Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

– The news that a McDonalds will be built within the Louvre is something of a shock to the system. For some reason, I would’ve thought this had happened years ago. Doing it now is somhow passé.

Last year we did a little short from the feature storyboard done a million years ago, based on Tom Hachtman’s comic strip Gertrude’s Follies. The segment involves Gertrude and Alice introducing Pabs (Picasso) to his first hamburger. Since our story takes place in Paris, they’re at a MacDonald’s within shooting distance of the Eiffel Tower. Had I known there would be a Mickey Dee in the Louvre, it would have been more appropriate to put it there.

Maybe we should redo the short.

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- Last week Amid Amidi started several threads of a conversation about te economics of posting films on line. This was followed up by Mark Mayerson on his blog, going into contracts with some depth.

This all followed some thoughts I’d been having about a short film we did in this studio last year. I entered it into one Festival and was soon rejected. Since then I’ve been sitting on it, debating how to exploit it.

It’s the film, discussed above, the pilot for the Gerturde’s Follies film. It was just a kick making it in the studio in between a couple of paying jobs. I wouldn’t mind doing more of them and might actually go ahead with that idea. But for now, I’m making the rash decision to post the film here and now. I’m only going to keep it up for a week or so, and then I’ll replace it with some stills. But for now I’ll forego Frederator’s $50 or Cartoon Brew’s $200.

An image from the cover of Tom’s book
collecting some of the Gertrude Strips. ________________
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- On the NYTimes website John Lasseter talks about the “digital archeology” behind adapting Toy Story and Toy Story 2 into 3D movies. He doesn’t really say much, but you can hear his voice saying it while looking at stills from both films. (For actual information, read the accompanying article.) Lasseter sounds tired and listless, as if he were in the middle of a junket and had repeated this material a hundred times that day.

This slide-show feature on the NYTimes site often has some interesting bits to show or explain. The slide sow for Shane Acker’s 9 offered some details about the production design for the film. Similarly, for Coraline, Henry Selick takes us on a tour of shooting 3D with puppet animation. He details the differences between the real and the “other” worlds of Coraline. Lots of stills of drawings, puppets, people in process and screen shots illustrate the excellent narrative. For Pixar’s Up, Pete Doctor takes us on a backstage tour of the character development behind the film. There are lots of models and early stills of artwork as they get to the characters. Each character also has its own sound cue. This is a sophisticated talk from Pixar, one wonders why so shoddy for the 3d re-releases.

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Daniel Thomas MacInnes writes on his The Ghibli Blog that Miyazaki is working on not one but two features: one for 2011, the other for 2013. Daniel doesn’t have titles or news about what the films are about, baut he does investigate the idea that two films would be so closely produced, back-to-back. Interesting if you’re a Miyazaki fan. ________________ .
The Shadows Dream is the latest Op Ed animation offered via the NY Times by Jeff Scher.

The intro on the Times site reads:
“Fall’s later sunrises bring longer shadows to the morning rush hour. On any particularly sunny morning, the shadows of people in the city seem to constitute a fleeting parallel universe at our feet.”

Jeff is really on to something with this piece, and I can imagine it going a lot further than it does here. I hope he continues with these experiments. Again, Shay Lynch’s music is exceptional. (I’m curious to hear the score he wrote for Paul Fierlinger’s feature.)

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