Oops

If you have ever bought anything from Amazon online, you know that they send you emails to alert you to items they believe you will want based on your past purchases. Occasionally, though, the recommendations leave me scratching my head, such as this one:

(Click to enlarge.)

Reruns Redux

I'm frankly amazed (and amused) that the video of Disney re-use is still generating comments after more than a week. I was certainly aware of how heavily Disney re-used animation during the Reitherman years. The video didn't surprise me so much as wrap things up in a neat package.

Thad Komorowski has created a similar video cataloging Bob Clampett's history of re-use, some of which I wasn't aware of.

Anyone who has worked in animation production knows the twin pressures of budget and deadline. While nobody has brought it up, Chuck Jones re-used animation multiple times within his half hour TV specials, including The Grinch and Riki Tiki Tavi. We can argue over a director's motivation and judge whether the end result has value or not, but I don't doubt for a second that given the opportunity, every director would opt for new footage instead of re-use.

It's the Cat Again

Mark Kausler has updated the site for his independent film, It's the Cat. There are original cels for sale as well as artwork on display. One of the neat features of the cels for sale is that when you display them, you can flip between the cel and the drawing it is based on. If you buy a cel, Mark will throw in a DVD of the finished film for free.

(If you just want the finished film, you can download it from MyToons for $1.99.)

The real plum, however, is the complete pencil test online. I'm one of those people who loves pencil tests and prefers them to finished animation. I love seeing the pencil lines in the rough and even the grain of the paper animating. It's animation, unplugged.

Run (or dance) over and take a look.

Against Outsourcing

"And 44 percent of the time (there are commercial airline crashes), the two pilots have never flown together before, so they're not comfortable with each other."
-Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers

"A palpable energy is released when inspiration and dedication come together in a creative art. The energy is transformative in an individual who is innovative, but it is transcendent when manifested by a group. There are no words for the dynamic thrill of participating in a mutual mosaic of creativity."

— Wynton Marsalis

My father worked for over 60 years as a machinist. His job was to take a blueprint supplied by a client and figure out how to make the machine part using the tools and crew at his disposal. Often, my father had only the vaguest sense of what the piece would be used for; he rarely saw his piece assembled with any other pieces.

The system worked because of the nature of blueprints. I grew up listening to my father talk about the challenges of making certain parts. The allowable tolerances, meaning the amount that the part could deviate from the blueprint without being rejected, was often as small as four ten-thousandths of an inch. As a child, working with a ruler whose closest marks were one thirty-second of an inch apart, I was amazed that anything could be made so exactly.

It works for machine parts; it doesn't work for entertainment.

The theory behind outsourcing is straightforward. If you can buy something for less money than it costs to build yourself, it makes sense to buy it. If a dentist needs a stapler, it's far more cost-effective to buy one than to order raw materials and tools to make a single stapler. Even when a dentist needs a crown for a patient, it's more cost effective to buy the crown from a specialty company than to make it in-house.

Problems arise when entertainment is treated like something that can be built to a blueprint. The relationship between client and supplier is very different than that of collaborators. Both client and supplier need the instructions to be as specific as possible (down to four ten-thousandths of an inch if possible). The client needs this so that the resulting work will fit his or her needs; the supplier needs this as he or she is being paid piece-work, and poor instructions inevitably mean rejects, which cut into profits and threaten the existence of the business.

It's clearly a master-servant relationship. The master has a need; the servant wants to meet that need with as little fuss as possible. While this sounds like a symbiotic relationship, where both parties benefit from each others existence, it often becomes an adversarial relationship. The master doesn't always know what he or she really wants. The servant has to satisfy the master in order to get paid, but has a limit as to how much effort can be expended before taking a loss. The master rarely takes this into consideration, thinking that payment allows for unlimited revisions. The goals of the master and the servant are different and the financial relationship they enter into makes this inevitable.

