CLAYDREAM..Documentary about Will Vinton

 This is the trailer for the finished film started in 2017 originally called "Welcome to My Daydream " about Will Vinton and his studio.

 CLAYDREAM_Follow link for the Tribeca premiere screening: TODAY Sunday, June 13th @ 4pm pst https://www.tribecafilm.com/films/claydream-2021

This is a still from the documentary of Will and myself discussing a scene

 Will and I discussing a scene

 

Will Vinton Turned 70

I don't know how I forgot to post this but my old boss, Mr. Will Vinton had a 70th birthday celebration this year that I was not able to attend.  I did however paint this portrait for Will with a sculpture of Mark Twain from the celebrated Claymation feature film The Adventures of Mark Twain as my present.

Will is one of the nicest people I've been fortunate enough to meet and so many opportunities were given to me at the Vinton Studios.  I hope Will enjoys many more happy birthdays!

  UPDATE: Unfortunately this was Mr. Vinton's last birthday: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/will-vinton-dead-oscar-winning-legend-claymation-was-70-1149596

"Welcome To My Daydream" a New Documentary

At last, the whole story of Will Vinton and Claymation is going to be told by filmmaker Marq Evans in the new documentary “Welcome To My Daydream”

This link from Cartoon Brew goes more in depth about the film and its importance in animation history: http://www.cartoonbrew.com/documentary-2/exclusive-first-look-will-vinton-documentary-welcome-daydream-153840.html  

I’m not sure where I first saw “Rip Van Winkle” but it touched me emotionally with that strange beauty good animation has.  I remember these surreal moments in the film where Rip is dancing in the sky with pulsing color blobs set to the beat of the music, and how affecting the song Rip sang to his friend at the end was.   Later, I ran across a 16MM print of the early documentary made in the 70's about Claymation and saw a young Will Vinton with long hair and a full beard, along with Barry Bruce, and I think, Bill Fiesterman, and Joan Gratz.  It must have been during the shooting of “Martin the Cobbler” because it had this great scene where a clay crew of stage hands is frustrating the clay actor playing Martin. The door to the miniature set opens and the giant head of Will himself peeks in to ask how things are going on set.  I knew then and there these were people after my own heart and wanted to work for them one day. 

Not only is Will one of the sweetest people I know, but so many good things have come from the opportunities he made possible for me and many others.  Thank you Mr. Vinton, I look forward to seeing your story continue.  

Dino Floss

I was sent some old memories.  My daughter grew up watching a children’s show called Adventures in Wonderland on the Disney Channel that had animated stories done by the Will Vinton Studios.  Here’s a piece I did called Dino Floss that John Ashley Pratt designed the characters for.  These stories were some of the most fun I had at the studio and I ended up doing over twenty of them.  Good times!

Maggie and Her Painting

I just received a lovely notice that Maggie MacLean is well pleased with her portrait and so is her owner Kevin. I'm so pleased they both are too. Kevin is a Disney animator now and has many screen credits under his belt. I first met him at the Will Vinton Studios where he was the youngest animator barely out of High school. Go Kevin, go Maggie!

Will Vinton Making Features Again.

http://www.cartoonbrew.com/business/gnosis-and-toonz-team-up-for-new-will-vinton-feature-projects-112871.html

Above is a link to an article from Cartoon Brew announcing the partnering of two companies which will help Will Vinton to make feature films once again.  There are some proposed properties that date back to went I was employed there.  I'm glad to see they may finally get a green light.  But I think there is more to the story. Ideas are free game if someone beats you to the punch, so they say. 

The posted artwork from the decommissioned Digital Domain film, “The Legend of Tembo” has prompted me to write about what I feel may be the origin of other films that did reach the screen, all starting with Will.

 Below the artwork for Tembo I added a concept drawing I did  for one of Will's projects about a baby elephant with a tick bird friend who is hunted by a man riding a Bull Elephant. 


Do you notice the friendly tick bird and Bull Elephant in the Tembo picture?

