The Many Faces of Mickey

I have a friend who was commissioned to do a sculpt of Mickey and they did a great job.  Mickey isn't easy to realize dimensionally because he has many cheated attributes like his ears and nose that defies a logical way to sculpt them in 3D.  I thought it might be fun to look at some of the various results toy makers tried to capture a recognizable Mickey.  These are from my toy collection.  

I never realized I had so many!

YouTube and QuickTime Codec Problems

The hoops I have to jump through these days are pretty frustrating because programs are changing their codecs making previous files useless.   I'm mad that older QT files won't play because QT has upgraded their codec.

Now probably for the same reasons YouTube files that used to play normally are zipping through showing only the first and last frames.  Anyone know a fix? 

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.

Seeing Things

Where do ideas come from?  I've noticed creative people say ideas just sometime come to them like a gift from a muse.  That would be nice but I seem to need a trigger.

We are hard wired to interpret information and make sense of it.  This is why we see pictures in clouds and random patterns.  I have the same experiences with things in our house.  I can make out a lovely lion head in the grain of our bathroom door and a cool dragon in one of our towels.

For years I have seen this little character flying in a winged ship on our table cloth and only recently decided to act upon developing a story for it.

I can't tell you anything about the story yet as it's going to be either a film or more probably a book idea, but I can introduce the main characters.  If you click on the artwork it should enlarge well enough to read the bios.  There is also a picture of the original table cloth design and you can see it wasn't too much of a leap.

Like all work in progress, there may be changes. 

Glen Keane Animator and Book Ilustrator/Writer

We all know Glen Keane as the master animator on many Disney films and the son of cartoonist Bil Keane who did "The Family Circus", but how many of you knew he was an author and illustrator of children's books?

I recently found this copy of "Adam Raccoon and the Circus Master" by Glen Keane for Chariot Books.
You can tell the hand of an animator right away by the great staging and poses.  I love the thick and thin quality of his lines and the expressive look in the eyes.

This book happened to be published in 1987 and might explain the similarities in the Circus Masters design and Ratigan, the Vincent Price voiced character from Disneys' "The Great Mouse Detective" done in 1986.

I was surprised to see there were quite a few titles done in this series entitled Parables for Kids.  Here is a list of titles:

Follow the King:
A First Lesson in Trust

Creating Characters With Personality

Cookie Time

Adam Raccoon in Lost Woods

Adam Raccoon at Forever Falls

Adam Raccoon and the Race to Victory Mountain

Adam Raccoon and the Mighty Giant

Adam Raccoon and the King's Big Dinner

Adam Raccoon and the Flying Machine

Adam Raccoon and the Circus Master

Adam Raccoon and Bully Garumph

Campaigns I Would Pitch

Probably nothing will come of this as ideas are fair game until someone copyrights or trademarks them. Consider this a preemptive strike against copiers, or verification that it was indeed I who loosed these innate thoughts into the cosmic conscious. I’ve come to this decision after conceiving of Breathe Rights only to find them on the market before I could do anything about them. Also after three very definite elements of a cartoon series I had pitched to Cartoon Network ending up being used in someone else’s series. Okay are you ready? Here they are:

No.1 An ad campaign for wireless phones featuring ‘The Bluetooth Fairy'.

No.2 A funny creature for a fast Mexican food chain called ‘The Chalupacabra’ who wants your food.

There, I feel better. Now when you see these, you can say with certainty and have this article to verify that I’m the idiot who thought them up.

Yours truly,
Joel 

"Alice"

Uncle Eddie did a post about Ralph Bakshis’ Kickstarter project dealing with Coney Island here:

http://uncleeddiestheorycorner.blogspot.com/2013/02/ralph-bakshi-does-coney-island.html

It got me thinking about a project I would love to see happen, but don’t know how to go about.  I love Tom Waits album “Alice” and learned it was for a play done in Germany.  I don’t know the story but the album seems to be little story vignettes  woven around something that happened to the narrator and his love, a girl named Alice. 

I had thought it was based on Lewis Carols “Alice in Wonderland”, but to me the characters are more earthbound and related to the carnival era of early Coney Island.  Some of the songs talk about Dreamland and it's clear this is the Dreamland of Coney, and some are wild hallucinations aboard ghost-trains and sideshows.  There are beautiful flights of fancy like the improbable song about a whale and a bird who fall in love, it's sad and achingly wonderful.  But all have a nostalgic Victorian sound and the last piece is a heartbreaking melody played on a musical saw!

