Guinness Would Have Called This

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

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

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

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

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

Here's an unproduced storyboard from The Buddha.

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

Buddha Tour

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.