Just as I suspect Tembo to have had its beginnings with Will Vinton, so do I believe Will may have been the source of several others.  Let me explain.  There was a time feature material was being actively developed at the Will Vinton Studios and the results were three to four ideas that were shopped around Hollywood for financing and distribution.  Nothing came from the effort.  Or did it? 

One idea was about a messenger pigeon that helped win World War One.  Do you recall a film called “Valiant” about a messenger pigeon that helped win World War One?

Another idea was about zoo animals that break out and try to get back to their home in Africa.  Sounds like two films that competed with each other to reach the box office first, “Madagascar” and “The Wild”.  I know first hand both films came from the same script because the lead characters names were the same while I was working on “Wild” and the lions name had to be changed.  Will Vinton was given an executive producer credit on “The Wild” but says he didn’t even know about it till he was told later.

Then there was a musical version of "The Frog Prince" and shortly "The Princess and the Frog " came out.

Lastly an idea was pitched about a small action figure named Cliff Damage, and then the movie “Small Soldiers” hit the screen not long afterwards. 

I see "Jack Hightower",a comic action adventure about a miniaturized secret agent, is among the ideas in development with this new venture.

Good for you Will, and hope to see you on the big screen again.  

Stop Motion in the Digital Age #04

In earlier postings we touched on replacement animation used in stop-motions history, and facial animation  replacements as early as 1935.  We also tracked the replacement evolution with computer sculptures exported as 3D prints being used as early as 2004.

My friend Raphael Cordero ,(whose studio did the sculpture, molds, and castings), posted some images that helps define a timeline for the facial replacements evolution even better with these hand cast test pieces for the 2001 production of the Will Vinton TV series "Gary and Mike", a production that has greater relevance with the digital age, which I will explain later.  These were hand sculpted, using a frame grabber, (see previous post Claymation, Techniques and Innovations ), to ensure registration, and then cast in resin.  The faces were split through the eyes and held on the head with interlocking magnets.

It must be remembered that the 1993 production of "The Nightmare Before Christmas" used both facial replacements and a stored image/live image form of frame grabber. The G&M faces were the first to split the face into two pieces.

These G&M replacements precede Laika's "Corline" which used the same split face and magnetic registration, by eight years.  The difference here being these were hand sculpted and cast replacements, as opposed to computer sculptures exported as 3D prints. 

I'm not sure why this technique wasn't used in the actual production, which went with wax replacement mouths, (I feel it may have been too expensive), but the craftsmanship is astounding and the seam on the face is almost invisible, at least in this still image.

As have been stated before, the computer allows the ability to do more easing into and out of facial extremes, making smoother animation with less chatter, and a way of previewing and modifying before exporting to hard print copies.

 "Gary and Mike" has the distinction of being the first stop motion production to be done digitally. Before then, it was customary for animation to be shot on film and then transferred to video.  This bypassed that method using small lip stick sized digital cameras placed on sets and a custom made data storage system was built to accommodate all the digital still images that made up the action.

The initial cost was hoped to be made back by avoiding film development, and film to tape transfer expenses. It was quite an undertaking for the time, and because of being digital, effects work and other elements could be combined without a film to tape transfer.

The infrastructure for the Will Vinton digital pipeline used for "Gary and Mike" in 2001, created a template for much of the feature work being done today.

Test head replacements for "Gary and Mike" from the Raphael Cordero Studio

The Artist's Work Space

Fellow blogger, and animation artist, Eddie Fitzgerald has recently posted on his inspirational “Uncle Eddie’s Theory Corner”, an article about artists work spaces, (link provided here: http://uncleeddiestheorycorner.blogspot.com/), which I liked very much and responded to.  He offered an invitation for me to show my space if I cared to, so here it goes.

As I mentioned my wife hates clutter because her mother was a messy artist, and she had to clean the house around her moms work area, which also spilled over into their living space.  Well, my mother was a messy artist as well, and we lived in what she called 'creative clutter', which I loved! 

Wanting to keep a happy wife and an inspirational environment,  we have managed a pretty good compromise.  I can’t show you our entire house, which is an eclectic mix of styles and cultures, but I can show my work spaces and touch on a little of how I work and what inspires me.

