Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

– Our heart goes out to Champagne Saltes Robinson whose mother, Genevieve, passed away Monday afternoon of a heart attack.

Champagne, of course, was the featured character in my film, Champagne. It was her life story – up to age 14 – that we tried to document in animation back in 1997. Champagne was raised in a convent while her mother was imprisoned. She also worked in our studio for a short while as a runner. (She got to do a bit of coloring on the film about herself.)

Champagne has just moved back to New York from Denver with her husband and one year old son, Jaysin. I’m sure it’s a sad return, but we wish her the best.

~

- John Celestri’s comments on my Double Lives page prompted a lot of thought.

Michael Barrier on his site talks about the one film/one character model as perfect for animation. This made me think about the animator that is asked to do more than one character on a film – and possibly sharing all of them with other animators. But for the sake of argument, let’s say that one animator is the only one to do those several characters.

Now let’s talk a little about my world – the one of Independent, short films. In shorts, there are two kinds of films – those with budgets and those without. Even within those two groups there’s play.

The early Disney films tried to break things up by character – there was the Goof specialist, the Mick specialist, the Duck specialist. Warner Brothers had the supervising director who dominated. This certainly had a lot to do with the way the studio was set up and the budgets. Only with a dominant director like Clampett or Jones and animators, who fell well within their way of thinking, would a rich style jump out.

Rooty Toot Toot followed the strong director mold, but it also broke the film up into characters. Masters like Grim Natwick and Art Babbitt took charge of principals – each telling their side of the courtroom drama. Hubley did a variant of that when he went solo. He knew what Bill Littlejohn, Tissa David, Barrie Nelson or Phil Duncan would give him, and he cast them accordingly.

But then the Independent world of today has the director as animator. Bill Plympton not only draws all of his characters but does the backgrounds as well. George Griffin and John Canemaker do the same in their short films.

There are many variants of the model caused by circumstances outside of the film that mold how that film will be done. Even knowing that the best way may be one animator/one character, the Independent film maker still has to try to make it work the best way possible for all those circumstance and still bring a soul to the short.

In the film mentioned above, Champagne, I was pretty much all that I could afford. For a good part of the film, purposefully, I worked without a storyboard. I improvised the scenes as I went (knowing full well what would come next – in my head).
In the middle of the film, when Champagne’s life started to settle down, I brought in someone I worked with frequently, Jason McDonald, to storyboard the last half of the film. He brought a completely different direction to it, and it allowed me to open up and improvise on his methods. I bought myself – and the Champagne character in the film – a security blanket to fall back on. I’d bet no one watching the film can tell where Jason’s work started, but I think the outside alteration gave more depth to the animation I was doing. A change for me and the character.

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