Starting with a Bang

Caricatured here, a 1984 version of Steve Moore, Dan Jeup, Mike Genz, and Fred Cline

 

40 years ago this month, I was winding up my junior year at CalArts.  Eschewing the usual summer job, I made a grab for the brass ring - my first animation gig.  

A tip from Darrell Rooney got me in the door at David Stipes Productions, a small effects house off of Sherman Way in North Hollywood.   David is a master matte painter, Emmy winning effects supervisor, and super nice man.  His studio was a shabby 1940's California ranch house in a neighborhood swallowed up by industrial buildings.  At that time, they were doing special effects for the mini-series "V the Visitor", with a motion control camera set up in what had once been someone's living room.  

But that's not what I was doing.

Winding through the old house and out the back door, there was small yard strewn with props and film gear.  The yard was closed in on three sides by neighboring cinder block buildings, making it feel like a stage in itself.   Upstage right was a one-car garage from which, along with  Dan Jeup, Fred Cline, and Mike Genz, I animated on David's indie short about dreams and their meanings, working from vocal tracks by legends June Foray and Hal Smith.

When I say we worked in a garage,  I mean garage.  It was unfinished; dewy cold in the morning and by mid-afternoon, an oven.  When it rained, the tin roof roared louder than my Walkman could compensate.  We worked from animation discs set up on fold-out tables.  It wasn't Disney, but I was a working animator - a dream fulfilled at 21.  That I was in a garage making $5 an hour did not diminish this achievement in my eyes. Heck, that's where Walt started!

I was quick to learn three harsh realities of the professional world: 

1. I was expected to animate 8 hours a day - every day - whether I felt like it or not.

2. Working on someone else's film can be a drag. 

3. Lunch was expensive.  

About six weeks in, David let us all go after funds dried up.  To my knowledge, the film was never completed.  It's not listed on the IMDB, and only a dozen or so people even knew about it until this post.  I took no photos, have no artwork nor footage.  Like a Bigfoot sighting, you'll just have to take my word for it.  Or not. 

Aside from being my very first animation job, my experience at David Stipes Productions was unremarkable except for one very notable event.  A few weeks into it we were in our grooves, animating away, when a very large "KA-BOoOoM!" shook the garage and everything in it.  We were certain it was an earthquake.  We ran outside as David and his crew rushed from the main building.  The yard was a cloud of dust.  

"Dildos!" Dan exclaimed.  

Despite appearances,  Dan had not been stricken with Tourette Syndrome.  The dust cleared to reveal dildos - hundreds of them - strewn across the yard amidst broken bits of cinder block.  Who hath wrought yon plague of rubber dicks?

One of the crew yelled, "The dildo factory exploded!"

The dildo factory?

We looked to each other in disbelief, then fell over laughing until tears streamed.  

The wall of the neighboring building - said dildo factory - had a gaping hole in it.  Inside, through cinder dust, we could see a forklift operator looking quite embarrassed.  It was like peering through a portal into an alternate universe.  While we were toiling away at cartoons, they were toiling away at dildos.  We were at the seam where the Real World and Bizarro World met.  

Welcome to Hollywood, kid!  North Hollywood, anyway.

 -Steve 

Bob the Dragon

The 1983-84 school year at Cal Arts was my favorite, and my student film that year, "Bob the Dragon" is a reflection of that. 

I was a junior that year when Hal Ambro came to teach animation.  Hal was a top notch animator, his work dating back to "Snow White".  Here he was, the man who animated the owl in "Bambi", at our disposal. Thank you, animation gods!  I would take my scenes to him (all on paper back then, kids) and Hal would sit at his animation desk and flip through the entire scene, going over my drawings, one by one, while explaining the importance of silhouette for clarity, or using the hands for expression, or giving the characters an implied weight.  Every visit to Hal turned light bulbs on for me and his mentoring was evident in my film that year, a huge leap from my sophomore effort.

T. Hee was another favorite of my teachers, a kindred spirit when it came to a love of whimsy.  I pitched my film in storyboard form and he not only loved it, but added the gag where the dragon encounters a goat.  Dan Jeup would voice the goat, using the goofy sarcastic laugh noise he would do when someone told a bad joke.  "Mmmahaha!".   The only other vocal was the dragon sniffing, done by the late, great Rusty Mills as only he could.  