If I could secure the music rights and the stage play, depending on the story I would love to do an animated version of “Alice”.  Perhaps even without the plays storyline an interesting series of songs done in appropriated styles might hang together kind of like a “Yellow Submarine”, or maybe something with the Alice character could bridge each song?  I want to know who is this Alice?  Is she a young girl or more mature?  Did she die falling through the ice while skating, or did the narrator die and everything is his ghostly visitation of this world and the afterlife?  

Sound intriguing to you? 


Update:  I found the stage play script for “Alice” was originally called “Woyzeck”.  The script has some of the songs from the album but many songs are missing and the storyline has no mention of the central character Alice at all.   Elsewhere I learned it was based on Alice Liddell, the young girl who was the obsession and muse of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland books although as I’ve mentioned it wasn’t apparent from what I read.

I may be free to develop my own storyline and push it toward my own fanciful and romantic interpretations.  I might try and track down Tom Waits and his people and see what might develop.   

My tribute picture called Tom Waits for No One

Tom Waits "Alice"

Snow White turns 76

When Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs had its world premiere on December 21, 1937, Walt Disney claimed it was his Christmas gift to the children of the world.

For many animators my age, the two most pivotal films mentioned for starting their interest were "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs", and "King Kong.  This was certainly true for myself but I still marvel at the revolutionary vision of Snow White.

I've said this more than once, (and people who have worked with me probably wish I would stop), but never in print.  So let's look at what makes this the stand-out film for me.

Considering the times cartoons had largely been limited to short films.  Despite what Disney would like you to believe, Snow White was not the first animated feature, there were two others before, and this may have caused some to prematurely label Snow White as Disneys' Folly, but the film was a water-shed success.  It garnered enough money to save the studio and finance more feature work.

Snow White was a unique and unproven mix of genres.  It is first a fairytale, then it's a romance.  It is also a musical, and a comedy.  Surprisingly it is a drama and a horror film.  And last but not least, it's an animated film.  This mix has become a bit of a formula for everything that followed at Disney but what a gutsy first move!

You can argue the films done under Walts supervision and after his death but you can't argue Walt as a visionary and the lasting appeal of "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs".  She is still the fairest in the land to me.



    

The Multiplane Camera

With my exploration of using Toon Boom Harmony and Animate, or After Effects to get a workable 3D into my next film, I thought it would be good to show how intricate and involved the pioneers at Disney were when they created the Mulitplane Camera

Of course Unca Walt explained it best in this segment from The Wonderful World of Color, and concludes with the breath taking shot from "Bambi".

Today we do everything digital, but think about the challenge they faced then trying to keep lights from reflecting, and dust or finger prints off the art, and the mathematics used to plot out moving these big fragile plates of glass!

Another Clue for You All?

After forty some years the belief that Sir Paul McCartney is dead and was replaced with a look-alike caught fire on the internet and is only now starting to cool again.

I am not a subscriber to the “PID”, (Paul is dead), or replaced idea and feel the whole thing can be attributed to McCartney getting a lot of corrective surgeries.  In Macca’s career he teamed up with prominent writers and musicians like Costello, Wonder and Michael Jackson.  We all witnessed the transformation of Jackson into an unrecognizable white woman so it’s not surprising that Macca “fixed” his ears which stuck out, removed the bump on his nose, had chin implants to make his head less round and his teeth worked on after chipping them in an accident.  Over time the cosmetic results have been noticeable.

I do want to mention a thing for the believers that no one has mentioned. In 1999 the McFarlane toy company issued a series of Beatles figures based on “The Yellow Submarine”.  While some have pointed to two Paul’s during the “All Together Now” sequence in the movie, this line of toys may contain another clue for you all. 

Before the release of these Beatles figurines a toy fair picture of the proto-types was shown on the Internet.  The first series figures were the Beatles and a second series, the Sgt. Pepper band.  Each figure contained an additional character from the movie.  The proto-types showed Old Fred and Lord Mayor too but when the toys were in stores the Lord Mayors character was gone and another Paul was paired with Old Fred.  So if you were to collect all the figures in the two series you have a total of three Paul’s, one as Paul McCartney, one as a Pepper character, and one superfluous Paul.  Could that be Faul?  Faul is the name supposedly given by John to the Paul look-alike meaning fake Paul or faux  Paul.

Animating in After Effects for 3D

I own a version of Toon Boom Animate and have worked with TB Harmony.  Both have 3D multiplane features.  TB Animate has planes that you can separate into layers but Harmony has planes you can rotate and lay flat if you wanted.  You could build a little 3D house and move around it, which is what I want to do.  Well, I own TB Animate and an upgrade to Harmony is too rich for my budget right now.

