The Little Island...

...is on Google Video. I love how well sound and music are used in this film.
Info on the guy who did the music and sound effects. Click here.

Throne Room, Part 3

Left: King by Tim or Dick
Middle: Alyson
Right: Tim

Left: Alyson
Middle: Tim
Right: Zigzag and Cobbler by Neil, don't know who did the crowd

Left: Tim or Dick
Middle: Dick
Right: Neil

Left: Alyson
Middle: Alyson
Right: Alyson

Left: Zigzag and Cobbler by Neil, don't know who did the crowd
Middle: Alyson
Right: Dick

Zigzag by Dick

Cobbler, King and Yumyum by Alyson
The left linetest image is from an early workreel. The final image doesn't have Zigzag in frame anymore. To me this makes sense. In terms of screen direction and continuity it would feel wrong to have Zigzag on the right side here. I don't know if this was changed under Dick's direction or later.


Left: Tim or Dick
Middle: Dick
Right: Dick ( see earlier post for more details about this scene)

We don't know who animated the Cobbler for this scene. The linetest is in an early Williams workreel. Ink& Paint was most likely done under Calvert.

Left: Cobbler by Art/Dick
Right: Dick

Aladdin

Yesterday somebody left a comment on "Throne Room, Part 2". A friendly comment along with a few points that I wanted to respond to - only I couldn't because the comment was very quickly removed. Here is the comment (without the reader's name): "Cool Post ! Some of the characters remind me a lot of Jafar and the Sultan in "Aladdin". Looks very similar, well for me at least :o) Anyways I like it a lot".
I think it would be fair to say that both "Aladdin" and the "Thief" were influenced by "The Thief of Bagdad", which also featured a Grand Vizier and a Sultan. The Grand Vizier Zigzag and King Nod in the "Thief" however had been designed many years before Aladdin was made. A few scenes with them had even been shown in a TV documentary in 1982. After Dick moved into the public spotlight with "Roger Rabbit", a film that Disney had been very involved in, it was also no secret when he finally got the funding to finish the "Thief". I don't know when Disney decided to make "Aladdin", but they where able to release their film first. I'm not familiar at all with the version of the "Thief" that was released here in the US, but I believe that some efforts had been made to make it similar to "Aladdin". But this was after it was taken away from Dick. The scenes we discuss here on the blog were animated before "Aladdin" came out. I hope this clears up this point, but I would appreciate your comments if you'd like to add s.th. that might be helpful to people who find this blog and who might have a similar reaction as the reader who posted the above comment.

Ice Age 2

The sequences with the Thief work brilliant as short bits of entertainment on their own. The Pole Vault and Tightrope sequences for example progress like a short film, there is a beginning, middle and an end. I have to admit though, that at times I had doubts about the general concept of using such “comic relief” sequences as framework for a feature film. This has been part of a lot of criticism of the “Thief” even while we were still working on it. After the film was taken from Dick, most of the footage that ended up on the cutting room floor were Thief scenes.When I watched the Recobbled Cut, it worked a bit like a time machine on me, re-awakening a lot of memories and thoughts about this, my first experience on a feature film. Around this time I also watched Ice Age 2. I might have been a bit Thief-centric at the time, but I noticed some similarities between the two movies. I felt that with Ice Age 2 they were very successful in the way they used their Scrat sequences - in my mind similar to how Dick had intended to use the sequences with the Thief character. Like the Thief, Scrat also seems to be very much inspired by the Coyote of the Roadrunner cartoons and as in the “Thief” they use 6 or 7 sequences with Scrat to frame their main story. Where the Thief is mostly focused on getting the Golden Balls, Scrat is always focused on getting the Nut. Similar to the “Thief” there is also a prophesy early in the story promising “doom and destruction”. In addition to the structural similarities you can also find a number of scene specific similarities, for example in the sequence where Scrat is pole vaulting.

One difference that made me feel that Ice Age 2's use of Scrat was more successful then the Thief is that Scrat's scenes, while quite spectacular, don't outweigh the main narrative. The audience cares about the main characters and the challenges and threats they face. In Ice Age 2 I quite enjoyed the back and forth between the main story and the “comic relief”. A good balance. There also is a better connection between what Scrat is doing and how that relates to the main story. Scrat's efforts of taking the Nut always reinforce the main threat of the ice walls breaking and flooding the little world that the main characters live in.
I think Ice Age 2 showed that a concept that didn't fulfill it's potential on the “Thief” (at least the “Thief” was never finished properly) could actually work. In my mind it validates Dick's approach in regards to the Thief scenes to some extend but also highlights some of the problems of our film.

Throne Room, Part 2

I had help again for this post as I'm not that familiar with this sequence. From what I remember the studio concentrated during 1990 on scenes with action, long shots, crowd scenes, scenes with a lot of effects. I remember Dick talked often about our learning curve and that he was saving the acting scenes for later. My guess is that a lot of this sequence was animated during 1991. In some versions of the "workreel" there are some scenes that had not gone through T&P, they might even have been done early in 1992. I think the studio got closed down in May 1992.

Left and Middle: Dick
Right: Zigzag by Dick. Andreas animated the courtiers. The Palanquin and the Eunuchs were done by Bob Wilk (see recent photo). Paul Chorley usually assisted on Bob's scenes.This is the same scene I talked about in my Conrad Veidt post.


Left: Dick
Middle: Zigzag by Dick, Palanquin and Eunuchs as usual by Bob, Yumyum - not sure, Dick or Alyson.
The Courtiers (by Andreas) come in for a few frames at the end
Right: most likely Alyson.

