CSotD: For the record … an unintentional blog post
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No moment, however fleeting, should go unblogged, tweeted, Facebooked and otherwise memorialized in media which will be gone by the end of the week. An observation from Sherman's Lagoon.
I went to the Paint & Pixel Festival in Northampton yesterday, with my comical sidekick Liz , but decided against going as a blogger and decided to simply enjoy the event instead.
(Note: For those who have always wanted a comical sidekick, you have to plan ahead. When my granddaughter was old enough to read, I started her apprenticeship by letting her borrow my Barnaby collections, and have given her brain stimulants disguised as comics ever since, like the Fantagraphics collection of the first year of Dennis the Menace, which otherwise she would not know was once a really funny strip. She is now 14 and good company. But that doesn't just "happen.")
As expected, we had a great conversation with "Rhymes with Orange" creator Hilary Price, who provided my aforementioned comical sidekick with some insights about Northampton and the Five Colleges. They had met two years ago — Liz can be seen briefly in the video interview I posted two days ago — and Liz is a huge fan. She's also, after this second trip down there, a fan of Northampton, so come back in three years and we'll see if that conversation led anywhere.
Hilary needs to put out more books, because I'm running out of people who I haven't already given them to and she is an absolutely world-class booksigner, as can also be seen in that video.
We also had a long conversation with the guys from Anzovin Studio, an animation outfit also based in the area and working on a national platform, with credits that include work on "Halo 2" and "Sid Meier's Railroads," and also the TV movies "Faith of Our Fathers" and "GI Joe: Valor vs. Venom."
Here's a short they had up on flatscreens at their table. It's a nice demonstration piece — a quick, watchable and funny way to show their stuff.
We got to talking and I mentioned that, when Walt Disney actually hosted his weekly show, "Disneyland," one of the things did was to give short explanatory presentations on how they produced animated films, which is how I first learned about storyboarding, for instance. I wish I could find one of the most memorable of these on YouTube, because, in it, he showed how they had used stop-action photography to study water dynamics for the "Little April Shower" segment of "Bambi," which was a 1942 release and one of the classics of hand-made animation.
There are certain moments that stand out as landmarks in technique and I remember being absolutely fascinated hearing him explain it and seeing clips of the artists working on it. That segment of "Bambi" joins a few similar moments — modern examples being the stampede in "The Lion King" and the issue of "physics of hair" in "Tangled" — at which even those of us who are not artists have to pause. Check it out:
We segued into talking about breaking the fourth wall generally, as in the Fleischers' "Out of the Inkwell" series, and they told me that there is a track on the CD for "The Incredibles" in which the animators comment on the film, but that it wasn't done for "Ratatouille" apparently because the public interest didn't seem to justify the additional cost.
That's too bad because I think keeping casual fans engaged is important in any artform. As I've said before, fan engagement is critical to web strips, because those are marketed straight to the public rather than to syndicates or newspaper editors, but there is also the looming example of comic books, which seem to be going the way of poetry, becoming a cloistered community in which the creators of a once-flourishing mass medium end up making things only of interest to each other.
The public will always enjoy animation, and they will probably always recognize the difference between the best and the worst. But they may not see the difference between the best and the mediocre, and, if artists want to make a living doing really good work, they need to do what Uncle Walt did and bring the public into the studio once in awhile to watch over their shoulder and see how it happens.
Well, obviously, I went ahead and blogged about yesterday anyway. But the difference is that I didn't take notes and "cover" the event, and we met and talked to more people than just Hilary and the Anzovin people. But this time around, I just let the shark eat me. Often, the best way to experience something is simply to experience it.
Here's an "Out of the Inkwell" feature from 1921:
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