My office is pretty digitally oriented for computer animation and this over-view picture kind of shows the contained chaos.  I have my messy bookshelf, walls of pictures, musical instruments and my sculptures and toys.  Some of the details are an unfinished portrait of my daughter begun by my late mother, which hangs above my desk, and a picture of my brother in period clothing that mom did, on another wall.  I also have paintings my mother-in-law did, and our mothers’ works are hung through out our house.

Downstairs I have a man cave with all my toys put in a wet bar, and movie posters on the walls.  This leads to my other work desk reserved for messy things like sculpture, or painting.  We have a cement floor in this part as it is also the laundry room, so I can drops brushes or cast plaster molds if I want. 

There it is.  I’m very thankful for what I have.  Hope you all have a great Thanksgiving!  

Daughter by my mother

Brother in period costume by my mother

Wind chime (hung inside)

Another wall hanging

Shelve in office, (note the Vinton box for floppy disks!)

Rug hung on wall

Wall hanging

Book case with sculptures I've done

Wet bar with collectable toys (sorry about the glare)

Basement desk for messy work, (portrait of grand-kids on easel started for Christmas, don't tell!)

Animation Input Devices

Tangible and Modular Input Device

While I'm on the subject of digital imaging today as opposed to early on, I came across this device for inputting motion for animated c.g. rigs.  It's called a Tangible and Modular Input Device for Character Articulation.  And you can read about it at the links below.

http://www.gizmag.com/modular-3d-joystick-input-device-for-animation-artists/32745/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBX47JamMN0#t=23

There's also a movie here: http://youtu.be/vBX47JamMN0

This thing  reminds me of something called the Monkey which was used early on as a way of helping stop-motion animators to switch over to c.g.

We had one at the old Will Vinton Studios but I don't recall it having worked too well.  It's is very cool looking though.

Monkey

Registration in Stop Motion

With three stop motion films running for this years Academy Award, the interest in stop-mo has warmed up again.  I thought I would share a trick I found very helpful.  Today so much is done digitally and elements are shot on green screen and combined with others to finish a scene, but this trick is still invaluable if you want to do a scene in one pass.

I had to animate a character walking through a table top full of food.  Now I'm a short guy with not much reach so it was a stretch for me to even get to the character. I had to stand on apple boxes. How was I to get to my puppet without knocking all that food around? 

First off let me mention that none of the food was real and done by a terrific artist in wax.  Even the lemonade was a solid mixture of silicone or something.  I solved my dilemma by first registering the plates of food with corner brackets.  Corner brackets are flat metal pieces you can screw or glue down to your table top.  I used a thin veneer and cut square pieces the size of each plate that I wanted to register and glued it to the plates bottom.  Then I placed the plates on my set and anchored the brackets around two sides of the veneer at the back.  This let me pull the plate forward and remove it entirely while I animated my puppet.  Using the brackets, I could drop the food back into place and not have to worry about it moving around.

I hope the diagram helps explain things a little better.  I might tell you about 'nesting' sometime.

P.S.  The music in this video clip is not from the original scene which was the little guy talking.

View-Master Artists

As a boy I always loved the stereoscopic View-Masters that took traditionally drawn animated characters and did a sculptural rendering of them in 3d. This was not always an easy thing to do with many Hanna Barbara figures because they were fairly stylized designs with lots of cheated attributes like both eyes appearing on a profile.  Some how they were able to come up with a happy compromise that was always appealing.

Thanks to the internet I've been able to track down who did these wonderful pieces. Most were done by Florence Thomas and later her successor Joe Liptak, whom I've mentioned before on this blog  

Thomas produced her first reels for View-Master in 1946 --a series of Fairy Tales and Mother Goose rhymes that are still in circulation. According to one source, Thomas "developed special methods of close-up stereo photography and modeling which is now in common use by major motion picture studios" (John Waldsmith, Stereo Views, 1991).

Florence Thomas setting up a scene from The Sword in the Stone.
 