I got to push my boundaries with the film, defying gravity, logic, and reality, with no one saying "You can't do that.".   All sound effects were interpretive, like the ricochet sound when Bob hiccups.   There's no arc of character or story whatsoever, it just ends.  I wasn't aiming to be a story guy in those days.  

Like all the Character Animation films back then, the finished product was a pencil test.  We shot our films on 16mm film using a massive old Oxberry camera from the 1920's.  Some day, I'll do a post on the dramas that unfolded around that camera as students got desperate for time.

The music is a piece called "Morning" from jazz artist Billy Taylor's LP  "I Wish I Knew How it Would Feel to Be Free".  Billy Taylor plays piano, Ben Tucker on Bass, and Grady Tate on drums.    After spending hours listening to random records in the CalArts library,  I heard "Morning" and knew I had my score.  It matched my animatic incredibly, just by chance.   I should have given credit.  I correct that now. 

I did, however, credit "The Small World".  What he hell is that?  In the A-113 suite, there was the big room, and the small room that I shared with Kenny Thompkins, Mark Rouse, Tim Hauser, Kirk Wise, Kevin Lima, Fred Cline, Carlos Baeza, and the late Ray "Supreme" Johnson.  Gary Conrad (of the big room) dubbed us "The Small World".   I was thanking them for their input and support, as well as Bob McCrea, who ran the department.

Some truly worthless trivia for you, but its my blog, dammit!

-Steve 

The List of 1982

Program for the 1982 show, designed by Fred Cline.

Forty years ago this week, I took part in my first CalArts Character Animation Show.  Through the course of the school year, I had managed to fool myself into thinking I was good.  But seeing my film next to those of Dan Jeup, Chris Sanders,  Kelly Asbury, Bruce Smith, Rob Minkoff,  and a couple dozen other better skilled artists, a hard, hard reality hit me like a brick from Krazy Kat.  I sucked.

I did not make the cut for the Disney show, where all the old timers came up to watch.  At the post-show reception, I got to hob nob with Frank and Ollie, Ken Anderson, and Marc Davis.  It was a comfort to know they did not waste a minute of their shortening lives watching my mess of a film.  Marc Davis cut me to the quick anyway, because apparently, he was good for that.  You can read about it in an old post here.

A Zoom Toast to Kelly

Top row: Kevin Lima, Steve Moore, Chris Bailey, Fred Cline.  Middle row: Kirk Wise, Dan Jeup, Rob Minkoff, Wendell Luebbe.  Bottom row: Tim Hauser, Butch Hartman.

Friday night I took part in a toast via Zoom - the pandemic's next best thing to being there.  We were toasting our friend, director Kelly Asbury, who had passed away a week earlier.   There are hundreds of industry people who would have turned up for this, but we kept it to a core group who hung out as CalArts character animation students in the early eighties: Chris Bailey, Fred Cline, Butch Hartman, Tim Hauser, Dan Jeup, Wendell Luebbe, Kevin Lima, Rob Minkoff, Kirk Wise and myself.  These guys are more than an animation who's who to me - they are my brothers. 

For the most part, the gang looked the same - a testament to living the animation life, I guess.  Most of us wore glasses now.  Kevin was rocking a new, bearded cue-ball look. And me with my COVID lockdown '70's hair  (cowbell band, anyone?).  The only real sign of age is that we were on Zoom for more than three hours and never talked shop once. 

Stories I either didn't know or had forgotten kept us laughing for hours - the crazy shit that makes us glad cell phones and social media did not exist back then.  These were not the flattering stories told at funerals, but hilariously human stories about Kelly.  Maybe you had to be there. I'm glad I was.   

"He was like the Sun." Kirk said.  "People just gravitated to him."

Cheers, Kelly!

-Steve

CalArts dorm, July 1984.  From left: Mark Rouse, Kirk Wise (white shirt), Butch Hartman, Steve Moore, and Kelly Asbury. Photo by Kevin Lima

A Great Day for America - The Far Side is Back!