Collaborators share the same goals. They may disagree as to the particulars or how to reach the goals, but they agree in principle or they would abandon each other as collaborators. What happens in a good collaboration is something called a positive feedback loop. One collaborator does something which presents opportunities for another collaborator to elaborate on. If the elaboration is any good, it often stimulates additional improvements. The feedback between collaborators pushes the idea or product farther than one simply giving directions to the other.

In many cases, animation is now thought of as a service to be outsourced. It requires that pre-production be far more detailed than in the past. Storyboard artists (especially for TV) are being asked to draw tightly and on model, as their work serves as the basis for the creation of the animation. In other words, the boards are thought of as the blueprints. But there is no way that a storyboard can contain as much information as a blueprint, and so inevitably there are mistakes and retakes. More money is spent on pre-production to take advantage of the economics of outsourcing, but due to the nature of entertainment, there are more retakes required to fix the mistakes. More money is being spent up front and at the end in order to justify saving the money in the middle.

Furthermore, this process eliminates the possibility of a positive feedback loop. There's no financial incentive for servants to try and outperform their masters' expectations. It only makes life more difficult when masters are already asking for too much for the money. Masters don't see their servants as collaborators; servants are merely "the help." My father never knew how a part was to be used, so it was impossible for him to suggest design changes that might have made a part work more efficiently.

What outsourcing does in entertainment is to increase costs in certain parts of production and to wall off any supplier innovation from the rest of the production.

You can't put a dollar figure on collaboration, because until it happens, you don't know what will result. Eliminating collaboration is a false efficiency. In entertainment, it may reduce cost, but it also reduces quality. As the marketplace becomes more crowded and as the internet drives the cost of everything towards zero, the cost of entertainment is going to become less important than its quality.

Chuck Jones Reminder

This Tuesday, March 24, Turner Classic Movies will be running four and a half hours saluting the work of animation director Chuck Jones. The complete schedule is here.

Highlights include the TV premiere of the documentary Chuck Jones: Memories of Childhood, as well as such noted cartoons as What's Opera Doc?, Duck Amuck, One Froggy Evening. The evening will also include early works, such as Jones directorial debut The Night Watchman, as well as Prest-O Change-O and Elmer's Candid Camera, two early steps in the evolution of Bugs Bunny. TCM will also screen The Phantom Tollbooth, Jones' feature, based on the book by Norton Juster, made for MGM.

The entire program will be repeated twice during the evening, followed by 1001 Arabian Nights, a UPA feature starring Mr. Magoo and directed by veteran Disney director Jack Kinney.

Upcoming Sheridan Industry Day

For those in the Toronto area who might be interested, this year's industry day at Sheridan College will take place on April 30.

In addition, I am in the process of booking the Bloor Cinema for a selection of this year's films. The dates I am trying to book are June 9 and 10, with both dates featuring the same films. Once details are confirmed, I'll pass them along.

Reitherman Reruns

Ressemblances dans les films Disney - Vidéos humour

One of my students, Agnes Salek, pointed this compilation out to me. It is skillfully cut together, showing all the Disney re-use, most of which was the work of director Woolie Reitherman. It seems he never saw a scene he couldn't reconfigure. I think that only the material re-used for Beauty and the Beast is from the post-Reitherman era.

A Tashlin Rarity: The Way of Peace

I was not aware of this film until today. It's from 1947, written and directed by Frank Tashlin for the Lutheran Church. Some of the crew, such as Wah Chang and Gene Warren, will be familiar to fans of stop motion animation of the time. The film is narrated by actor Lew Ayres.

There is relatively little animation in this film. It is more a series of illustrations to accompany the narration. I don't know how much this film represents Tashlin's own religious feeling or how much it was simply an employment opportunity.

At this time in his career, Tashlin had left Warner Bros. and was attempting to break into live action feature writing and directing. The year this film appeared, Tashlin first got credited as a screenwriter on the all-star musical Variety Girl. The Way of Peace followed a stint directing animated industrials for John Sutherland Productions, but it would be another five years before Tashlin got credit for directing his first live feature, fittingly titled The First Time.

