The Inkling Chronicles

MORE! Animation Schtuff - Part II

More schtuff from the boxes:

Here's a letter from Chuck Jones .  I had written Chuck (that is , Mr. Jones)  a thank-you letter for coming to talk to our class at Sheridan College in 1983  (Chuck says "yours was the only letter I received from my visit" )    He mentions that his book is in the works, so I must have asked if he was working on a book ...  needless to say,  I was absolutely thrilled to receive this letter from one of my animation heroes .

[click on images to see larger]

Also from Sheridan College daze here is a photo of three
of my teachers : Zack Schwartz,  Zlatko Grgic,  and  Kaj Pindal.
I learned a lot from all of them and only now , years later, appreciate how good I had it studying under these gentlemen and our other wonderful teachers like Dick Friesen, John Kratovil, Jim MacCauley, Wayne Gilbert, and Bill Speers.   Of the three gentlemen pictured below only Kaj is still around today and still teaching at Sheridan from what I hear .  Long may he wave !

Here's a picture of Kaj Pindal in his backyard Railroad (similar to Walt Disney's, Ollie Johnston's , and Ward Kimball's ... I think Ollie and Ward actually rode on Kaj's railroad, but Walt never got the opportunity ...)

After leaving Sheridan College I got a job in Ottawa, Ontario  animating on "The Raccoons" television series .    Here's a caricature of me from those days , by fellow animator  Graham Falk . 

Yes, I really did look like that in those days :

(this is me at the Atkinson Film Arts studio animating on
"The Raccoons" series in 1984)

Here's another of Graham Falk and me , by Graham Falk :

Another animator who worked on "The Raccoons" was
Nik Ranieri (who went on to animate on a better raccoon and many
other good things).  Here's Nik in those days:

(That's Carolyn Gair in the mirror behind Nik, taking the photo.
Carolyn sat next to me in the next cubicle over.) 

I left Ottawa in the early summer of '85 to take a job with Don Bluth working on "An American Tail" .   The gang gave me a great going-away dinner send-off .  Here's a photo from that send-off (at a Mexican restaurant in Ottawa of all places ... sending me off to Los Angeles !)

From back to foreground , starting on the right side of the table:

Norm Roen (partially obscured by Jamie) , Jamie Oliff, Glen Sylvester, Trish Stolte,  Curtis Crawford,  Drew Edwards.
From foreground on the left :   Gloria Hsu , Graham Falk,  Kathy Harker-Fiander (partially obscured by Graham) .   

More of these photos from Ottawa to follow. 

A gag drawing by Nik Ranieri and Dave Pruiksma made during "Pocahontas" at Disney's in 1994 :

Below are a couple of pages from the old Disney Animation employee newsletter "The Twilight Bark" .   Dave Pruiksma had a column that ran in every issue of The Bark.   This one is from around the time of the release of the live-action "The Flintsone's" movie .   The drawings of various Disney Animation people as Flintstones-style characters are by Nik Ranieri.

(click images to see larger)

(caricatures of : Mike Gabriel, Eric Goldberg, Dave Pruiksma, Jim Pentecost, Tom Schumacher, Nik Ranieri.)

(caricatures of :  Jeffrey Katzenberg,  Tom Sito,  Susannah Grant,
Ed Gombert, and  Burny Mattinson.

I'll just keep digging it up and posting it , so check back , folks...

Good Trick - Cam Macmillan

More remnants of a past life:

(Click Image to see it larger)

This is a drawing from a film I worked on during my 2nd Year at Sheridan College :  "Good Trick"  ,  directed and animated by 3rd Year student Cam MacMillan (in those days Sheridan's Classical Animation program was only a 3 year program) .   "Good Trick" was a cartoon about the misadventures of a pretentious stage magician and his rabbit assistant. I was Cam's assistant on that film , doing clean- ups of his roughs , cleaning up with felt-tip pen on paper, which was later colored with Pantone markers -- from the reverse side, bleeding through , so as not to mess up the line inked in felt tip pen--  and some Prismacolor pencil on top of the flat marker color.  I also did a little bit of animation on the rabbit .  "Good Trick" won some awards at film festivals and played on HBO in the U.S. as well as on cable tv in Canada.   At one time I had a 16mm print of the film , but it seems to have gone missing over the years.   It was a fun project to work on.   

Cam later went into computer graphics in a big way .  I've lost touch with him (as with so many others ) over the years , so if he happens to see this blog post I hope he drops in and says "HI" .

One of the interesting things about this film is that I think it was one of the first  to combine hand-drawn animation with CG  elements.   I was amazed when Cam showed me the wireframe CG tracking shots he had worked out on an early Apple computer with the wire frame 3-D sets of the giant playing cards turning in perspective as the magician ran on top of them, with the camera dollying around them . Cam printed wireframe animation onto 11 x 17 paper and we pegged-up the wireframe print outs , and then traced off the CG wireframe animation on to clean sheets of animation paper.  The characters were then animated on top of the traced CG images.  We inked the tracings of the CG animation in felt tip pen and colored them with Pantone markers as with the rest of the film.   A seamless blend.