The overwhelming majority of Americans can agree that the return of Gary Larsen's "The Far Side" comics is great news.  I read about this yesterday on CNN's website though it was not headline news for some reason.  In the CNN article, Larsen explains that he decided to make an official Far Side site because so much of his work was posted online without his permission - fan sites, but more irritatingly, sites exploiting his work to promote their own products or services.  His new site will feature the old strips, but promises some new stuff to come.

My Most Influential Contemporaries

I have posted before about artistic influences, artists who I did not work with personally, but had a strong influence on my own work.  This time, I write about artists of my generation. In the past 30 years, I have worked with hundreds of artists, and many have influenced me in some manner.  Here is a list of five artists who, for me, had the greatest impact, in chronological order.  

1.  Dan Jeup – Dan was my roommate during my freshman year of CalArts, in 1981.  I knew next to nothing about Disney animation, though Dan was already animating at a professional level, and was an encyclopedia of Disney animation knowledge.  His passion for the medium was contagious, and I felt lucky to be asked along when he studied Disney film prints in the school library, pointing out different animation techniques.  Dan taught me about editing and match cuts and animating a character with weight.   And I taught him how to drink a lot of beer.

More on The Ideal Workspace

Yesterday's post on studio space seemed to resonate with readers.  FLIP heard from a couple of art department veterans.  

Fred Cline's credits include The Little Mermaid, Bebe's Kids. Space Jam, and Robot Chicken.  Fred told FLIP:

"For me, there is a distraction issue any time there is shared space, and there is an isolation issue every time there is individual space. As for me, if I am storyboarding, I like to share space because it's easy to get a sort of tunnel vision where you are focusing on your own section of the film and not considering the whole picture. Sharing space as a storyboard artist gives a constant reminder of progress on other sections of the film. If I am designing or doing art direction, I need lack of distraction (or isolation) in order to accomplish the most in a limited amount of time. Apart from that, all I really need is an ergonomic chair, and a cintiq. I've found that a central seating area with coffee table and sofa/upholstered chair seating group adds to the collaborative process."

Deja Boop

Fed Ex delivered two boxes today from art director Fred Cline - boxes full of original materials from the ill-fated Betty Boop feature from 1993.  He found them while cleaning out his garage and was kind enough to ship them to me.  Original storyboards - an entire first pass - were in one box.  Another box had animation tests, scripts, and animatics of a few songs from demos by jazz great  Bennie Wallace.  Seeing this stuff again brought back a lot of lost memories, including the sadness we all felt when the plug was pulled.

I called Fred on his cel phone to thank him for the boxes. We talked for about two minutes when someone in the background interrupted him.  I heard him say, "I'm talking to Steve Moore." Then he laughed and the phone went silent.  Not completely silent, but like he set the phone down and walked away.  

"Hello?  Fred?  Hello?"

About fifteen minutes later, Fred called back. Turns out the guy in the background was Henry Selick and he was calling an emergency meeting.  Fred was in San Francisco storyboarding on Henry's new feature for Disney.  He couldn't say any more about it, and was again interrupted by a background voice. 

"Steve, I have go."  

I thanked Fred again for the Betty Boop materials, then hung up.  Ninety minutes later, I read that Henry's project had just been killed by Disney.  Holy shit!  It was like The Boop Movie all over again.

My heart goes out to Fred, Henry, and the crew.  I know exactly how they feel right now.  It's a very sickening part of the business, where studio gatekeepers can completely fuck so many people over.  Of course, I don't know the whole story, but I'm inclined to side with the artists.  I'm like that, and it's usually the right bet.  

And I usually ask, "Is it a good time to call?"

-Steve

Remembering Mr. Z

I was saddened to read of the passing of Richard Zanuck, film producer and one time head of 20th Century Fox.  What many of you may not know is that Richard Zanuck,  producer of Jaws and Driving Miss Daisy, once had a connection to animation, and I was part of it.

In 1993, the Zanuck Company began pre-production on a Betty Boop feature to be done through MGM Studios.  It was the baby of Richard Fleischer, veteran director of films such as 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,  and Fantastic Voyage.  His father was Max Fleischer, who, with Uncle Dave, created a studio which at one time rivaled Disney.  Their star was Betty Boop.  Richard Fleischer inherited the rights to Betty, and approached Zanuck, an old friend from their days at 20th Century Fox, to make a Betty Boop feature.