A Missed Opportunity

The Toronto Star has an article today about the Purchase brothers, who hope to break into the live action film business and who are working on their reel. One of the pieces they've created is based on the video game Half-Life 2 and the piece has been watched more than 2 million times on YouTube.

While I don't play video games and don't seek out films like the Purchase brothers are making, I do have to admire their skills, their dedication and their ability to entertain an audience. Most of all, I admire their resourcefulness. Their film was made for relatively little cash, though many hours were invested in it.

Valve, the company that makes Half-Life 2, is aware of the film and likes it, but they have no interest in a Half-Life movie as they've been disappointed in movies that have been made based on videogames thus far. While I have no interest in insulting people, I need to say that the Valve people are IDIOTS. They're stuck thinking about $60 million budgets, big name stars and 2000 theater opening weekends. It doesn't have to be that way.

I don't doubt that the brothers could complete their film for less than half a million dollars. A budget that low presents many options. The entire film could be given away for free online as an ad for the game. Material could be made available free online as a teaser for a paid download or DVD purchase. A limited theatrical release or a cable TV sale would both be possible. Any of the above would advertise the original game and expand its fan base. Already 2 million people have viewed what exists. The snowball has started rolling down the hill and Valve is too stupid to give it a push when they would be the main beneficiary. Instead, they've set up a road block.

In his book What Would Google Do? Jeff Jarvis says that he thinks the current business model for advertising is doomed. The satisfied consumer is the new advertisement. This means that if a friend tells you about something (and these days you might hear it in person, by twitter, by email, on a blog, or on Facebook), you're far more likely to try it than if you've seen a traditional kind of advertisement. Two million people have decided, without seeing an ad, to check out this film. Why wouldn't the makers of Half-Life 2 want to cash in on this?

Besides being a missed opportunity for Valve, it's also a shame for the Purchase brothers. They've already received calls from Hollywood because Hollywood is smart enough to realize that anybody that can attract an audience is worth investing in. But while the brothers may get an opportunity, they'll be pulled into a business model that's eroding. A Hollywood budget will provide them with resources they don't currently have, but it will also shackle them with a bureaucracy and an overhead they've proven they don't need. If Valve was a smarter company, they'd cash in on the brothers while allowing the brothers to make the film without Hollywood interference. Everybody, except Hollywood, wins and what's wrong with that?

Academy of Art Animation Notes

I've had a link to David Nethery's blog listed here for a long time, but he has a second blog done for the Academy of Art in San Francisco that features news of new books and interesting clips. There are some pencil tests there of Sergio Pablos' work on Treasure Planet, for example. In addition, there's news of a new book on effects animation by Joseph Gilland called Elemental Magic and the two volume collection of Disney artist Walt Stanchfield's lectures on drawing for animation.

I've added a link to the right and the site is worth checking on a regular basis.

It's the Cat

Mark Kausler's animated short, It's the Cat, is now available for purchase at MyToons. Set to a 1920s recording by Harry Reser's Syncopaters, the cheefully amoral cat plays pranks on the moon, a dog and the three blind mice. You can see the above preview in a larger size at the MyToons link above.

I love this film because of the intricate synchronization of the animation and soundtrack. While the actual cartoons of the time period often just bounce repetitively to the musical beat, Kausler is constantly animating accents to hit off beats and notes in a very sophisticated way. The above clip really doesn't do the film justice as it stops before the most interesting animation.

As I'm going to be teaching a workshop on animating to music in May and June, I was interested in Mark's process for dealing with the synchronization. He gave me a very detailed description of his process here. Scroll down for his comment.

Mark is known both for his animation on films like Who Framed Roger Rabbit and his extensive knowledge of animation history. I'm sure it was his love of the latter that prompted him (and producer Greg Ford) to ink and paint the animation on actual cels and shoot it on a film camera stand. This is as old school as it gets. This film was made over a 10 year period, as Mark was busy with professional assignments. This film is a small gem and I understand that Mark has already completed the pencil test for his next short. That's something to look forward to.

I've added Mark's link to the list at right. It should have been there a long time ago.

More on Silent Comedy Timing

Another great example of silent comedy slowed down to real time. Here's Ben Model working his magic on the opening factory sequence of Chaplin's Modern Times (1936). The bulk of this has been shot at 16 frames per second, so that watching it at 24 fps means that the action is 50% faster than life.

Note the pauses in the acting that Model points out that separate the movements and gestures. This is so the actions read clearly when they are sped up.

This sequence works in the finished film due to the inhuman speed that the workers must move on the assembly line. There's a sense of urgency that's not only funny but a story requirement: Chaplin's eventual nervous breakdown has to be believable.



As noted by Ben Model in the comments, here is the sequence where Chaplin has his breakdown, first at the speed at which it was shot and second as it plays in the film, 50% faster than it was shot.

For Students

This week, two very good sources of information, one on the east coast and one on the west, have blogged their thoughts about animation students approaching the end of school year and moving into the wider world. Independent animator and instructor David Levy's thoughts about thesis films may be coming too late in the school year to be much help to this year's graduating students, but it's definitely worth reading for those students with a year or more to go.

For those students who are graduating and looking at an uncertain job market, Steve Hulett, business rep of The Animation Guild, summarizes a talk he gave to the students at Cal Arts.

Their advice sounds pretty good to me.

Sita Really Sings

Nina Paley's Sita Sings the Blues is the kind of film that a major studio would never make, and that's exactly why it's so valuable. On the face of it, a film that combines at least four different design styles, Indian mythology, a commentary on that mythology, 1920s jazz, and autobiography is a commercial train wreck. No one in Hollywood would ever give this a green light or even invest in developing it. That's because in a studio setting, the large number of people involved threaten to pull a film apart. Studios seize on the generic because it's the only thing that everyone can agree on; idiosyncracy rarely survives the Hollywood process.

The jumble of elements that make up Sita work because they're all from the mind and hand of one person: Nina Paley. The story is inspired by her own experience of being dumped by a boyfriend, and the parallel mythological story reflects the misfortune that men often judge women by mysterious or impossible standards. The three on-screen commentators relate the mythology while questioning the characters' motivations and actions from a modern perspective. The celebration and heartbreak of romance are portrayed through musical numbers sung by Annette Hanshaw, a jazz vocalist of the 1920s whose natural delivery and sense of swing continue to make her work appealing.

The film is fun. That needs to be said as the subject matter implies a gloominess that isn't there. The bounciness of the music, coupled with an open design style, keeps the tone light. The looseness of Paley's design for her own story also prevents it from being depressing while allowing the disappointment to come through. There's a good amount of visual and verbal wit at work here.

Animated features are slowly crawling out of the family film ghetto. Think about what we've witnessed in the last few years: Persepolis, Waltz with Bashir, Idiots and Angels and now Sita Sings the Blues. There has never been a time with so many personal animated features. Ralph Bakshi pioneered with Heavy Traffic, but nobody followed him until recently.

Paley is taking things a step further, trying a new distribution model as well. She'll be making the film available for free downloads under a Creative Commons license after it airs on March 7 (at 10:45 p.m.) on WNET in New York. She's made Sita merchandise available. She's also taking donations, trying to pay the almost $50,000 she needs to clear the rights to the music so that the film can be exhibited commercially. She's over 15% of the way there.

If you watch the film, why not kick in at least what you would have spent on a DVD rental? After seeing Sita Sings the Blues, my feeling is that the sooner Nine Paley can start her next feature, the better.

