Good Story Telling

Mark Kennedy has a great post at his blog Temple of the Seven Camels about the opening scene of Orson Welles's "Touch of Evil". This shot is most famous for being the longest single take but Mark gives good insight as to why the decision was made to shoot it this way. Part of that article is below. The whole article can be found by clicking on the title or going here:http://sevencamels.blogspot.com/

This is the scene the way Welles wanted it without title and credits superimposed over it.



If you picture in your mind this scene full of different shots cut together, you'll realize that if it were assembled that way, you would quickly lose track of which car was the one with the bomb in it. Even if you only showed one car the whole time, I still think that if you did it all in cuts it would be confusing and not nearly as powerful. You would never be sure if, after a cut, you were looking at the same car as the one that we saw at the opening. When it's all one shot, you never lose track of where the car is in relation to the camera and our characters. You never have the audience getting distracted by trying to figure out which car is the one we're supposed to be following. The viewer can therefore focus on the characters and the story being told.

Collect Them All!

Got more dough than you know what to do with? Why not buy these nifty art pieces from The Aquarium Cartoon Art Gift Shop? Sculptures by James Cauty.

3D Brass

Another stereoscopic free-view style painting. Click on image to enlarge.

Hyungkoo Lee

Artist Hyungkoo Lee has made these cool bone structure sculptures of famous cartoon characters out of aluminum and resin.

Donald Duck
Huey, Dewy, and Louie
Coyote
Road Runner
Bugs Bunny

Violin

Time to get back to art with another of my free-view stereoscopic paintings. Ya gotta cross yer eyes and focus on the image in the middle.

Click on image to enlarge.

Fear(s) of the Dark

http://www.primalinea.com/pdn/images/index.html






I mentioned this last Halloween. I hope it plays somewhere near. See The trailer at the link above.

The Alvin Show

Back in the 60's "The Alvin Show" premiered on prime time television. It was an example of limited animation that utilized modern design made popular by UPA earlier in the 50's. Format Films and creator Ross Bagdasarian,(David Seville and the Chipmunks), filled the series with fun designs and strong character situations that lifted the show above it's small budget. "The Alvin Show" also features great comic songs by Ross that were available as novelty records. It was a great use of cross marketing.

Check out the opening to see the style of the show: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uv5qlABRlNg

And see some of the songs here: http://www.youtube.com/user/Alvinfanatic

Sustainable Freedom

Here's something a little different. My brother sent this to me and I was very impressed. Hope you have a high speed connection.

If you can't see the movie, click the title or go here: http://myspacetv.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=1988837
Sustainable Freedom

Tom Terrific

Speaking of Gene Deitch,(see last post), look what I found on YouTube. I love Mighty Manfred the Wonder Dog. The lip smacking is still funny and says volumes about who Manfred is. I don't know for certain but the animation of Tom watching TV may be Jim Tyers. It's got his 'shrink take' style and he did work on the series.

Gene Deitch

Tom Teriffic


I stumbled across the name Gene Deitch on an information sharing site and wondered if it was the director/animator who turned Terrytoons into the modern style of UPA type animation during the fifties. This is what I wrote and the response I received:

Hello,

Are you the animation director Gene Deitch? If so, I loved "Tom Teriffic" as a kid and hope it's made available again one day. I thought Jim Tyer was a great fit for that show and his animation seemed well suited for an amorphous character.

Hope you are well,

Joel

------

yes,Joel,it's me. Thanks for your good words! I'm on an iPhone out in the countryside,so can only reply with a few words. Thanks for remembering Tom Terrific! Gene

------

Cool huh! What makes this particularly interesting to me is that since 1961, Deitch has resided with his wife, Zdenka, in Prague.

Now I see Gene Deitch will be the Guest of Honor at the 3rd annual San Francisco International Animation Festival (SFIAF), a four-day event from November 13th through 16th at Landmark’s Embarcadero Center Cinema.

Go see him if you can.

William Stout

Okay I admit I live in a cave. I’m sure everybody has known about William Stout for years. But incase you are a cave-dweller like myself and don’t know this guy, you are in luck.

William Stout is a chameleon artist who has mastered a plethora of styles and works in a multitude of markets. He has done comics, movie posters, film art direction, storyboards and book illustrations. His styles encapsulate the best of artists like Arthur Rackham, Charles R. Knight, N.C. Wyeth and more contemporaries such as Wally Wood, Jack Kirby, Robert Crumb, and Frank Frazetta.

The guy is just incredible. Take a look at this portion of a cover for the “Comics Journal” he did. My scanner wouldn’t allow me to get the whole thing, (click on image to enlarge), but you can tell the guys is a monster. He has deservedly worked with pioneers like George Lukas, Steven Spielberg, Disney Studios, etc. etc. etc.

Everyone's a Critic

Many leading authorities on animation have written about the limitations of computer animation and the superiority of traditional drawn animation. If you are caught up in the media of a movie it tells me there is something wrong with the story.

I’ve seen movies with budgetary constraints that have transcended their limitations and have become classics because of their entertainment value and not the media they were executed in.

Story has proven to be everything. If traditional drawn animation were the criteria that determine the validity of good animation we wouldn’t have had the idiotic proclamation: drawn animation is dead and the long string of poorly received films which prompted the opinion.

The awful truth is animation in any form is hard to pull off. It is an art and art is subjective. You may not like Picasso or you might think he is a genius. Animation is a collective endeavor done by individual artists pooling their talents to form a work that will connect emotionally and aesthetically with a broad range of people with different life styles, political beliefs and religious convictions. Sound like a hard thing to accomplish?