Jerry Rees and Steve Leiva were hired as producers and they, in turn, hired me to direct. We began the development process with a small crew in a Burbank office building.

There were weekly meetings at the Beverly Hills offices of The  Zanuck Company, in Richard's office.  My first time there, Richard Zanuck stepped out from behind a huge desk, shook my hand and said, "Dick Zanuck.  Nice to meet you."

I never, ever, called him Dick.  This man was Hollywood royalty.  He produced some of the best films ever done.  His father, Darryl F. Zanuck, MADE 20th Century Fox.  This was Richard Frikkin' Zanuck, man!  "Dick" was just way too familiar, too equal par, for a first time director from South Jersey.  I called him Mr. Z.  

Richard and Lili Zanuck winning Oscars for Driving Miss Daisy.

Entering his office, to the right, was a seating area with matching gold couch and chairs surrounding a heavy duty coffee table.  In the two dozen or so meeting I had there, the seating arrangement never changed.  As the last hired of the group, I got the only seat left - the ottoman.  To my left, sat Jerry Rees, then Steve Leiva. Lili Zanuck, Richard's wife and business partner, sat on the couch directly across from me.  To her left was Richard Fleischer (who also insisted on being called Dick), then Mr. Z in His chair.  

At the start of one such meeting,  he looked to me and said, "Steve, you always get the ottoman." 

As I was shrugging it off, Lili patted the couch next to her and with a flirtatious smile said, "You can sit over here."  

The room erupted in laughter as my face turned beet red. I stammered, "Ohm uh....I'm afraid of you."

Richard laughed out loud. "Afraid?  She hasn't even gotten started yet!"

The fear I mentioned was in reference to her tendency to explode in meetings.  Lili's a petit, gorgeous woman with a razor sharp wit and vocabulary that could make Bluto blush. Inevitably, in every meeting,  she would get into a nuclear argument with Steve Leiva.  Steve liked to preach about filmmaking, and Lili would have none of it.  She would tear into him with a bombastic barrage which, for the layman, would kill them instantly.  But Steve kept coming,  not conceding an inch with a haughty snort.  Lili would go apoplectic. The sound of Steve's voice would make her squirm on the couch, twisting her body away from him.  She would place her hand to her brow to block him from peripheral view, all while continuing her verbal mauling.  It was simultaneously hilarious and painful to watch.  Eventually, Richard, or "Bully" as she called him, would step in, and he and Fleischer would have the final word.   

Six months into pre-production on Betty Boop, regime change at MGM put the project in turnaround. We set up a Boop pitch room at The Zanuck Company,  which stayed up for a few years as they tried to set the film up at other studios.  But Fleischer's Boop deal was not favorable.  Studios wanted to control the merchandizing revenue, so the project died.   The artwork, reels, and recordings generated over that time were dispersed among the crew.

  

Betty Boop Movie Development painting by Fred Cline

It was through Richard Zanuck that I met musician and friend Bennie Wallace.  Bennie did several demo recordings for the film.  He would later score my 1997 short Redux Riding Hood and 1999's The Indescribable Nth.  I can't imagine these films without Bennie's score, but without Richard Zanuck, we would have never met.  I sent Lili a copy of The Nth, and she was so kind to call me with compliments.  She's tops in my book.  My heart goes out to her, dealing with the loss of her "Bully". 

Years after Boop, I called Mr. Z.  His secretary didn't remember me, took my name and number, and I figured he'd get back to me eventually, but he's a very busy man.  He called me that same afternoon.  I thanked him for that, and he said his father told him to always return calls on the same day, no matter what.  

He was truly a class act, and Hollywood is a more terrible business without him.    

   

-Steve

Read more about The Boop Movie here.

Augmented Reality Without Mushrooms

"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one."
 -"Big AL" Einstein

Last month, I was shown this video by my old pal Jerry Rees. 

My head fell off.  A week later, I saw this one, below (skip to about 1:30 to get to the interesting stuff).  

Now, I’ve been around long enough to say I’ve been around long enough.  And for the first time in years I saw something animated that really blew my mind.  How do they do it?   Jerry explains “Augmented Reality” and his work with AMUSME, a start-up new-tech company he has been working with as Lead Creative.

