When I finally landed a job in the animation industry, I ended up meeting and working with a lot of people who had created animated cartoons that I had grown up on. While not household names, they were very familiar to me from seeing their credits on various cartoon shorts or shows over the years. I ran into some of these people at Warner Bros Animation. People like Gerald Baldwin, who had worked on UPA and Jay Ward productions product and had created a sequence that I truly enjoyed from Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol. Art Leonardi, who worked as an animator on late 50's/Early 60's Warner Bros.Cartoons and became a jack of all trades with Friz Freleng on Pink Panther and Ant & The Aardvark cartoons. Tom Ray, a veteran animator from MGM and Warner Bros cartoons, would later work for Chuck Jones 'How The Grinch Stole Christmas' and 'Horton Hears A Who!'. Of course, there were many others, some of which I was surprised were still alive and actively working in the animation industry.
People like Alex Lovy, a longtime Lantz Director, who later worked on Hanna Barbera cartoons, Norm McCabe, an animator and Director of Looney Tunes from the late 30's thru early 40's,
and Charlie Downs, who started at Disney and worked on many of Ward Kimball's projects at the studio.
When I was working for Don Bluth on The Troll In Central Park in the early 90's. The studio was going through a difficult time with Goldcrest, the movie company that was funding the Troll movie. Apparently, Goldcrest had a new management team and they weren't pleased with the Bluth product (more on that in a future post).
Fortunately, the Bluth unit in Burbank had a special projects division that had just completed the character animation for a ride at Universal Studios called The Fantastic World Of Hanna Barbera and was now embarking on a new project for a theme park attraction in Japan.
One day, I had noticed an older gentleman in a corner of the studio who was toiling away on color keys for the new project. I went to introduce myself and he told me his name was Walt Peregoy.
Peregoy, a superior talent, had painted backgrounds for Disney's Sleeping Beauty, 101 Dalmations, Sword In The Stone and had designed the backgrounds for Hanna Barbera's late 60's/Early 70's product.
He eventually returned to Disney to work on projects for EPCOT center.
It was pretty much known in the business, even back then, that Peregoy was a volatile individual and wasn't afraid to voice his opinion about things. I didn't care much about that; I was in awe of being in his company. Every other day I would drop by talk to him a bit and would salivate at his beautiful paintings. He was 64 years old at the time. I developed a friendship with Peregoy while working at Bluth studios and got to hear plenty about Walt Disney (not all good things either from Peregoy's perspective!).
It still strikes me as a surreal experience that I got to work side by side with people who made the cartoon films that I grew up on.
Above, is a film that was featured on the old Disney TV show called Four Artists Paint A Tree. Walt Disney introduces four of his artists; Walt Peregoy, Marc Davis, Eyvine Earle and Josh Meador. Years before I met Peregoy, I actually saw this film in High School. It's good stuff! Enjoy!
From the early 60s', Joe Barbera and William Hanna explain the process of animation from the Hanna Barbera perspective. I've never ever seen this before so this is pretty cool. I think HB's early product is terrific because there's still a whole lot of care in the preparation of their animated shorts. The drawings are well drafted, the timing works, colors look neat and the voices are great. Unfortunately, somewhere after the sale of their studio to Taft Broadcasting around 1966, the studio fell over a cliff! Don't get me wrong...there was still good things coming out from Hanna Barbera, just not so much. Anyhow, this stuff still fascinates me! HB's early animated cartoons like Ruff and Reddy were made for a budget of just under $ 4000 for a 5 minute animated cartoon. By the time they got to the Flintstones, the quality was upped and the budget became $35,000 for a half hour television show. I know it sounds like chicken feed today but the Rocky and Bullwinkle show had a budget that was paltry in comparision, roughly 1/4 the Budget of a Flintstones half hour!