Watch Sita Sings the Blues Online

Nancy Beiman and Michael Sporn have posted that the complete Sita Sings the Blues can be watched online at the WNET site. I don't know how long this will be available and since there are still unresolved copyright issues, this film may never be released theatrically or on DVD. Watch it while you can.

Brad Bird and Chuck Jones Podcasts

The Museum of the Moving Image is located in Queens, New York, in a building that was once a working film studio owned by Paramount. During World War II, the building was used by the Signal Corps for the creation of instructional films (many including animation) for the military.

The museum, which I've visited, is definitely worth the trip to Astoria. In addition to the brick and mortar building, the museum has a web presence that features many interesting articles and dozens of podcasts with movie professionals.

There are three interviews that are animation related: two with Chuck Jones (here and here) recorded on successive days in December 1994, when he was once again working for Warner Bros. creating short films, and one from 2005 with Brad Bird, recorded after the release of The Incredibles.

Jones was 82 at the time of these interviews and he tended to ramble. Several familiar Jones tropes are here, such as his quoting Mark Twain and his screeds against producers. While there are no major revelations in these interviews, it was nice to hear his voice again and to spend time with him.

Bird continues to impress me with his stage presence and his thoughtfulness. The interview with him is excellent.

Don't limit yourself to just the animation-related interviews. There is a wealth of material here including interviews with well-known and lesser-known personalities dating as far back as 1989.

It's All In The Timing

Ben Model is a musician who accompanies silent movies as well as a silent film historian. He's done some very interesting work taking silent comedies and demonstrating the difference between the speed at which they were originally projected and being projected at a realistic speed.

It was standard in the silent era for films, and comedies in particular, to be undercranked. What that means is that if the film was going to be projected at 16 frames per second, it would be shot at 12 frames per second so that when projected, the images would be faster than life. The term "undercranking" comes from the fact that cameras were literally cranked by hand.

There was no fixed projection speed during the silent era. Projection ranged anywhere from 16 to more than 24 frames per second. Initially, projectors were also hand cranked, but even when they were motorized, they were controlled by rheostats which could vary the speed within a single film.

What's interesting in Model's examples, is how the actors adjusted their speeds so that they would get the desired result on screen. Here is the boxing sequence from City Lights (1931). At this point in time, film projection had been standardized at 24 fps and cameras were motorized due to the need to synchronize with sound. Chaplin still preferred to shoot with an older camera so that he could continue to use silent comedy timing.


There are differences that Model points out. Characters seem to weigh less when in fast motion. This lends a sense of unreality to the physical knock-about that allows it to be funny. When Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd made sound films in the 1930s, their falls appeared painful because they were accompanied by sounds of impact but also because being timed realistically, they looked like real people hitting the ground and the audience viscerally felt the impact.

The speed itself adds comedy to this fight. In real time, it's leaden, but sped up it has a lot more energy.

One thing that the extra speed required was increased clarity. With gestures faster than normal, it was important to do only one thing at a time so that the audience could read the actions clearly and not get confused. In this Model version of a clip from The Adventurer (1917), pay attention to Chaplin and the empty glass in his hands. When the drink is finished, he licks his fingers, puts his fingers in the empty glass and them licks them again and drinks from the empty glass, hoping to find a final drop. There's the rule of threes in operation; Chaplin performs three actions to show that he wants more, but hasn't any. That's all an anticipation of the gag where he tips another man's glass and steal the liquid from it.




Model has other examples available here, including one from Sherlock Junior (1924), starring Keaton. In Chaplin's last silent, Modern Times (1936), he sang a nonsense song at the end, which forced him to shoot at 24 fps. However, before, during and after the song, he cut in undercranked footage shot with a silent camera. Note how different the speed of people's motions are in the two types of footage. While Chaplin's song is funny, it's like he's stepped into a different world where everything is sluggish by comparison. I should note that this clip contains the last verse of the song, one which Chaplin edited out for re-issues and is missing from the latest DVD release of the film.