In 1983 this was several years before Disney did essentially the same type of perspective dolly shots (the clocktower sequence in "The Great Mouse Detective") and I think Cam MacMillan should get the credit for being the first or one of the first (to my knowledge) to do this type of combination of CG and hand-drawn elements.

Animation Schtuff

So these days I'm doing some teaching , which is fun and a new challenge , and somewhat accounts for the lack of posting new drawings on the other blog (You're A Gazelle) .   

With the teaching I've started to rummage through my boxes and boxes of Animation Schtuff:  old drawings and notes accumulated over the years, looking for material that I can use in my classes .   I'm also running across a lot of old photos and mementos that are bringing back memories of good friends and good times .  If I get some more spare time I'll start scanning a lot more of my photos and posting new photo galleries , but here are a few that I found today and decided to scan along with some animation drawings I was scanning for use in the class .

This first one is me and my friend Lenord Robinson at the Filmation Features Unit in 1987 . I believe this was taken on the day we all found out that the Filmation Features Unit was shutting down after completing only two films (12 had been planned).  I think I look a little bit worried , but Lenord isn't letting it get him down !   Lenord is a really good animator and a very enthusiastic , inspirational guy .  I learned a lot from him .   The movies we worked on at Filmation Features weren't very good , but it was a great crew of really nice , talented folks , many of whom had done better things previously , and/or would go on to do better things after. [click any of the photos to see them larger]

 

(man, was I ever really that young or that thin ? )

I guess I shouldn't have been too worried because right after that I got a job at Disney working on "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" , riding in on the beginning of the wave  of the "2nd Golden Age of [hand-drawn] Animation Features"  that lasted until about 2000 and came crashing down completely by about 2003 .  (it was a fun ride while it lasted, eh kids ? )

So , after Roger came  "Oliver & Co."  and  "The Little Mermaid".   Here are a couple of crew photos from Mermaid .  I worked mostly on the sea witch Ursula , as Kathy Zielinski's assistant .  (Kathy is another fantastic animator who I learned a lot from and I'm sorry to say I didn't ever get to work with her again directly on the same character) .

In addition to Ursula ,  I got to work on Kathy's scenes of  Chef Louis.
Most of Chef Louis was animated by Matt O'Callahan  and the Clean-Up lead was Stephan Zupkas,  but I got to do the scenes that Kathy Zielinkski animated ,  with my fellow assistant animator Kent Culotta.
For some reason Kent and I are wearing almost identical shirts in the Chef Louis crew photo .  (?)  The photo was taken across the street from the Flower St. studio in the kitchen at the WED commissary.

From left to right:  David Nethery,  Kent Culotta (with fish) , Juliet Stroud , Tom Mazzocco (behind Juliet) ,  Matt O'Callahan,  Stephan Zupkas (in Chef's hat), Debra Armstrong , Patrick Joens .  (missing  from photo is Kathy Zielinski)   Oh, yeah, the big guy with the knives is Chef Louis.   (drawing by Matt O' Callahan)

Here's the Ursula Crew photo :

Left to right , Front row: Pres Romanillos (callow youth) , Peter Gullerud, Mike Show, Eric Pigors  (the eels are Flotsam and Jetsam)
Second row: Francesca Allen,  Terrey Legrady, Vera Lanpher,  Dave Cutler, Kathy Zielinski, Ruben Aquino , Nik Ranieri . Third row: Teresa Martin, Alex Topete , Kent Culotta, David Nethery .  (The lady with the tentacles is Ursula) Back row: Dave Woodman, Dan Boulos, Merry Clingen , Sheila Brown, Stan Somers , Patrick Joens.
(drawing by Dave Cutler , if I recall correctly ...) The Ursula Crew photo was taken around the corner from Disney's 1420 Flower St. building on  Hazel St. a quiet little residential street (!)  off of the industrial warehouse district that took up most of Flower St., Airway, and Grand Central Ave. area which housed various WED/Imagineering and Disney Feature Animation crews during the years from 1986 - 1994 .

Finally, a fond memento from The Little Mermaid wrap party.  The wrap party invitation and a personal note from directors John Musker and Ron Clements.   (they note that my "work on the witch looks great" , and  I have the hots to animate ,  , but in fact instead of animating on  The Rescuers Down Under  I departed to spend two glorious years animating at Dale Baer's studio , before returning to work on John and Ron's  wonderful Aladdin feature at Disney  (I was assigned to  clean-up on Aladdin and stayed in clean-up animation until the very end of my time at Disney , in Florida on Brother Bear in 2003 .  oh, well.... gawrsh how time flies ... )



 

(by the way, John and Ron , if you're reading this [ha!] ,  I am currently available .... "have Cintiq , can draw" ...  )