 

 One of my faves: Hook and Tink














 A scene from "Robin Hood"

Joe Liptak

I found a pretty good tribute to Florence at the blog Mystery Hoard and you can find it here: http://frequential.blogspot.com/2008/04/unsung-geniuses-florence-thomas-of.html


Looking at the size of the candle flame and the scale of what appear to be real feathers in Captain Hooks hat, and the detail on Tinkerbell, it must have been a fairly large setup.  It's pretty obvious now but I never gave it much thought as a kid.  

It seems appropriate that these were clay figurines and done in Portland Oregon just like Will Vintons' Claymation.

UPDATE:  A woman names Linda asked if there were other photos of her relative Florence Thomas.  I was able to find these:

 

 

 

 

UPDATE!   

Lori said...

I just found your blog, “View-Master Artists” (dated Nov 19, 2012) this evening and want to kindly inform you that the last 5 “updated” photos you posted is NOT Florence Thomas. Instead, the artist is Martha Armstrong Hand. I personally knew her in the mid 1990’s until her passing in 2004. For your reference, here are a couple of links in tribute to Martha.

https://www.niada.org/portfolio/martha-armstrong-hand/

https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/latimes/obituary.aspx?n=martha-armstrong-hand&pid=2744926

Thank you in advance for making the correction.
Lori, August 23, 2020

Old Memories

I found this digging through old stuff. The picture on the back is pretty impressive as everyone is in focus. I recognize almost everyone I worked with but there are a lot of folks I never knew and some folks are missing including myself I think. I may be one of those eyes peeping over a shoulder though there should be a bald head or ball-cap.

Click Image to Enlarge

Missed History

Today, thirty-one years after its original release, Will Vinton’s now classic and award-winning animation of “The Little Prince” was presented at the Hollywood Theater with some of the original voice cast members reprising their roles live, along with sound effects artists and live music.

I couldn't make it but I dearly would have loved to. After 13 years with the Will Vinton Studios it would have been wonderful to talk once again with these gifted, creative people.

Megan Kahrs, another former employee, was there and posted some pictures on facebook which I'm using without her permission.

The middle picture starting with the mustachioed Mr. Vinton on the left, includes Joan Gratz, who won her own Oscar for the claypainted "Mona Lisa Descending a Staircase", and master animator/director Barry Bruce who defined the look of Claymation.

If you've never seen "The Little Prince & Rip Van Winkle" or "The Adventures of Mark Twain" they are available here: http://willvinton.net/filmDistribution.htm

This blog is peppered with postings on Will Vinton, Joan Gratz, and Barry Bruce if you're interested.

Finding Stop Motion

I tried to build a stop motion demo reel with the bits and pieces I have kept but found most was in an unusable format. The usable things are the commercial bits at the beginning with Barbie and all. I found some badly compressed sequences on YouTube of my work from the TV show "The PJs" shot at Will Vinton Studios. It looks awful but I captioned the characters I'd done and the whole process brought back a lot of memories.

"PJs" ran three seasons and was controversial from the start. From an animation stand point it was very well organized and people were top notch making it happen. This was gorilla animation and I can't remember the exact daily frame count needed to stay on schedule but it was well over a hundred frames. It meant no 'pop-through' where you put the puppets through a few trial shots. Many times it involved group shots with the entire cast, each one having their own idiosyncrasies.

It's a very different kind of animation than commercial or theatrical.

Claymation tools

Will Vinton

A fellow animator was asking how certain things were accomplished at Will Vinton's Claymation Studio. Here is a paraphrased version of the questions and answers.

Q: When you join pieces together, how do you erase (blend) the seams? Especially when reaching across a crowded set to get access to the puppet at a 45 degree angle.

A: You might want to consider ways of gaining access to your characters so you don't have to bend in unnatural ways. If you can pin register props like tables and chairs you can remove them and get to your figures and then replace them for the shot. I've had walls on hinges that swung out of the way so I could get to characters. If a character is seen from the waist up or never walks or is seated, we sometimes mounted them on a square platform and registered them with 'L' brackets screws to the floor. We lift the thing out and drop it back into the brackets.

