Update: New Photos added to Animator's at Work gallery
My friend Jay Jackson just sent met this great photo of himself working on "The Black Cauldron" at Disney's in 1983 .
My friend Jay Jackson just sent met this great photo of himself working on "The Black Cauldron" at Disney's in 1983 .
Article from the Oakville (Ontario) Beaver , June 22, 1984 , about the International Summer School of Animation at Sheridan College.
"It's four months compared to eight, and rather than a 20 or 24 hour schedule they have a a 40 hour week. They go from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily and most of the students are here at night"
Photo of the primary animation and clean-up crew on Cecropia's animated game "The Act" . Orlando , FL , 2006. Most of us in this group had previously worked with one another at Disney's Orlando studio.
Once I asked Ed Smith (who animates in ink) what he does when he makes a mistake.
His response: "I'll let you know when that happens."
Jenny Lerew's posting of Steve Hickner's photo of a post-Oscar lunch reunion between Dick Williams and some of the London animation crew of "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" who had relocated to L.A. prompted me to look for my copy of the L.A. Roger Rabbit crew photo. (someone in the comments section of Jenny's blog had wondered if the photo she posted was of the L.A. Roger crew; I then posted in a response that it wasn't the L.A. crew, but that I would try to find and post the L.A crew photo.)
This is the brochure that Sheridan College had put out around 1979 - '80 to promote the "International Summer School of Animation" . The program was created so that non-Ontario residents and foreign students could attend the popular Character Animation program at Sheridan College's School of Visual Arts in Oakville, Ontario. As a U.S. citizen I couldn't get into the regular Winter/Spring terms at Sheridan, so I was told that I should apply to the Summer School. The Summer program basically crammed the entire curriculum for each Year of the (then) 3-Year Sheridan program in Classical Animation into three 15-week summer terms. We attended for three consecutive summer terms and ended up with the same Diploma in Classical Animation as everyone else who went through Sheridan's regular animation program which was spread out over the normal Winter/Spring terms.
At one point someone in the summer program (I think it was Tahsin Özgür) made up a logo and motto for the Summer School which was a take off on the Blackwing pencil motto "Half the Pressure, Twice the Speed " ... for the Sheridan Summer School the motto was changed to an image of a Blackwing pencil with the words : "Half the Time, Twice the Pressure" , to reflect the intensive nature of the accelerated summer program. I used to have that logo on a T-shirt , but somewhere along the line it's gone missing or I'd post a photo of it. (Maybe one of my fellow International Summer School of Animation students will see this post and send me a photo of it if they still have one of the T-shirts or a print copy of the logo.)
Anyway, here are some images from the brochure that Sheridan College was using at the time (c. 1981) to promote The International Summer School of Animation.
(click each image to view it larger)
I'll post some more about Sheridan College in those days, but I've got to make the time to scan stuff. In many ways the intensive nature of the summer course was the best thing that could have prepared us for the real world of animation production. Everyone who was in the summer program really wanted to be there and the average age of the students in the summer school was much older than the typical 18 and 19 year olds who entered the regular program at Sheridan. We were motivated and we lived, breathed, ate, drank animation every day during those summers.
One of the things I'm doing these days is teaching animation online. I'm the Online Coordinator of 2D Animation at the Academy of Art University.
Officially announcing what has been in fact a hiatus of posting on the blogs
and
I'll post again at some point, but at the moment am busy on other projects , things I can't post here.
Everything remains in the Archives. Check back now and then and I might have something new to post.
Don't delete me from your bookmarks yet . I'll be back.
In the meantime check out my TVP Animation Blog , a collection of clips made with that remarkable drawing/animation/efx software TVP Animation .
Meeko and Flit Crews , spring 1995 .
622 Rodier Drive (aka Circle 7 Drive), in front of the "Hart-Dannon" building , where Walt Disney Feature Animation "Pocahontas" crew was housed.
(Click on the photo to see identifications of individual crew members)
I posted this last year , but it's worth sharing again this Christmas .
Beautifully designed piece of Christmas cheer from the incomparable R.O. Blechman.
(TV Animation could be so beautiful . Why isn't there more stuff like this on the television networks ? (this originally aired on "The Tiffany Network" , CBS. They could commission something like this in 2007 , right ? Why not?) This is from 1966 and it beats the pants off of most of our technologically advanced Flashy Toonboomery . )
Here is a cel from my collection. It is of the Ghost of Christmas Present from the Richard William's adaptation of "A Christmas Carol" which was made in 1971 and won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film . It was originally aired on television as a half-hour Special (back in the days when television networks still commissioned high-end Christmas Specials and they were actually Special) .
I had this cel for many years after purchasing it at an ASIFA cel sale in Hollywood . When Richard Williams came through the Orlando Disney Animation studio to lecture for us as part of his book tour for his master class notes "The Animator's Survival Kit", I made sure I brought the cel along to ask him to autograph it. Dick seemed genuinely surprised and delighted to see this cel and informed me that this was from a sequence animated by veteran Warner Bros. animator Abe Levitow (who worked for many years in the Chuck Jones unit at Warner's) . Dick said he would sign it "on behalf of Abe" , and so he did.
[click the image to see it larger]
The technique used for this film is very interesting . The animator's drew directly on the celluloids with a "grease pencil" (Mars Omnichrom) in an illustrative style reminiscent of 19th century British magazine illustration such as would have illustrated many of Mr. Charles Dickens's works. Then the animator's drawings on cel were painted (on the back) as usual and photographed against background paintings.
Here is a closer view showing some of the detail of the cross-hatching on the drawings ----
[click on image to see it larger]
The entire film is on YouTube in a much reduced form (dropped frames, sometimes jerky playback, fuzzy , low-res images which don't do justice to the beauty of the original artwork).
For some strange reason this film has never received a DVD release.
The YouTube and Google Video versions are the only way you can see it right now. It was briefly available on VHS a few years ago, but is not currently available as far as I know and never on DVD.
The cel appears around the 14:10 mark on GoogleVideo, during the section of The Spirit's dialogue: (first quoting Scrooge's words back to him) "What then ... if he be like to die he had better do it , and thereby decrease the surplus population" ...
Oh, God ! to hear the insect on the leaf pronouncing on the too much life among his hungry brothers in the dust ."
Here is the entire film on GoogleVideo: