I first saw this ad on Vimeo and by the time the cards started bouncing around in the “cloud,” I was convinced it was a parody of Google’s products. Well, after further research, it turns out that this is a real advertisement for an official Google product. It’s from the directing duo Wolfberg. While of dubious effectiveness as an ad, it strikes me as a superb example of photorealistic computer animation that is both inventive and fun to watch.
(via Motionographer)
There are a lot of images that pop to mind when I hear the words ’2D animation.’ A man’s hand pressing down on a badly wallpapered alarm clock is not among those. The book Creating 2D Animation Revealed with the Adobe Creative Suite
The Walt Disney Family Museum in San Francisco has announced two new exhibitions for this summer centered around the works of lowbrow artist Camille Rose Garcia and Where the Wild Things Are author/illustator Maurice Sendak. The exhibit showcasing Garcia’s work alongside paintings by Mary Blair is an inspired stroke of curation. I hope they keep doing shows like this in which they explore the influence of classic Disney in contemporary visual culture.
Camille Rose Garcia: Down the Rabbit Hole (May 9-November 13, 2013) features some 40 works by Garcia alongside several Alice in Wonderland concept paintings by Disney artist Mary Blair from the Museum’s collection. Organized by guest curator Tere Romo, the exhibition celebrates not only Garcia and Blair’s artistry across decades and artistic styles, but also the power of art to draw us into magical worlds that spark engagement and inspiration. Go HERE for more details.
Maurice Sendak: 50 Years, 50 Works, 50 Reasons (May 23–July 7, 2013) features 50 works by the legendary author and illustrator, accompanied by 50 statements from celebrities, authors, and noted personalities on the influence of Sendak’s work, all in celebration the 50th anniversary of his universally revered book, Where the Wild Things Are. Go HERE for more details.
Texas executes more Americans than any other state in the United States, a disturbing fact that Austin-based British journalist Alex Hannaford learned when he began interviewing Texan death row inmates in 2003. Now, he has patched together a fictional animated film based loosely on those inmate interviews. The Last 40 Miles follows “a condemned man on his last trip: a ride from his solitary cell on death row to the execution chamber in a facility 40 miles away.” The film will employ a variety of drawn and digital animation styles, including rotoscoping.
Hannaford is producing the short with a trio of artists who teach at the Art Institute of Austin: Jeff Roth, Meg Mulloy and Luc Dimick. They are attempting to raise $30,000 on IndieGogo to complete the film. At the time of this writing, they had raised $18,666 with three days remaining in their campaign. Unlike Kickstarter’s all-or-nothing fundraising platform, IndieGogo offers a ‘flexible funding’ scheme, which means that even if these filmmakers don’t reach their goal, they are allowed to keep the amount they’ve raised. Texas Monthly published an interview with Hannaford last December in which he describes the genesis of the film and how they’re making it.
According to former Disney animator Tom Bancroft on Twitter, Disney gutted their hand-drawn animation division this afternoon, and laid off nine veteran animators, including some of the studio’s biggest names: Nik Ranieri, Ruben Aquino, Frans Vischer, Russ Edmonds, Brian Ferguson, Jamie Lopez and Dan Tanaka. Two of the animators who still have jobs are Eric Goldberg and Mark Henn. The news of cuts in their animation division was leaked last week, but I, for one, did not anticipate that all these top animators would be let go. We’ve reached out to the studio for comment.
UPDATE: According to Aaron Blaise in the comments, Alex Kupershmidt was not among those laid off.
UPDATE #2: The Animation Guild reported that 9 veteran animators were laid off today so there are still two names that are unknown.
UPDATE #3: And now the Animation Guild is reporting in the same link above that, “Other veterans are being called in to meetings to discuss pay cuts and/or buyouts.”
UPDATE #4: In light of Disney’s dismantling of their hand-drawn animation division, this Animation Guild post from last October suggests that Disney execs, including Lasseter, had decided a while ago that hand-drawn animation was no longer a part of Disney’s gameplan. In the post, an anonymous staffer at Disney lodges the following complaint to union rep Steve Hulett:
We’re developing a bunch of different projects to show John Lasseter. It’s a complicated process. We pitch to a development group, they tell us which ones they like, then tell us that people who’re pitching need to develop three pitches for John, since he likes artists showing him three things.
And when we do pitch, it’s made clear to us that the stories aren’t necessarily for a hand-drawn project. When we’ve brought it up with John Lasseter, he’s shied away from commiting to a hand-drawn feature …
UPDATE #5: There’s a long-ish piece at Business Insider that explores reasons for the broader company-wide layoffs at Disney. They include the dying DVD market (and sluggish sales of Brave and Cinderella) as well as the $50 million write-down on Henry Selick’s cancelled stop motion project. Of course, the hand-drawn animation division layoffs are simply because Disney is moving away from drawn animation.
Ogres are so yesterday. DreamWorks Animation just announced that they have acquired the IP for the Trolls franchise from the Dam Family and Dam Things of Denmark. DreamWorks now becomes the exclusive worldwide licensor of the merchandise rights for the humorously-deformed Don King-hairstyled Troll Dolls, with the sole exception of Scandanavia where Dam Things will remain the licensor. The studio had previously announced that they were developing a Trolls feature.
DreamWorks also announced that they have tapped American Girl veteran Shawn Dennis to lead the Trolls brand development. “Trolls is a brand with over fifty years of deep heritage and we are thrilled to bring this iconic, multi-generational property to DreamWorks Animation,” said Chief Operating Officer Ann Daly. “We have big plans for this franchise and Shawn Dennis is uniquely suited to lead this charge. She helped grow the American Girl brand into a household name and by bringing this expertise to Trolls she will introduce these characters to legions of new fans around the world.”
Dennis joins DreamWorks from American Girl, where she was Senior Vice-President of Marketing (Product Development and Publishing). Prior to that, she was group head of global branding at Dell, and Chief Marketing Officer and Vice-President of the NFL.
Calle Ostergaard, CEO of Dam Things, said, “DreamWorks Animation is renowned for telling wonderful stories about imaginative worlds while bringing characters with universal appeal into the hearts and homes of families everywhere – I can think of no better future for Trolls. We are confident that the time-honored legend of the Trolls, which holds such special significance to the Dam family and the people of Scandanavia, will now live on in new and exciting ways with DreamWorks Animation.”
The National Film Board of Canada has released a trailer and clip from Theodore Ushev’s new film Gloria Victoria which will screen at Annecy in June:
Recycling elements of surrealism and cubism, this animated short by Theodore Ushev focuses on the relationship between art and war. Propelled by the exalting “invasion” theme from Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony (No. 7), the film presents imagery of combat fronts and massacres, leading us from Dresden to Guernica, from the Spanish Civil War to Star Wars. It is at once a symphony that serves the war machine, that stirs the masses, and art that mourns the dead, voices its outrage and calls for peace.
Ushev draws upon the rich history of Modern art in Gloria Victoria, and turns it into a visceral and original animated experience. I saw a workprint last fall, and if it’s not plainly evident from these previews, it’s a mind-blowing art lover’s delight.
In Circle Line, London-based Adam Wells depicts the life cycle of a creative individual, and its accompanying compromises and heartbreaks. At least, that’s my reading of the short; I’m sure there’ll be other interpretations, too. In common with Wells’ earlier shorts Brave New Old and The Rest is Science, Circle Line shares a preoccupation with the inherent beauty of mechanical processes (especially moving sidewalks in this film) and physical routines.
I invited Wells to share with readers how he achieved the film’s distinctive look. He writes:
The project is CGI, but there are no character rigs. I use ‘point level’ animation on 2D planes, working directly on the postion, frame by frame. CG animation is often compared to puppeteering, and a lot of traditional animation lovers are put off by the asthetic. I am trying to build something that is fully CG and looks it, but is built from a more traditional technique, which is why I make such liberal use of stretch and smearing. (This does not require fancy CGI calculations, it’s just drawn polygons.) It’s a technique I have used for my larger project Risehigh.
CREDITS
Directed by Adam Wells
Sound Design by Nic Smith
Typography by Joseph Alessio
Technicolor announced last week that they have appointed Owen Hurley to be the Creative Director of its Animation and Games group. Hurley will be based in Bangalore, India, at Technicolor Digital Productions’ animation studio.
The company, which formerly focused on technology solutions for the entertainment industry, has been building its reputation as a content producer since 2010. Their Indian studio has a dedicated unit working on Rockstar Games including such titles as Red Dead Redemption, L.A. Noire and Max Payne 3.
Earlier this year, Technicolor also announced plans to develop original content. Their current projects in development include Berkeley Breathed’s Pete & Pickles; Atomic Puppet, (a co-production with Mercury Filmworks); and a TV series adaptation of the graphic novel series The Deep.
Hurley recently directed Technicolor’s Barbie in the Pink Shoes for Mattel. Prior to working at Technicolor, Hurley was the Director of Animation and Cinematics at Vancouver-based Relic Entertainment, where he worked on the games Company of Heroes and the Dawn of War series. During an eight-year stint at Mainframe Entertainment, he directed episodes of Beast Wars, ReBoot, War Planets and Weird-Ohs as well as the direct-to-DVD movie, Casper’s Haunted Christmas.
Amazon’s Gold Box Deal of the Day—good for today only—is an amazing value for anyone who is even slightly interested in classic Hollywood cartoons. They’re offering all six Looney Tunes Golden Collection DVD sets for $65.
Edward Levitt, an unsung hero of the Golden Age of animation, has died. He was 96. Levitt died on Tuesday, April 2, in Palmdale, California.
Levitt worked as a director, production designer, storyboard and layout artist, and background painter for thirty-five years in the animation industry. His superb skills as a designer made him a key figure during the Cartoon Modern era of the 1950s.
Ed Levitt was born in New York City on April 17, 1916 and grew up in Somers, Connecticut and Brooklyn, New York. His family moved to Los Angeles in the mid-1930s and following graduation from high school, Levitt applied to the Disney Studios in 1937. He was hired at $16.50 per week and did rotoscope tracing on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
The Disney studio recognized his talent as a painter, and by the end of production on Snow White, he had switched to painting backgrounds. He worked as a background artist on Pinocchio, the “Rite of Spring” segment in Fantasia and Bambi.
Here are a couple examples of his paintings from Fantasia and Bambi:
Levitt picketed during the Disney strike of 1941. He returned after the strike was settled to work on Victory Through Air Power, but left again to enlist in the Marines in 1943. During the war, he made training films while a member of the Marine Corps Photographic Section in Quantico, Virginia. The following photo shows Levitt during the time he was stationed at Quantico:
After the war, Levitt became a partner in a Los Angeles-based production company called Cinemette, which was formed with ex-Marines (and Disney artists) John Chadwick, Jack Whitaker, and Keith Robinson. The studio operated between 1946-1950, and they created a number of industrial films, as well as entertainment short subjects and early TV commercials.
Levitt’s liberal politics led him to direct Grass Roots (1948), which called for establishing a world government through a revision of the United Nations charter and was partly funded by the United World Federalists. He also produced a popular anti-nuclear animation film Where Will You Hide? (1948), which attracted the attention of no less than Albert Einstein, who commented, “Somebody, after having seen this film, may say to you: This representation of our situation may be right, but the idea of world government is not realistic. You may answer him: If the idea of world government is not realistic, there there is only one realistic view of our future: wholesale destruction of man by man.”
Levitt’s star rose during the 1950s when commercials and commissioned films were produced at an increasingly frenetic pace. His spare but visually sophisticated style was ideal for advertising, and he was much sought after as a designer, storyboard and layout artist. “He was a great artist,” said animator Bill Littlejohn. “And his layouts were the best. He could animate, too. I sure liked working with him. He was so damn good at what he did. He knew the problems that the animators would face and he would design things with that in mind.”
These are a few examples of commercials and films designed and laid out by Levitt:
Through the 1950s, Levitt worked as a freelancer at nearly every major commercial studio in Los Angeles including Graphic Films, Cascade Pictures, Raphael G. Wolff, Quartet Films, John Sutherland Productions, Eames Office, ERA Productions, United Productions of America, Ray Patin Productions, Academy Pictures, Churchill/Wexler Film Productions, Storyboard Inc., and Fred A. Niles Productions.
At Playhouse Pictures, Levitt worked closely with director Bill Melendez on many of the Ford spots starring the cast from the Peanuts comics. When Melendez opened his own studio in 1964, Levitt was one of the first artists he hired.
“I remember Ed as being reliable, steady, pragmatic, kind and generous,” said Melendez’s son Steve, who also worked at the studio. “I know that he helped Bill in the early days not only artistically but also financially. Bill always considered Ed to be ‘The Best’, a title he did not bestow easily or often. Ed could draw anything and had a great grasp of how a film is made. He was the best layout person I have ever met.”
Levitt played a key role in designing the first Peanuts special, A Charlie Brown Christmas. This was one of his backgrounds from the film:
He also coined the famous credit used for many years at the end of the Peanuts specials—Graphic Blandishment. “Blandishment” is defined as “something that tends to coax or cajole,” which speaks to Levitt’s modesty and his view of the role he played in the filmmaking process.
Steve Melendez recalled that Levitt was proud of A Charlie Brown Christmas even during times of uncertainty and doubt:
“When we completed A Charlie Brown Christmas, and we all had a chance to look at the answer-print, Bill, Lee [Mendelson] and everyone else thought we were the authors of a great disaster and we would probably never make a film again. Ed was the sole voice who said, ‘Don’t be silly, this film will be shown for a hundred years!’ And he was right. I don’t know if he believed it or not, but his calm confidence gave everyone hope that perhaps things were not as bad as they seemed.”
By the early-1960s, Ed identified himself as a Cartoonist-Rancher on his income tax returns. He had purchased a ranch in Lake Hughes, an hour’s drive north of Los Angeles, near Gorman, California, and had began taking animal husbandry classes at Pierce College. At his orchard, he planted cherry and apple orchards, and began to raise cattle.
Bill Melendez made this drawing of “cartoonist-rancher Ed”:
He spent most of the 1960s working on the Charlie Brown TV specials, and also directed a couple of Babar specials for Melendez. Other Sixties projects included the titles of It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, and the features Gay Purr-ee and The Incredible Mr. Limpet.
Levitt retired from animation in 1973 to become a full-time rancher and orchard owner. “As you get older,” Levitt told a newspaper reporter, “it just seems a lot nicer to sit up here in the forest and listen to the trees grow.”
This is a photo of Levitt (left) operating his “pick-your-own” orchard in later years:
Levitt is predeceased by his wife, Dorothy. He is survived by his brother, Julius Levitt; sister, Annette Priemer; his four children, Alan Cyders; Geoffrey, Dan and Paul Levitt, along with numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren. In lieu of flowers, the family has requested that donations be made in his name to the Motion Picture & Television Country House and Hospital.
Artist Katie Woodger is claiming on her Tumblr this morning that Disney’s Consumer Products division has been reproducing her Alice in Wonderland artwork on Disney merchandise without permission. She has a compelling case:
My painting was created back in 2010, and since then so many people have expressed their love for it, not just on tumblr, but in many places. At least 9 people had it tattooed on their bodies. It’s one of my favourite images I created at University and I was proud of it in many ways.
Disney have used it on a cosmetics bag HERE (look at the back)
and they have produced a Tshirt HERE with a really similar design clearly modeled from my painting.
I’m so mad because I have no chance at getting Disney to do anything about it. I had so much respect for the company and now I am just SO upset and disappointed.
Bear in mind that Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland is a public domain property and Woodger’s art was styled in an original manner that is distinct from the Disney versions. If her claims hold up, this would be a bold example of copyright theft by the Disney Company.
Shave It comes from directors Fernando Maldonado and Jorge Tereso of Bueno Aires, Argentina-based 3dar. The monkey at the center of the film is a stone-faced schemer with an environmentalist agenda. The filmmakers explain:
For us, it’s an ironic reflection about how nature adapts to the human invasion. We found a great inspiration in an Amazonian bird, the Lira, which imitates the sounds it hears in the environment. It does it with such a lack of criticism or judgment that it imitates the other birds singing, the power saws’ noise or the crash of the trees falling in the same way.
The filmmakers push all modes of stylization in this film from a hypersaturated color palette to 2D backgrounds/FX animation mixed in with the computer graphics. The angular monkey is a sight itself, with his shock of wavy electric-blue hair, floating ears, hinged mouth, and mask-like face that makes the stylized animals in DreamWorks’ Madagascar series look like naturalist depictions. All the elements are pulled together with expertise into a fun and attractive package. The development art posted on 3dar’s website gives a small taste of the effort that was invested to explore all the graphic possibilities.
CREDITS
Written and directed by
JORGE TERESO
FERNNADO MALDONADO
Art Direction
MARINA MUÑOZ
Executive production
FEDERICO HELLER
GERMAN HELLER
JORGE TERESO
Graphic design and 2D animation
JULIAN DORADO
3D art
MARTIN BERISSO
JUAN PABLO LANZO
MARCO LOCOCO
SANTIAGO TERESO
FEDERICO CARLINI
Post-production
LUCAS SALVIETTI
Production Assistant
REGINA PORCHIETTI
NATALIA TORIANO
Sound Production
GERMAN HELLER
Music and Foley
JULIEN BEGAULT
CYRILLE MARCHESSEAU
Musical Research
EZEQUIEL BARROS
Animation Direction
FERNANDO MALDONADO
Animation
MARCO LOCOCO
PAULA RAMOS
JORGE TERESO
Rigging
VINCENT SOUZA
MARTIN BERISSO
NAHUEL BELICH
Illumination and Rendering
JORGE TERESO
FEDERICO CARLINI
SANTIAGO TERESO
Creative Support
FEDERICO HELLER
MARINA MUÑOZ
JULIAN DORADO
Among the most popular features on CartoonBrew.com is our annual coverage of the Academy Awards. Our 2013 Oscar coverage recorded the highest traffic ever in the site’s history, hitting a single-day record for pageviews on Monday, February 25.
The animation community’s interest in the awards is justified for many reasons. Foremost, the Oscars serve as a barometer of the general public’s attitudes toward animation. The films that are nominated (as well as those that aren’t) tell us a lot about how animation is evolving as an art form and its acceptance into the mainstream.
The Oscar’s animation categories, however, have long been marginalized in the entertainment media, and lacked the informed coverage and analysis that accompanies the live-action categories. Cartoon Brew sets out to change that with its new ANIMATION OSCAR TRACKER, which is the animation industry’s first and only resource devoted to year-round coverage of contending films.
Our broad focus on both mainstream and independent films will help the film community parse through the ever-growing number of feature and short entries. We aim to provide Academy voters with an indispensable tool for making informed decisions when it comes time to nominate films and select winners for these prestigious animation honors.
The new ANIMATION OSCAR TRACKER, which is readily accessible through Cartoon Brew’s top navigation bar, will be updated regularly with lists of films in contention. More features will be added in the weeks and months to come including Oscar predictions, interviews with filmmakers, and coverage of other animation-related Academy Award categories like visual effects.