So I was a surprise to learn After Effects has this 3D function.  I've been learning to animate in this program and it's pretty straight forward.  You can do some nice hinged puppets by adjusting the pivots and parenting flat artwork together.  There is a way of doing the equivalent of scrubbing through a nested symbol like in Flash or Toon Boom to do lip sync.  This is done through importing image sequences, and you can use it to do a more traditional style drawn animation, but I'm finding it's very hard to edit, but it does have this 3D function like Harmony that I've mentioned.

I thought this would allow me to get the 3d effects I want and save me the cost of upgrading to Harmony but I must be doing something wrong.  I took some artwork from a past personal project and a future piece I'm working on and set them up in 3D using After Effects.  Even in the program as I scrolled through the animation I got planes dropping out or jumping levels.  I thought it might be a graphics card thing but even rendered the planes popped in and out.  If anyone knows a fix for this I would love to know.  It may be a format setting or something because the look is totally different from a rendered TB scene.

First test in After Effects with dropped layers.

Sec test using After Effects with dropped layers.

Test using Toon Boom Animate with AE floor

I think I have a work around by rendering my 3D elements, in the black and white scenes, it's the wood floor moving in perspective, using After Effects and bringing the sequence into TB Animate where the other elements are separated into planes that use depth only.

Update:  I did get the scene to work in After Effects without layers dropping out.  I had to insure there were not intersections where one layer momentarily penetrated another. 

Carving the Comics

Here's a link to these great sculptures by Charles Ponstingl.

http://melbirnkrant.com/carving/index.html

The site was put together by Mel Birnkrant and tells the story of  how Charles came to do what he does.  There are many interesting pictures so be sure to check them out   I personally would love to one or two or more of these.

Photoshop Fairy

I have the most beautiful grand kids,(seven of them, but who's counting?), and my two youngest are just too adorable. My young grandson is a pleasant and good-natured fellow with a winning smile that reminds me of one of my favorite people, Oliver Hardy. So it was not my intention to play favorites by eliminating my grandson from this group picture taken at Halloween. In fact I think he makes a very good lemur. But just look at my granddaughter. What a beauty, how could I resist not taking this image further? She too was the model for "The Pumpkin Queen" featured repeatedly elsewhere on this blog.

Don't worry, young grandson, your time is coming!

Skeleton Fight

This relates to my last post about stop motion which mentioned Michael Sporn's blog.  If you bothered to go there he had included an interview with Ray Harryhausen talking about his regret that the skeleton fight in Jason and the Argonauts couldn't be at night.  Ray doesn't give a reason but I agree it would have been more dramatic.  Even so you have to admit it's pretty cool and captures that magic element I spoke about in yearly stop motion films.  Thanks Ray for filling my life with dreams and the magic of animation.

Sporn on Stop Motion

http://www.michaelspornanimation.com/splog/?p=3255

Above is a link to an article by Michael Sporn about his musings on the sophistication of modern stop motion. He wondered how a master like Ray Harryhausen would fare in the modern world of rapid prototyping and the ability to make stop motion almost indistinguishable from computer animation?  I don’t know for sure but I think Ray would be cool with it. He was certainty trying to make his work as believable as possible with the tools of his day.

I think I know what Michael means though. There is an ‘other-worldliness’ to old school stop motion, particularly when combined with live action, that tickles the imagination. It’s undeniably real and yet something about it is not. It’s magic. That quality Michael mentions caused by shooting on twos or the differences in film grain or lighting which were really unintentional drawbacks in production seem to further push that indefinable magical quality making it more akin to dreams and hallucinations. The very artificialness, (is that a word?),  makes the action more memorable.

A production like “A Nightmare Before Christmas” which used the latest technology like a frame grabber system, (a live frame and a captured frame ), and computers for rig removal, also used replacement faces to give more expression to the puppets.  Even with these improvements the puppets didn't squash and stretch like organic objects and still had that rigidity we recognize as stop motion.

I see the use of computers as a natural progression in film making. The use of rapid prototyping and full color exporting of computer models has forever changed stop motion. The fluid movements and organic distortion of computer animation has spilled over and one wonders if stop motion will become, I fear,  redundant since a lot of it begins as computer models anyway?

Christmas Time is Here Again!

Highjacking Ward Kimball

                                                                                                                          Ward Kimball

http://www.cartoonbrew.com/disney/advance-praise-for-the-book-that-disney-doesnt-want-you-to-read-73722.html

Above is a link to an article on Cartoon Brew talking about the difficulty author Amid Amidi is having with Disney not signing off on his book "Full Steam Ahead!", the biography of animator/director Ward Kimball.

