Some More TeleTV Boards

These are a few more concepts created at The Ink Tank for TeleTV.

These were thought up and drawn by the inimitable Santiago Cohen.

These are meant to be simple, 5 second, 'bumps'.

There's something about these boards (the above in particular) which makes me think of Folon's TV ID from the late 70s.





Folon's an illustrator who's fallen out of favor.  I wonder how many American animators have even heard of him.

This would have been mixed media.  Simple.  Fun.

And sunset.

Troubles Models

Anezka Sebek called the other day to let me know I had some binders in her office.

I thought they were just photocopies of readings, but it turns out one was a model book we sent to the Poland animation facility for the second season of Troubles the Cat for Sesame Workshop (then The Children's Television Workshop).

The book contains turnarounds for all the characters and painted color models for all the characters and props.

This was painted on cel and the Chromacolour numbers are indicated. We used Chromacolour because it's cheaper in Europe.

For those who haven't had the "pleasure" of working on cel.  This (above) is what the back looks like.

Inking is done on the front, color on the back.  Dark colors are painted first so they don't show through lighter tones.

This (above) is three 8 1/2 x 11 pages combined.

Note the lack of "anatomy" in the right most drawing.  After the dailies for first episode of season one, CTW pointed out a little black dot just below the tail.  We had animated the cat a little too realistically.

This was corrected with the first use of After Effects in any production we worked on.  Mike Turoff framed through the transferred video and removed the bit of biology.

In designing characters, pose drawings are more important than turnarounds.  Sure, animators will ultimately want to see the character from every angle but it's more important to see how the character moves.

These are idiosyncratic designs.  The poses demonstrate how the line contributes to the character -it's expressive and loose.

The cat was then used as a unit of scaling to all the other characters.

You can do that with a grid, in this instance we didn't want to be so rigid.

These characters were designed by Santiago Cohen. The color styling was Elli Albrecht.

Trouble

Here's the introduction to "Troubles the Cat", I stumbled across it on YouTube earlier this week.

We produced this at The Ink Tank for Childrens Television Workshop. Santiago Cohen designed the series. His work is what makes it so special. Maciek Albrecht and Suzan Pitt were the directors.




The animation was done in Poland, except for this opening which John Schnall animated.

Winter Wonderland

This is the last film we did for HBO at The Ink Tank.

Santiago Cohen is responsible this. As always his designs are stellar, this time matched by a loving soundtrack by Macy Gray.

Santiago also did a lot of the animation. I was in a foul mood the whole production because I felt HBO was screwing the studio. Funny, today, if the situation were the same at my own company I wouldn't mind. I also like to think that such a situation wouldn't arise.





In addition to El San, I did several scenes and a lot of inbetweening although I can't remember exactly what -none of it looks the right kind of amateur to be me work. I'm pretty sure Scott Dodson helped on this animation, and I think Casey Saffron was an assistant at the studio around this time. I'm certain that Alex Reshanov did the compositing and a lot of the art production. I also suspect Valerie Cardon did the inking, it looks good.

Amy Schatz produced and directed the show, "Twas the Night" for HBO. Michael Sporn, Jeff Scher, Nadia Rosen, and Maciek Albrecht also contributed segments.

More Interesting Things By Others

Our friend and neighbor Bill Plympton has posted an animatic of his new short film.




He's open to suggestions for a title.


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Almost forgot this one.

Laurent Cilluffo started work on this in 1999 and finished it seven years later. It just made it online two weeks ago.




He writes that there are a few things he would do differently, but to me the singular design overcomes any animation shortcomings.

We worked with Laurent and his wife Valerie for several years at The Ink Tank.


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Pete Sluszka, who worked as an animator on "I Spy" produced by The Ink Tank, was one of four directors to make animation for The Decemberists "The Hazards of Love" "rock opera".

Foremost, it's not an opera. You know what makes something an opera? It's performed in an opera house or an opera company. That simple.

Porgy and Bess at the Met? Opera.
Tommy at the Meadowlands? Not an opera.

Sure there's gray area. Skiffle musicians in smokey club; not within the gray area.

In any event, it looks like an interesting project.

Here's a link to some video.

And an article with some more visuals and full credits.


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Annie Simpson used to work the front desk at The Ink Tank. Everyone had a crush on her.



She's just launched her website. You can see some of paintings and films there.


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And another old friend from The Ink Tank, Santiago Cohen, sent this postcard the other day.

Meow

The first project I did any substantial work on was "Troubles the Cat", thirteen 6:00 segments for The Children's Television Workshop series "Big Bag" which aired on Sunday mornings on Cartoon Network.

Children's Television Workshop is now "Sesame Workshop" and The Cartoon Network is in the throes its own identity crisis.

Troubles was a nice little show. Very warm.

The success, in my mind, stems from Santiago Cohen's designs.




We "cleaned up" the drawing some out of economy. Remember, this was painted on cel and shot on film. A looser style would take a lot more time and attention than a children's series allows.

Here are some of Santiago's paintings from around the same time.

Try To Put Us Down

Going through the dark recesses of our FTP site, I uncovered this little piece.

There's a long story to go with it.

This was back at The Ink Tank. The 20th Century, even.

R. O. Blechman had a closet full of feature film proposals. During his quest for financing he crossed paths with a producer who had acquired the rights to a "German children's book" (which we could never find) and a very popular classic rawk song. He also secured development financing from a big Asian conglomerate.

The first step was to write a treatment.

Without going into the gory details, we didn't do a treatment. The big Asian conglomerate was coming to town and we needed a presentation. The plan was to make some artwork.

We decided to work with Santiago Cohen to stylize the story and Maciek Albrecht would direct the animation.



At one point there was a notion to create the animation for Imax in 3D (talk about cutting edge!). This spawned the idea to make dioramas of the design. So we created about a dozen scenes and presented them to the big guys one at a time while Maciek walked them through the story (which, for some reason, was not allowed to be written down). The ultimate scene was -ugh- a battle of the bands. After this was placed on the table, a lighting bolt on the set was pressed activating a CD blasting the popular classic rawk song.

The men from the big Asian conglomerate stood up and applauded.

Of course, we didn't deliver what they needed to sign off on. They were excited and did commission a script.

For some reason such a thing was anathema. A script? Pish! "What's a script gonna tell you?" (Please note my vocal dissent.) So it was decided we would make a film.

In three weeks.

As a concession, it was agreed we would write a treatment. That alone is a side story full of grief.

Anyhow, the little "pilot" was produced -stem to stern -in three weeks.





Tissa David animated the entire thing. Mostly. Igor Mitrovic did the musical note morphs and some inbetweening. The small blimp and the globe (obviously) were animated by Dave Courter in Lightwave.

Making things even harder, this was shot on film. Ugh x2.

To deliver for camera I stayed up 86 hours straight. Not quite, I did take a brief nap under the pencil test camera at about 4 am before the day the cameraman, Daniel Esterman, came to shoot.

I'll post grabs of some specific shots next week.

After going over the sheets and artwork with Daniel, Megan Whitmarsh (one of our production artists) asked if I wanted to see Nights of Cabiria at the Quad. Never able to turn down Fellini, I extended my awake period by another 2 hours.