Jerry Rees: 

"Augmented Reality (AR) is a process that allows web cams and/or smart mobile devices to show you a live image of what is actually there (the Reality part), plus an added element that isn't actually there (the Augmented part).  Software locks the Augmented element to the scale and perspective of a preordained marker in the real space.  This "tracking" to the marker is essential in making the added element seem to be part of the physical world.  When you move the marker in Reality, the Augmented element moves right along with it.

Old school tracking markers used to be blocky black & white symbols.  We now use image recognition.  This allows the app to "recognize" almost any image, such as a face or a logo and launch the software.

The term Augmented Reality is used pretty indiscriminately by many companies, often referring to a flat overlay that doesn't track, or just a link to a traditional website or video playback. 

We are excited to push the AR envelope with true 3D animation that tracks the real world and includes original music and sound.  We aim to create involving experiences and we aim for high quality.  Since AR places extreme limitations on the amount of data that can be streamed live, we are constantly exploring work-around strategies to elevate the sense of production value.  One day soon, cloud computing and hardware advancements will work together to remove most of these limitations.  Until then we valiantly joust!

When planning out the Augmented Reality pieces, I start with sketches.  I storyboard the expected attitudes and action.  My storyboards for Owney included plans for him to sit up and beg, catch a little envelope in his mouth, toss it back to you, bark, trot and run.  The idea was for updates of the app to feature Owney doing more and more interactive tricks - to display more and more personality.

Our Maya animator Jeff Clifton started building Owney in 3D, keeping in mind his required activities.

I rendered a pose test cycle to establish a cadence for Owney's trot.  I gave this reference video to Jeff as a timing guide for his animation.  I also gave it to our composer, Ian Rees, as a timing guide for his music.

Looking at historical photos I painted the flat Owney fur textures for Jeff to wrap around the Maya model.  This was the only fur solution available to us since Augmented Reality cannot yet handle the heavy data required to move thousands of fur strands.

Jeff sent me animation dailies married to Ian's music, and we tweaked various drafts.

But Jeff's challenges went far beyond traditional animation.  He had to collaborate with the software techs who were providing us the playback tools which track our animation to the physical marker.  Not only were there strict restrictions on the amount of data, but different tracking software uses different rendering environments as well.  So Jeff had to keep simplifying the data load while laboring to preserve the quality of our character.  And he had to work within the software language parameters of each vendor.  Not easy.  But he has become a top practitioner in essentially outsmarting the medium - especially as we followed up the Owney AR release with other projects such the JFK stamp, a dynamic Captain America movie promo and more.  Randy Cartwright has become an invaluable consultant, brainstorming with Jeff on best new methods.

A web portal allowed us to view tests on how smoothly the animation moved in the AR software environment, how well the sound stayed in sync, and how well the animation locked to the physical marker as you moved it around.  There were a number of trouble-shooting passes to smooth things out.

Once we were happy, the Apple apps team ran Owney through his paces.  He got a clean bill of health!

On some of the projects I've used Photoshop plus 3D layers in After Effects to do a more elaborate animatic of how the final experience should appear.  This process has allowed some of the textures and layers I build during pre-viz to be incorporated as hybrid aspects of the Maya model and the final app.

Currently my directing duties at Imagineering are keeping me from participating full time, as I did for the first year of our AR venture.  But the AMUSME team is going strong and I keep throwing in my two cents until I can dive back in!  We've started collaborating with computer science faculty members at various universities.  So many breakthroughs are just about to happen and we are poised to secure a perch on the front of the next wave.  Fun will be had by all!"
Jerry and Stephen Michael Schwartz wrote a 69 page version all based on newspaper articles vetted by Smithsonian.  Free at the iTunes app store for iPad.
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/owney-tales-from-the-rails/id488657528?mt=8

For those without an iPad there's a web version link.
Fred Cline did awesome illustrations in the classic Golden Book style.

And there's the companion Augmented Reality Owney we released earlier:
http://postalmuseum.si.edu/owneyapp/

And finally, here's a video Jerry did of the "Owney" theme, using Fred Cline's illustrations.  The song was written by Stephen Michael Schwartz, performed by country singer Trace Adkins. 


-posted by Steve