Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

– Having finished a bunch of work for Between The Lions, the PBS show out of WGBH (a greater client can’t be found), we’ve met with a quiet period.
To keep busy we’ve started production on a short segment of the Gertrude’s Follies storyboard feature done years ago.

To see the history of this project go here and here.

What this has done is forced me to push cartoonist Tom Hachtman back to work on the strip. I need some new dialogue written between Gertrude and Alice, and I’d like him to do the backgrounds (only a couple are needed.) He’s a great watercolorist and airbrush artist – the real thing, not computer.
Of course, I prefer the watercolor painting, but I’ll take whatever he’d like to do. It’s his strip and his characters; that’s his decision.
Anyway, I got this card (to the left) from Tom. It thanks me for getting him back to Gertrude. (It’s my treat; the characters are so much fun drawing.)

Matthew Clinton has finished his first draft of animating the piece that’s about 2 minutes in length. Paul Carrillo has already edited up a hilarious first cut soundtrack of effects and music. All we need is the finishing parts.

It’s funny. That’s what counts.

I’m reluctant to post the strip it’s based on
(I don’t want to give up the joke, though it really doesn’t matter). It’s about Pabs eating his first hamburger – just in case any of you have seen it. (I just had a flash thinking how horrible this would have looked if we’d done it in Flash. Sends a chill through me.)
(Click images to enlarge.)

I just received in the mail a copy of the program from the Seattle Children’s Film Festival that was held in January of this year. They’d done a two program retrospective of some of our films. It was a kick having someone ask for the program; it was fun knowing that our films stay alive.

The program was enough of a success that the curator of that festival has just sent an email sayng that she is curating . . .

“. . . the second annual REDCAT International Children’s Film Festival at REDCAT (Roy and Edna Disney Calarts Theatre) in Los Angeles. The festival will be comprised of a selection of the best of Cinema K: Children’s Film Festival Seattle and additional new programs.

I would like to include one of the retrospective programs we showed at Northwest Film Forum: Dr. DeSoto, The Red Shoes, Abel’s Island, and The Man Who Walked Between the Towers.”

Of course, this will be an honor, so our program will be presented at that festival in June. When I have the dates, I’ll pass them along.

All these retrospectives popping up! (There was one in Philadelphia recently, another in North Carolina, and a very big one which will be in NYC this Fall – we’ll talk about it when it gets closer.) I’m starting to feel old, but I’m loving it. (The Seattle program
from last January.)

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