The animators and directors of the 1930s and '40s grew up watching silent comedies and absorbed the feeling for fast action. Bobe Cannon's smears in The Dover Boys are 4 frames long. Tex Avery talked about bringing in an object 4 frames before it beaned a character. Rod Scribner's animation has the broad energy of silent comedy. The furious anticipations that animated characters go through before zipping off screen owe a debt to the sense of speed that silent comedy introduced. Animation caricatured it, pushing it even further. Fast is funny, especially when it's been combined with movements that read clearly.

What's Killing the Videogame Business?

(UPDATE: Variety reports that Midway Games, makers of Mortal Kombat, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Feb. 12.)

Slate has an interesting article on the state of the videogame industry. While sales are rising, budgets are rising faster. That's leading to financial losses and layoffs.

The development cost of a game is now in the area of $40 million, which is the cost of a mid-range animated feature. The gaming industry is pursuing a Hollywood model, hoping that blockbusters make enough money to offset losses on other releases. I'm not sure how smart it is for anyone to raise the stakes in a time of economic uncertainty.

I'd love to know how many artists the gaming industry employs relative to TV and feature animation. It's possible that gaming employs more than the two of them put together. If that's true, I hope that the game producers know what they're doing.

Sita Sings the Blues on NY Television

The N.Y. Times is reporting that Nina Paley's animated feature Sita Sings the Blues will air on the New York PBS station WNET on March 7. It also reports that the copyright fees for the songs have been negotiated to a more reasonable level and that the film may soon be released more widely. I'm looking forward to seeing the complete film.

The Bandmaster Part 3

Above is the complete version of The Bandmaster, directed by Dick Lundy for the Lantz studio. It's available on The Woody Woodpecker and Friends Classic Cartoon Collection.

There are several bits of animation I'd like to talk about. The first is Les Kline's trapeze artist, which is around 3:03 into the cartoon. When we think of animators who create funny movement, we tend to think of people like Rod Scribner or Jim Tyer - animators whose movements are very broad. The shot of the trapeze artist is the opposite; it's a quiet piece of motion that could actually be accomplished with a cut-out. The idea of a cartoon character defying gravity was already old by 1947, yet the way this character moves to the music is somewhat hypnotic and always breaks me up. There is something otherworldly about it; a loopy grace that glides along the clarinet solo. The second shot of her is an anti-climax that breaks the spell. The gag with her hair is not particularly good and the decision to animate her in perspective also breaks the mood. For me, though, that first shot is unforgettable.

Pat Matthews is one of the great unsung animators. Take a look at this 30 frame cycle of the dancing elephants. It's beautiful in many ways. Click to enlarge.



First, there's a lot of action jammed into a second and a quarter. Second, the are great rhythmic lines in many of the poses. Take a look at frames 15, 18 and 22 for example. The paths of action for the body and trunk are also strongly rhythmic and graceful. There's some expert spacing between the drawings. The leap (frames 12-15) is only four frames after a lengthy anticipation. The leg kick on frame 18 really pops relative to the preceding drawings. The spacing between drawings 22 and 23 is also quite large. Of course, all of this synchs well with the music.

This animation is also very efficient in that it is cycled with the characters moving to the right and then it is flopped and re-used as they move to the left. Because each drawing is used at least four times, Matthews could afford the time to make sure that each drawing was attractive and that the animation worked.

Both of these bits of animation are grace notes in what's really not a very good cartoon, but both show the power of movement itself to entertain.

The last piece of animation I want to mention is again by Les Kline. The animation of Andy pushing the tub of water at the climax does a great job of conveying panic and furious action. The posing and movements are broad; the timing is fast. There's a genuine sense of desperation coming from the character. The cartoon hasn't really built up to a climax in terms of content, but Kline's animation pumps energy into the end of the cartoon that really gives it an extra kick. Again, the power of movement to emotionally affect an audience.