There have been other books about the Disney staff that somehow reached print even though the individuals were depicted warts and all, so I don't know why Ward is being scrutinized and sanitized.

I was given a unique opportunity to spent two weeks with Ward and Betty Kimball back in 79.  While there Ward managed to introduce us, (I was with two other workmates), to Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston while they were busily compiling material for their book "The Illusion of Life".  I was struck by the contrast between these gracious soft spoken gentlemen who behaved like loving grandfathers and Ward who wore a head band and implied he smoked weed when we were first introduced.

I was taken aback by much of Wards honesty and surprised by Betty's tolerance of Wards vulgar humor, (Someone had sent him a toy train to 'personalize'.  He said he was going to cut it in half and put a condom in it.)  Now you don't expect that from a Disney artist and truth be told I don't think he saw himself as that.

It's widely known that Walt Disney thought of Ward as a genius.  Ward had established himself as a successful musician and bandleader recording 13 Dixieland albums with his band The Firehouse Five Plus Two, (Frank Thomas played piano), and authored two books.  He was open minded and interested in almost everything including UFOs. 

I came away from my visit with admiration and awe.  Here was a man who deeply enjoyed life and had the confidence and self security to tackle and conquer many disciplines and yet was raw and unpretentious, willing to deflate and cut through social mores and expose the humanity.  I made a vow to try and enjoy life and have as much fun as Ward.

I really want to know what made this man tick and I haven't looked forward to a book like this since "The Illusion of Life" which was a two year wait.  I hope "Full Steam Ahead!" doesn't turn into another multiple years wait.  I've already pre-paid for it when it was first announced.

Update:  Well, Disney has won and Chronicle has killed the book.  Amid assures us the book will be printed but for those who prepaid outside of Amazon, like me, the task will be more complicated.  Personally I won't be prepaying on any books before they hit the stores again.

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

Hitch

I know it's after Halloween but I just couldn't resist doing this caricature of Alfred Hitchcock.

R. Crumb and Genesis

One of the more curious things I've run across is "The Book of Genesis" illustrated by Robert Crumb. An interesting interview by The Paris Review tells us what motivated Crumb and how he spent four years making the book. It also goes into other interesting things about Crumb and the whole article in it's entirety can be found here:

 http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6017/the-art-of-comics-no-1-r-crumb

What I found interesting is something Crumb wrote in his Genesis book end commentary.  During his research he found these stories were never buried and then rediscovered later,  that they are the oldest texts in continuous use in Western civilization, and that peoples belief in these stories being the word of God has preserved them for millennia while the stories of the gods and heroes of Egypt, Babylon, and Assyria were buried and forgotten along with these mighty empires.

What I also found compelling is that Crumb had initially wanted to do a comic set up of Genesis but changed his mind and did a very faithful translation with no comedy.  The only thing remotely done in a comic fashion that I found was the depiction of Noah"s sons who bare more than a passing resemblance to the Three Stooges.

I don't know what it means for a subversive underground cartoonist famous for depictions of sexual perversions to do a labor of love like this book.  I doubt if Crumb were having a religious conversion, but all things are possible.  I will close this out with just a portion of the Paris Review article that I also found curious.

   

INTERVIEWER

Let’s begin with Genesis. Where did this book come from?

R. CRUMB

Well, the truth is kind of dumb, actually. I did it for the money and I quickly began to regret it. It was an enormous amount of work—four years of work and barely worth it. I was too compulsive about the detail. With comics, you’ve got to develop some kind of shorthand. You can’t make every drawing look like a detailed etching. The average reader actually doesn’t want all that detail, it interferes with the flow of the reading process. But I just can’t help myself—obsessive-compulsive disorder.

INTERVIEWER

Was the act of drawing a God figure a challenge? You have had panels in the past where God is speaking to someone.

CRUMB

Mr. Natural. But I also saw God in a dream in the year 2000.

INTERVIEWER

What did he look like?

CRUMB

He had features almost like Mel Gibson or Charlton Heston, very severe but at the same time sort of anguished looking. And he was warning me about something, very briefly, warning me about this destructive force that was getting stronger, and since He loved Earth or this reality or whatever you want to call it, He was enlisting me to be one of the people to protect this reality from this destructive force. When I was trying to figure out how to draw God I remembered that image, which I could look at only for a split second, it was painful to look at this face, it was so severe and yet so anguished.