The complaints of floaty, weightless, plastic characters that are disconnected with their environments are ludicrous when you examine the sliding feet on walk cycles and other glaring violations of physics seen in a majority of drawn animation from top leading studios. It tells me there is something deeper with the complaints than the fact it was computer animated.

I’ve seen traditional drawn animated films that were expertly drawn with beautiful attention to detail and design that have tanked. Not because they were drawn but because the story was bad. The characters were insincere and unbelievable. They reacted wrong in situations and people just couldn’t connect.

I’m not a snob for any media. I have done drawn, stop-motion, and computer animation and believe the strength and magic of animation is not about what style or technique you employ. It is story and characters that prove the success of animation. It is an art form and art is subjective.

Thief and Cobbler Recobbled

http://smashingtelly.com/category/animation/

The link above,(or clicking on the title), will take you to Smashing Telly and their posting of Richard Williams "The Thief and the Cobbler" recobbled. This is a recreation of the way Williams originally intended the film with NO SONGS and no Johnathon Winters babbling through the entire film. This recreation has some astounding perspective animation in it which is all the more impressive considering it was done in 1967 before computers were a viable alternative.

This special fan edit of The Thief and the Cobbler reconstructed by Garrett Gilchrist of Orange Cow Productions combines the fabled uncut work print with other footage from the released versions, as well as other rare materials to create the most complete film - not to mention the most faithful to the original vision.

UPDATE: The above video by Smashing Telly has been removed.  A new one is here: 

Multi Plane Camera

I couldn't resist posting this piece of Unka Walt explaining the Multi Plane Camera. It's just great stuff.

Seated Nude 3D

Yet another free-view stereoscopic life drawing.

Click image to enlarge.

Drawing the Line

Here's another stereoscopic free-view style life drawing for all you cross-eyed kiddies out there.

Click on image to enlarge

Light Against Dark, or Hello Kitty

Light against dark. This is a mantra I end up chanting every time I paint. My Mother first tried to convey this concept to me as a boy watching her paint. Our styles differ quite a bit with her loose strokes and confident brush work. Mine is more guarded, trying to hide my brush strokes and push toward a photo real quality.




This post shows the various progressions of my oil painting:"Pink Pussycat". I wanted to do something a little disturbing so I chose my favorite theme of anthropomorphic characters. This time with a twist on childhood memories done in a mature realistic manner that I hope is slightly sinister.

I did a photo collage grafting Smokey the kittens head onto a dolls body as my guide. I sketched the image onto a canvas using burnt umber and let that dry. You can see the under sketch through my first ‘blocking in’ of color. I toned the whole surface going from lightest to dark.

Next came more defining of shadows and highlights. I tried to knock down any brush strokes with a round brush to keep them soft and defuse.

Lastly I added the details defining ribbons and flowers. The whiskers and signature finished it off.

Incidentally, my wife hates this picture. She says it's wrong and it really bothers her that a grown adult male should paint a kitty in a pink dress. I’m a little thrilled that one of my paintings can cause such a strong response. Maybe I shouldn’t be. (click on images to enlarge)

Night on a Bare Mountain

Alex Alexeieff and Claire Parker made this 1933 version of "Night on a Bare Mountain" before Disney's 1940 version in "Fantasia".

This is a little hard to watch because of the image degradation and size but you can still make out the wonderful dimensionality of some of the figures as they morph and rotate. This is quite an accomplishment considering their method of generating these images was using frames with hundreds of pins pushed through a screen. The depth of the pins determined how much light or shadow was created in the overall image. It appears to me that some of these images were superimposed or matted into a model village. I also think the scarecrow flapping in the breeze was life action but the metamorphose is animation.

Another rare treat I've read about and wanted to see for years. Isn't YouTube great?

Advance Promo: Coraline

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/coraline/news/1748615

/exclusive_sneak_peek_at_coraline_video_5

The link above,(or clicking on the title), will take you to Five videos about LAIKA studios stereoscopic stop-motion feature "Coraline" that will be released in 2009. Looking good!

Self Indulgence

I did a little study into my family background and found the Brinkerhoff’s have quite an illustrious presence. Constance, Fidelity, and Integrity proclaim our Family Crest, (in Latin even!). We Brinkerhoff’s hopped off the boat from Holland around 1641, but the family crest reads 1307. I had known about the Brinkerhoff Piano and the Brinkerhoff barbed-wire, (to keep renegade pianos from roaming), for some time. Now I find not only do we have streets named after us, we are also practiced in other arts such as syndicated comics, inventing, novel writing, Post Master General, oil drilling, (are these arts?), music, painting, and medicine. Of course it would be a Brinkerhoff that came up with a rectal spectrum.

UPDATE:  Oh, we also have a Ridge worth fighting over....

Brinkerhoff Family Crest (spelled Brinckerhoffe)

Brinkerhoff Street in Plattsburgh, New York.

Brinkerhoff Piano

Brinkerhoff Barbed wire

The history of Brinkerhoff Drilling is long and illustrious. Zach Brinkerhoff Jr. along with his father Zach Senior, started Brinkerhoff Drilling in 1940 in the Illinois Basin with 3 rigs.

Brinkerhoff Author

Brinkerhoff Metal Band


Post Master General

Little Mary Mixup by R.M. Brinkerhoff

Brinkerhoff Invention

Brinkerhoff Health Restoritive

Brinkerhoff Amputation Saw

Brinkerhoff Rectal Spectrum