Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

Where did I leave off ?

On Monday, a couple of hours after I posted a story about Rooty Toot Toot, my site went down and took the SPLOG with it. It’s been a tough couple of days trying to deal with the “upgrade” of my Web Host. They got the site back yesterday, and it’s taken till now to get this much of my blog back. (I guess I was given a “downgrade.”) It looks like my last two weeks worth of material has disappeared into their database . . . or maybe it’ll show up in a couple of hours. Who knows? (You can’t trust computers, these danged things!)

As soon as I get my “Image Browser” back, I’ll reconstruct last Monday’s UPA posting and try to go on from there. If the last two weeks were lost, I’ll try to recover some of what I posted this coming weekend.

In the meantime, on a lighter note, there’s a funny bit about a custody battle in Sweden fighting over a Donald Duck comic book. Go to the end of today’s “Arts, Briefly ” NYTimes article.

- Today I give you a stereo painting by Oskar Fischinger. Jeff Scher pointed it out to me, and I thought it too stunning an image to keep to myself.

Just place it in your stereoptican viewer and see it in 3D. Alternatively, hold it up to your nose, and slowly pull it away until the two images fuse into one. Or, as I prefer, just enjoy it as is.

(Click on images to enlarge slightly.)

This image came from the Artscenecal site. To see another of Oskar Fischinger’s stereo paintings go here.

Stereoscopic imagery is quite an interesting offshoot in the art world. It’s fascinating that Fischinger would have been so involved in it. Salvador Dali was also interested. You can find a number of his images on line at 3D Gallery Anaglyph, however you’ll need your red and blue glasses to view them properly.

– To give you an idea of our studio and its makeup, I thought it worth posting some photos of the physical space. These were all photographed by Paul Carrillo, our brilliant editor.

This photo gives you an idea of what you see as you first enter the studio. This is the main room, where much of the action takes place. Animator, Matthew Clinton is working in the far corner on his computer. Laterally across from him (several stations down from the moviola) is Paul’s desk. I like the open feeling of it.

This photo shows the reverse of the one above; it’s taken from Paul’s desk facing the front desk. The front door is out of frame to the left.

We’re animating-coloring-completing a Rosemary Wells story. Unlike most of the films based on her books, this is an original story of hers which tries to encourage young children to read. The title and art styling come from another book of hers.

Mary Chapin Carpenter sings a new song written for the film.
(Click on images to enlarge.)

Matt’s almost finished with his sequence and is compositing it in color. By the time he’s done with his section, I’ll be done with mine and the two of us will animate the finale/song sequence together. We’re actually using art from a book done by Rosemary to illustrate some of the song, but we’ve mixed an animated band in with it. Bunnies.

- If you’ve been following the Production drafts that I’ve been posting here, you may want to follow-up on Michael Barrier‘s site today. He has definitive comments by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston about assigning credit, historically, from the listings on the drafts. It obviously makes sense. These drafts help locate scenes in production – the person listed on the draft was the last one to work on it. Anyone who had come before was taken out of the picture – dropped from the drafts.

- At AWN, Chris Robinson has written a very good article about George Griffin‘s latest animated short, It Pains Me To say. Robinson does more than review the film; the article is an analysis, inspired by the film, of the entire process of animation, Griffin, and film making. A good read about a film we’ve been waiting to see.

- Meanwhile, if you’re at all pumped up about the Oscars & animation, you should take another look at the films on AWN’s animation showcase. It’s a great service the site offers us.

- With all the brouhaha over Oswald, maybe it’s time to give the original superstar some attention. Mickey has been left behind and ignored by the Disney studio, itself, for the past how-many-years showing up in a couple of distorted cgi abominations and otherwise used for nothing more than a theme park escort.

It’s very nice that Oswald is back in the fold, but when you have a licensed character – many licesnsed chararacters that have been so abused by the current owners, it’s hard to get excited for what we’ll see of Oswald in the future. I expect John Lasseter will only be able to do so much. The bigger guys (marketeers) still run the front office.

This box of Big-Little coloring cards was given to me as a gift many years ago. It’s fun every once in a while to flip through them.

(Click on images to enlarge.)

- The ASIFA Hollywood Archive’s site has a good overview of Art Babbitt’s career with a short bio of Babbit by Tom Sito and a good filmography.

- Here’s another grouping of three production charts from Pinocchio. These sheets take us from where we left off into the “Little”Wooden Head” musical number.

A wider variety of animators enter the picture. Art Babbitt’s involvment with Gepetto puts him front and center, and it looks like Don Towsley is leading with Jiminy.

My original posting of the sheets for the opening sequence received a strong and positive reaction. A lot of good questions were posted, and I think most of them were answered by some astute, knowledgeable readers. I got quite a bit out of it and hope others did as well. I have sheets up through the Blue Fairy sequence, so I’ll keep posting them till I run out.

For some reason, I get a thrill just going over these sheets. I guess I’m just a sucker for these early films, and these sheets give me the feeling that somehow I’m in on it. I often wonder if the films being made today have the same effect on younger people; I hope they do.

(Click on any image to enlarge it to a readable size.)

– This is a camera layout for Gulliver’s Travels. It gives a good indication of how small the artwork was at times. The field guides look all off proportion. This layout was certainly just an indicator for the final layout, however it’s obvious that the guide they’re using is not the traditional Acme proportions but the ones Disney used at the time.
(Click on image to enlarge.)

(Hans perk on an earlier posting gave a field guide comparison chart – Acme to “Disney”. Check that out here.)

Also interesting is how thin the paper is: not the best quality and very transparent. The peg holes, of course, are those that were unique to the Fleischer studio.