln Center".

It's interesting to see Tissa's "solo" work. She always takes the lead even when working with a director. She takes command of her scenes and brings more to a film than animation skills alone.

The characters here are rare examples of her own hand on film.

Here's a brief clip from the 39 minute piece.




The art production in the film is also extraordinary. It goes a long way to boost the expressiveness of the animation and, in the cases where drawings are on 4s and 6s, make it more fluid.

Some of this is in camera, panning foregrounds on floating peg bars or running multiple exposures of panning backgrounds. Some is simple artistry in production. It looks like the drawings were photocopied onto cel, but there are some instances of dry brush and a lot of color pencil and "watercolor" work.

Additional credits include;

Backgrounds and Background Animation.....Richard Fehsl
Color Stylist............................Ida Kozelka-Mocsary
Cel Painters.............................Deanna Herst, Lily Jong



There are two other notable "Midsummer Night's Dream" animated films.

Jiri Trnka's (clip below)



And John Canemaker's "Bottom's Dream"



Available on DVD.

Statue-esqes

Friday we encountered "Fantasia" made flesh in the form of Nicholas Cage, yesterday another Disney classic in real world fashion.

Alice in Central Park.

You don't have to be crazy to talk to cats

Sure, it's Lewis Carroll's "Alice". But isn't Mary Blair's graphic vision equally influential -if not moreso.

Talking Animals

Lewis Carroll predicting waiting for the F Train 100 years later

Beyond the popular bronzes, a stone tribute in a playground;

by Frederick G. R. Roth

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The Disney cult aren't the only ones putting up statues around town. (I know the Central Park sculptures were commissioned independent of the Disney film, it's just a clever line)

The Hare Krishna center on 2nd Avenue and 1st Street has this in the window.

shooting through glass at night with a flash

The circle of life becomes a crime scene.

click to enlarge

Nicholas Cage Eats Just Like Everybody Else

Remember this?

This is where I met "Spyro Gyro". Enlarge and look closely at the parking meter, you'll see one of these.

New York City Film Permit

A few weeks back "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" trashed Times Square, last night they brought the wrecking crew to my neighborhood.

Nicholas Cage Eats Just Like Everybody Else.

Several blocks were closed off. It looks like they were shooting on the JMZ platform at Marcy Avenue.

Filming happened at night, so they had to make their own sun.

One of several banks of lights on cranes

The shoot even took over the church for a holding room/cafeteria.

Holy Communion

You Have Nothing To Lose...

There's been a recent hubbub about free work stemming from a New York Times article.

Drawger, the illustrators' blog, has been very vocal lately and is largely responsible for the Times running the story.

In case your "click" button is broken, Google (which is a really big company -you may have even used them to get to this site, which incidentally is hosted by Google, for free) contacted several professional illustrators and asked them to do work for free.

We're often asked to do work for free. Just as frequently we're asked to work for substantially lower than we would like to charge. Very rarely can we do free work. In fact, as Helena Usack told me when I was a terrified novice producer - "Nobody needs animation, no one's life depends on animation." Animation is a luxury. Illustration is a luxury.

Maybe Oprah Winfrey can afford to give away 100 cars to her studio audience, providing them we a free luxury. Maybe there's a billionaire animation studio that can do a pro bono commercial or make a ten minute film from a novice's script. To quote Brian, "Artists shouldn't be asked to do work for free, they're the ones who need money from their work."

*******

While scanning Drawger for the first time in a month or so, I noticed our friend Steve Brodner has learned how to make a moving gif.



Day by day I feel more obsolete.