Q: What kind of tooling technique is used to get that mottled/carved wood look? Gairy Bialke was probably best known for that style. It looks awesome, especially on arms and legs.

A: The chiseled look to some Claymation probably started with Barry Bruce who used what became known as a Barry Stick. It has a flat surface with a blade on one side and a round edge too. We made our own custom tools in the wood shop and a variation made by Jeff Mulcaster became my favorite tool. It's small and extremely versatile. (See diagram)

Click Image to Enlarge

Basically the flat side was used to spread the clay, kind of like frosting a cake. We were using the soft Van Aken and the flat tool side also was used to block out the shapes giving you that carved kind of look. The sharp blade created creases and the round side was used to smooth and blend . The curving tip was used for prying open spaces, smoothing and detailing, and on the Mulcaster tool it was great for detailing small areas.

Q: In EB's mustache at the end of Claymation Easter, how was it modified from fame to frame to appear as though the lines were bending (looks almost like morphing or deforming, but the lines would have to be re-scribed, and it doesn't look like they are).



A: The mustaches were clay replacements you could bend and shape so they looked like they were morphing until you replaced it with the shape you wanted. We has a mold to make copies.

Q: How was the lip sync done on the Raisins? This is probably my biggest question because I can't tell if it was completely torn apart and re-sculpted every frame, or if it was a single expression being re-worked frame to frame. Even with live action reference, I would have trouble with some of those mouth shapes. It's incredibly fluid.

A: The lip sync was done using live action reference of the actors preforming their lines. We all had Moviolas at our sets and tried to match the lip shapes the best we could. Generally the mouth was carved out leaving a cave from cheek to cheek and nose to chin which was lined with black clay. The mouth was built up using rolls of flesh colored clay spiraled around the edges of cave until you got the mouth size you wanted. Then you smoothed out the spiral and added the lip details. If you were very careful and remembered where your cave was you could cut these mouth shapes out and use them again like replacements.

Oxberry Camera

http://www.michaelspornanimation.com/splog/?p=1652

Clicking the title or pasting the link above will take you to an article posted by Michael Sporn about John Oxberry, the maker of animation cameras.

It brought back fond memories of my first job in animation. It was at a commercial house in Ft. Wayne Indiana that used an Oxberry with aerial image projection for rotoscoping, effects and combining live-action with animation.

I recall the hum of the motors that ran the camera up and down it's double rostrums was loud enough to drown all ambient sounds from the room. This was a good thing and helped focus your attention on the mound of artwork, the correct camera settings and following the exposure sheets.

The N/S, E/W pegs were all hand cranked, (there may have been servo motors too that you could program), and the exposure sheets had all the computations for every frame marked out in the camera column.

Fortunately for me it was not my job, although I did shoot some less complex scenes on it, because it involved consulting big expensive books full of mathematical equations to figure compound moves with fairings to ease in and out.

Our brainy cameraman Chris Dusendschön later went to Robert Abel Associates and got involved with effects and early computer graphics.

My second experience with Oxberry was at Will Vinton's Claymation Studios. There was a derelict camera that sat dejected for years until another brainiac Animator/Director Hal Hickle restored it single handed. It was used for titles and Animator/Director Mike Wellins did a short film using paper cutouts on it.

Incidentally Hal also owned one the the cameras Ray Harryhausen used to shoot "Mighty Joe Young".

I am excited by the digital revolution and the autonomy it allows. But I'm also glad to have experienced the early method of cartoon making and kind of miss the big toys.

Click image to enlarge

What To Keep

I was doing some housekeeping and came across these relics of my thirteen years spent at Will Vinton Studios. It again confirmed what a privilege it was to be there and the opportunities that were offered to us as employees. While there I met and unashamedly got the autographs of animator/writer/director Bill Plympton. Another time I had the opportunity to meet writer Buck Henry and again got his autograph. I also had a boat cruise with writer/director/actor Spike Lee and as a previous post called Sentimental Journey records I met other luminaries of the animation world. I feel very blessed to have had these experiences.

At another place I shook hands and talked with William Shatner. But that's another story.