Animation Artifacts &Hubley &Tissa David 04 Nov 2006 09:10 am
Carousel LO
- One of my favorite experiences in my animation career was working on the Hubley film Everybody Rides The Carousel. This was a feature done for CBS. It was adapted from the work Childhood and Society by the noted psychologist, Erik Erikson‘s. His book was a treatise on the development of humans; he broke the stages of man down to eight.
In Hubley’s film, each stage was represented by a horse on the Carousel.
At the sixth stage, my favorite part of the film, two young adults find each other, fall in love, separate and come back together. The female Voice/Over was done by a Yale student in her first film role, Meryl Streep.
Here’s a layout by John Hubley, given to Tissa David for a seminal scene in the film. The boy and girl have fallen in love and present themselves to each other wearing symbolic masks; they cannot reveal their true feelings to each other. The masks, which don’t come off, cause them to grow apart and separate.
In this one rough drawing, John expressed volumes, and Tissa animated what is, to me, possibly the best scene in the film.
To show how it ended up, I’ve taken some key frame grabs from the actual film. The scene actually plays out slowly, and acts as a coda at the height of the sequence.
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(Click any image to enlarge.)
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The artwork was colored on layers of vellum designed for architects. It came in rolls and had to be cut and punched. Little of the paper’s grain showed when it was bottom lit. The drawings were inked and colored with magic markers: water based ink lines and alcohol based fill colors. (This prevented the ink lines from smearing.)
It was photographed from below – like a pencil test. To soften the background a blank layer of the vellum was used between the background and the characters. The masks were doubled into the scene after it was shot. They were filmed top-lit at 80% exposure.
This was the technique for this one sequence in the feature. Most of the rest of the show was shot traditionally, top lit. Each stage had its own technique and color scheme.