Left and Middle (same scene): Dick
Right: Alyson

Left and Middle (same scene): Dick
Right: Dick
I think these pencil roughs were done during the time when Dick was pressured to fill in the gaps of the film with storyboards. The storyboards he did in color on small cards without registration holes to force himself "not to animate". In this case he apparently preferred to pose out the scene as animation roughs, maybe with the idea to give it to somebody else to tie down.


Left: Alyson
Middle: Zigzag and King probably by Dick, Yumyum by Dick or Alyson
Right: Andreas

Left: (see Throne Room Part 1) Courtiers by Andreas, Guards by Neil, Cobbler by Art/Dick
Middle: Alyson
Right: Alyson
If you have a chance to watch this, look at all the stuff falling off the Cobbler. Cool secondary animation. I also love the use of reflections in the Throne Room sequences. The BG design is still completely flat, but all reflections are dimensional, not just flipped versions of the drawing. It's a lot of work because you have to draw things as if seen from underneath. The first film that did this as far as I know was "Three Orphan Kittens" in 1935. Dick and Roy paid homage to this film in the Maroon Cartoon at the beginning of "Roger Rabbit" not only in regards to the use of reflections but also with the nice perspective camera move that Roy animated.


Left: Neil
Middle: Alyson
Right: Neil
I remember Dick at the video penciltester, figuring out the rhythm and timing for these head tilting scenes. I think it must have been during the "storyboard phase" because I remember the little color cards. Initially I had some doubts about his choices. When Yumyum leads with tilting her head to screen left, Cobbler follows with also tilting screen left. Then they do the same thing to screen right. Imagining the situation, them looking at each other, I felt that the Cobbler would actually mirror her action, which would result in him countering her screen left with a screen right. (If I'm not being clear here just ignore this, it's not important). I came to realize anyway that Dick's choices were the right ones, as proven by the final sequence which works beautifully. Intuition wins over logic.


Left: Alyson
Middle: Neil
Right: Alyson
Nice again the secondary animation on the ear rings, they just have the right weight.


Left: Zigzag by Dick, Cobbler by Neil, King and Yumyum (not sure)
Middle: (see Throne Room Part 1) Cobbler by Art/Dick, the rest by Neil
Right: Tim Watts

I have one more installment coming up to wrap up this first Throne Room sequence.

Gort or How I almost ended up in deep Sh&%#

Picture this... Camden 1990 or there abouts.Dick comes to me with a folder in his hand, saying: Here's a scene by Art Babbit, it's not very good, can you make it better? In my mind I imitated Munchs Scream and ran the other way, but I blushed, as usual and tried to look confident. The scene was of a tall servant, who had to smack his huge hands together like cymbals. Dick had done a new design since Art worked on it and he explained to me how to achieve the decelerating stagger for the hands. I was very green as an animator and totally terrified, but set to work.
Testing the scene in the evening, I knew it was not up to scratch, but had a pretty good idea where I went wrong. So I decided to fix it the next day. Which I did, and I showed it to Dick, who liked it, thankfully. What i didn't know, was that he took my tape that evening and looked at the miserable first take and apparently had a fit, ready to take it off me. I'm glad I didn't know about this when I fixed the scene, or I''d have been too mortified.After that I animated the little guy with the gong in the next scene, referencing Alex Williams take on him in an earlier scene.
And by the way, I still blush when I have to show a scene. Some things don't change.

Photo ScrapBook Part 4

Tim Watts, Genius

Static electricity

I remember having to do all the flying weaponry on the afore mentioned shot animated by Roy and Raymond, a scene that ended up being nicknamed: Starwars, due to it's plethora of flying objects.
It's funny now, remembering the lengths I went to, to make sure things didn't look repetitive or predictable. Seeing the finished item, it zips past you at such a clip, that even I hardly see any of the stuff I animated into it.
I guess it's what I now refer to as the Maple syrup concept.
You have to distil a lot of maple sap into a thimble full of syrup but only the concentration of vast amounts of input into a tiny amount of output will make it taste as sweet as it ultimately does.
The 18 foot long background for this shot hat to be stuck with sellotape to the walls of the camera room, and unstuck and held by assistants for the motorized move between frames and then restuck to the walls.
I remember John explaining the process of 8 or ten camera passes on this monster of a scene.
Needless to say, that meant that the film in the camera had to be rewound those 8 or ten times to be re-exposed again and again.
After almost a week of shooting the shot finally turned up in the moviola and lo and behold, Dick spotted something...
The film, passing through the felt lined slots in the reel housing, had built up enough static electricity to start sparking inside the camera, and those sparks were visible as thin blue lightning on the exposed film.
Luckily, Dick deemed it mild enough a fault, not to warrant a reshoot, which probably saved John and Grahams life...

And here is the proof...

Conrad Veidt

Next week I will post more about who did what on the Throne Room sequence. For now I just have another instance of Dick using thermo prints, as a basis for the beginning of this scene:Zigzag's walk into the throne room and his hand gestures are based on a scene with German actor Conrad Veidt, probably from the 1940 film “Escape”. Veidt is playing a German general. The film is not currently available. It would be nice to have an image for the scene that Dick used. In the prints he looked just like he does in this image from “Escape”:In 1940 Veidt also played Grand Vizier Jaffar in “The Thief of Bagdad”, which was an inspiration for both the Thief and also “Aladdin”.
In 1942 he played Major Strasser in "Casablanca". He died in 1943.

Photo ScrapBook Part 3

Simon Downes, Runner and later Roy's assistant
and Dave Cockburn , Animator

Bob Wilk , Animator

Ian Cook, Production Manager and Dee Morgan, Render Artist

Roy Naisbitt, Production Designer and all around Genius



John Leatherbarrow, Director of Cinematography