keyleedaud (REAL ESTATE)

This blog won't be updated until at least June 30. See you then.

( The following came to me from Børge Ring. ) At Toonder's Amsterdam Studios during the 70s, we made an animated film for the famous British rock band that called themselves Pink Floyd. We delivered the film in a silent version, and the Floyds ran it on the concert stage. Hidden behind the film screen, where they too could see the film, the Floyds performed the whole soundtrack in a live performance. The film was written and designed by a well known London artist named Allan Aldridge. At that time Winsor McCay, the founding father of American animation, had not yet been rediscovered, excavated and repositioned on his rightful throne. McCay was practically unknown outside a small circle of comic page archeologists. Allan Aldridge knew about McCay .He dug up one of Winsor's virtuoso newspaper comics of yore. Winsor's story (about a small boy) was named Little Nemo in Slumberland . Allan redrew it in his own drawing style and added ideas of his own, so as to

This is shaping up to be a banner year for animation instruction. Hot on the heels of the announcement of the Dick Williams DVD set , comes word that Eric Goldberg 's instructional book will be published this summer. Goldberg has been working in animation since the 1970s and is the animator of the Genii in Disney's Aladdin as well as the director of the "Rhapsody in Blue" sequence of Fantasia 2000 and the animation director of Looney Tunes: Back in Action . Copies of animation notes by Goldberg have been circulating for years. Those notes leave no doubt that this will be a major contribution to the animation instruction bookshelf. Here's the link at Amazon.com and at Amazon.ca . ( info via Cooked Art )

I'm visiting family in New York and last night I had the pleasure of seeing The Bully Pulpit , a play based on the life of Theodore Roosevelt, written and performed by Michael O. Smith. In animation, as our work appears on screens, it seems natural to look to movies for inspiration. However, there's a lot to be said for learning from performers on a stage. Let's not forget that the first animated hit, Gertie the Dinosaur , was based on vaudeville animal acts. Smith's play has a single set and he is the only performer in it. Roosevelt, on the occasion of his 60th birthday, relates the story of his life to the audience. Along the way, he evokes his parents, wives, children, friends and political contemporaries. The play has a 10 minute intermission, but for roughly 45 minutes in each act, Smith has to hold the audience's attention for the play to succeed. The vast majority of animated shots are less than 15 seconds long. Imagine the challenge of maintaining a

This sequence is mostly exposition. Pongo and Perdita learn that there's news of their puppies. They meet the Great Dane and learn that Cruella was responsible for kidnapping the pups, then they travel to rescue their children. The dogs are faced with various hazards on the journey, several of which will play a part on the return trip. They have to dodge a truck (and a truck will later take them back to London) and there is falling snow (which will end up revealing them to Cruella near the film's climax). They also have to swim through icy water. It's interesting that writer Bill Peet decided to establish the length and dangers of the journey only briefly. Rather than dwell on the details, the sequence is short so that the story can get back to the happenings at Hell Hall. Once again, sequence director Woolie Reitherman relies heavily on re-use, though it's not very obvious. Shots 3.1, 3.3, 12, 12.1, 12.2, 14 and 14.2 all use animation from earlier in the film. Th

Story wise, this piece belongs to Tibbs. He finds the pups and becomes Jasper's target. Jasper's violence toward Tibbs, throwing a dart and a bottle at him, are a way of hinting at the violence that the pups might eventually face. By attacking Tibbs, a resourceful adult character, the point is made without yet threatening the helpless pups. While there is good animation in this sequence, the assignment of shots is very broken up. Nobody gets control of a character and there are few instances where an animator can put together a succession of shots. Cliff Nordberg does some nice Tibbs. Amby Paliwoda does some nice Horace and Jasper. Jasper in this sequence is very much like Bud Abbott of Abbott and Costello. He's teamed with a dumber partner and doesn't hesitate to treat his partner poorly for his own amusement and selfish ends. Nobody does weak animation here, but the sequence is very much a jigsaw puzzle of different animators' shots. They assemble well, b

You have probably seen the pencil test for the opening for Richard Williams DVD set of The Animator's Survival Kit over at Cartoon Brew . The website for this set has been updated with a promo that shows a more finished version interspersed with shots of Williams lecturing at Blue Sky. There are additional clips of Williams explaining things here and on succeeding pages (click on the images for motion). The set, consisting of 16 DVDs, is not cheap. Price information can be found here . At today's conversion rates, the set will cost $990.70 in the U.S. and $1,011.88 in Canada. After November 17, the price is 20% higher. ( link via The Thief )

Animated features originate under two sets of circumstances today. One set of features comes from ongoing studios such as Pixar, DreamWorks, and Blue Sky. They are characterized by large staffs and high overhead, which result in films with high budgets and the need for massive success at the box office. Budgets are routinely $75 million and up. The danger of this model comes from a box office failure. Should a film flop, the loss is enormous. Pixar and Blue Sky are owned by larger corporate entities (Disney and Fox respectively), while DreamWorks is independent. While Pixar and Blue Sky might be better positioned to survive failures, Disney (which shut down drawn animation) and Fox (which closed down Don Bluth's Arizona studio) have both proved that corporate parents are not always forgiving. The benefits of the Pixar-type model is continuity. Mistakes and breakthroughs that occur on a project increase the corporate knowledge base, improving the quality of each successive fi

David A. Price's book, The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company , is a readable history of today's leading animation studio. It's also clearly shows that the company, especially in its early days, was far more than John Lasseter. Within animation circles, discussions of Pixar naturally revolve around Lasseter, but Price establishes the importance of Ed Catmull to the existence of the company. It was Catmull's vision to create movies with computers and it was Catmull who assembled the team of software engineers at the New York Institute of Technology that started to make them a reality. Once Catmull understood the limitations of Alexander Schure, the head of NYIT, he migrated his team to George Lucas's Industrial Light and Magic. Catmull's contributions came in several areas. As a software engineer himself, he not only wrote code but had an intimate understanding of the problems that needed to be solved. In addition, he was a natural at management. He not o

The first part of sequence 8 is really just exposition. The news of the stolen puppies finally ends up with the Colonel and Tibbs. What exists is suspense: where are the puppies? At the end of this part, we're know they've been located when Hell Hall is revealed as the DeVil place. The strength of this sequence, however, is that we're introduced to five new characters and they are all distinctive. In relatively little screen time, we understand the personalities of the various characters as well as their relationships. They feel like well-rounded individuals with real lives, not just characters stuck in to carry story points. I would point out that with the exception of John Lounsbery on the Colonel, none of the other nine old men have animation here. More evidence, if it was needed, that lesser-known Disney animators were fully capable of doing the job. Eric Cleworth and Don Lusk create good interaction between Towser the bloodhound and Lucy the goose (who's voi