Here's another discarded portfolio drawing that I had laying around. It didn't last long in the portfolio because of multiple reasons, the main one being that it was only there to serve the purpose of having more humans in it. My portfolio got a little too top heavy with cutesy animal characters and I was looking to balance it. This drawing got the boot a year after initially adding it. It's not that I thought there was anything wrong with it; just that I had things that I thought presented me a little better. I used to be very careful about letting people see work that I thought was below par or just not up there with my best. I don't worry about that anymore because even with drawings that you like very much, there's always going to be someone thinking that your work is not inventive, thoughtful, sincere, stimulating, subtle, organic, animated, etc (you get the idea). Once you reach a certain degree of experience, even the drawings that are not so great by your standards, may exhibit a quality that you may gloss over all together. Sometimes those quick simple little sketches exhibit a whole lot about your abilities as an artist. A quick story....Years after I went to school for animation and fine art, I took a life drawing class with a famous artist in NYC. In sketching out my first 20 minute pose, I was a little embarrassed by the drawing and wasn't in the mood to have my instructor critique the work. But as he walked behind me, he took a quick look at my drawing and exclaimed the following.... "Ahhh, a professional!" It was quite a good feeling to hear that, although it didn't make me feel any different about the sketch.. It did give me a certain confidence to know that even my half baked attempts at a good drawing are going to be tempered with an ounce of professionalism.
Here's a drawing I did for some project years back. It was in my portfolio for a while and then I decided to remove it for some reason, probably because it wasn't representing any specific bird. I change out drawings in my portfolio quite often to keep it fresh. I still liked the drawing however and kept it in a pile since then.
Obviously it's some rag tag bird, likely something in the seagull family. However, once again it's cobbled together from my imagination without a heap of reference which sometimes can be a good thing! Most artists will look at their work years later and retire or destroy a good deal of their drawings as being 'not up to current standard'.
This one has survived multiple trash sessions. It has some fun shapes in it and that's why I like it. The media was either an ebony or prismacolor black pencil on animation bond paper.
Does anyone remember this incidental character from any show that they can remember?
Here's a little quick sketch that I did of a pontificating fellow.
It was done in with an ebony pencil with plain copy paper.
Never underestimate the power of copy paper for pencil drawings...it's a great drawing surface for a couple of dollars per ream!
If you've noticed, I haven't posted a whole lot of cleaned up drawings in the past. The reason is simple; there's a power to the ruff sketch that comes right out of the imagination onto a clean sheet of paper. There's going to be a bunch of imperfections, but the power of the lines and the raw attitude of the pose makes it much more interesting to me than a labored over clean up. Besides, I can rough out a pose like this in a minute or two whereas a clean up will take me much much longer to lock down.
Bottomline, I'm able to post quick sketches much more frequently.
To this day, I learn a whole lot from rough drawings. It's almost like you can see how the artist approached the sketch. There's something about a really great ruff sketch that gets me totally enthused. The vitality of the drawing really takes over and makes the thing alive!
Now don't get me wrong...a really well done finished drawing can also be terrific...with the emphasis on 'can be'. But the truth is, some clean ups are merely adequate, and lose all the flavor of the original rough drawing because the rough is traced.
A direct tracing with a clean sheet of paper over the original almost always loses something in the process. Unless you have a master artist doing the clean ups!
When a great clean up artist is at work, he or she enhances the original rough by redrawing it, trying to plus the original.
I've worked with a few clean up artists over the years and some of them should have been animating because they were just that good. But they preferred working in the trenches because they did their jobs well and didn't have to worry about producing 7 feet of quality animation in a week. Thank god that we had these people content in their jobs because they made the character animators look sensational!
Anyway, getting back to the rough drawing above, a friend commented to me that this drawing wasn't all that rough. His point was that most of the detail was there and locked down in single lines.
Well, I've done ruffs that resemble lollipops with scribbles for legs and I've done drawings that have many of the elements close to locked down. But even with a drawing that appears to be close to done, there's still things that I would like to add or change before I finalize it.
OH by the way, I did this drawing today...not in 01 as I mistakenly scribbled on the bottom.
After finishing work on Tiny Toon Adventures, the staff at Warner Bros. went to work developing Animaniacs. A few months into development when we were locking down the stars of the show, I went ahead to animate some Walk cycles for Yakko, Wakko and Dot, which were received by the producers in a great way. Immediately after development, we went right into production minus our layout crew. We were told to draw our storyboards tighter in order to use them as layouts for the animators overseas. Eliminating layout might have saved the producers some money in the short run, but it put tremendous pressures on the storyboard crew. Yakko's World wasn't the first cartoon to be storyboarded (for me that was The Big Candy Store) but it was the most labor intensive.
When I was presented with the script, it was just the lyrics for the song matched to the Mexican Hat Dance. Since I sometimes take things too literal, I thought that it might be a magical kind of idea to have Yakko doing the Mexican Hat Dance, while pulling hats out of thin air representing the countries that he mentions in the song. So to get the full picture, hats would be appearing, disappearing, swallowing up Yakko and finally for the finale', exploding as he reaches the final verse of the cartoon. I thought it was a great idea because it felt like a throw back to some of that great animation from The Three Caballeros, Dumbo and some of those amazing WB Clampett cartoons. I was really excited at the opportunity to do something absolutely surreal for network TV. So, the first thing that had to be done was the research. I looked in book stores and in libraries for all the different hats worn around the world. I researched customs, clothing, dances..anything that would aid me in boarding the cartoon. Then I set down to work, roughing out my Yakko's World masterpiece. I spent the better part of two weeks roughing out the short cartoon. Unfortunately, most of the research ate into my boarding time. I was late with the storyboard and although the production execs cut me some slack for a few extra days, patience was wearing thin. Finally, I stayed up late one night and finished the thing. I was sure that all would be forgiven once they saw what I came up with. The next morning, my director and I were asked to present the storyboard to the producer. Armed with my masterpiece we proceeded upstairs to The Producer's office where we sat down and started to pitch Yakko's World. I flipped over the title page, showed my boss how Yakko leaps into frame and starts in with the hats when he stopped me. "What th' #&%^@# is this? Just have him point to the countries on a map!" I looked at my Director and then back to the producer and then quietly exited the office with my masterwork in hand. The only thing salvaged from the original board was...the title page and..... page one where Yakko leaps in. The rest found a home as a giant wee wee pad for my dog.
I was given another two weeks to RE-board Yakko's World with him pointing to a map. Again, I had to get some research (mainly a map) to accurately represent the countries that Yakko points to. Unfortunately, that was just the beginning on the headaches of working on this thing. First off, some of these countries are so small that they don't really register on the screen and second off, the writer of the songs' new lyrics had problems rhyming certain nations together. So in using creative license, he used so called nations like 'San Juan' to rhyme with Guam. San Juan was easy for me to figure out as a city in Puerto Rico but others were not as easy, and I have to say that I probably lost some hair due to the stress that Yakko's World put me through. The third problem was that the song moves pretty fast and there's not a whole lot of business that you can do between the short breaks. That was important to me because I thought the whole thing of pointing to countries was pretty boring. To help perk things up a bit, I had the countries light up as Yakko points to them, which you really had to do because many of these countries wouldn't be seen because of their size...plus remember that Yakko is pointing to these places at lightning speed. Another thing I incorporated was a little dance that Groucho Marx once did for (I believe) the movie Animal Crackers. One of our staff guys (I apologize for not remembering his name) animated this little dance with Yakko that was inspired by Groucho's dance in Crackers. Since it was a development type thing that wasn't being used in production, I thought some of it might fit within the breaks and liven up the thing, so I called for it. The other thing that I did was to have Yakko roll up in the map at the end, instead of the explosion of hats that I had in the original version. It just seemed like a good way to finish it up. I expected a good number of changes when it went for approval, but none were requested and it went into animation without a hitch. A few months later, I was called into editorial to see the finished version. Everybody, (myself included) was quite pleased with it. I recall being surprised that it was very entertaining. Warner's Executive Brass thought that it was so good that the cartoon was run in The Warner Stores and on The Fox Network as a teaser, months before the show hit the airwaves. Pretty much the way I boarded it is the way you see it on the screen. So here it is...Yakko's World.
Finally, after years of people telling me that my old website on AOL was a real piece of crap, I finally registered for my own domain name and will be posting new webpages there over the next couple of weeks. Currently it's under construction. Thanks to Kevin O Neil for pushing me over the finish line.
New site is $#@!#$%@.com, so keep it on your favorites list.
UPDATE!!!! AUGUST 17th, 2011
Actually with this blogger account, there is no need for a separate website anymore.
And BTW,
that other site hasn't existed for a couple of years now....
