The Laughing Brigand

I had planned this story for sometime down the road, but since it came up in David's post I want to post it now.
As David said this scene had been around for a long time. Dick had originally animated it for academy fielding (aspect ratio). He asked me to help him shoot a linetest of this scene. He was redrawing it and widening the shoulders for widescreen. As a student just a year or two before I had watched this Brigand scene as part of the Clapperboard documentary over and over. When I watched Sleeping Beauty around the same time I spotted the similarity. Dick had always been pretty open about using live action as inspiration for some of his animation. So I didn't think it was a big secret and casually mentioned "Hey, Dick the animation from this, you took from Sleeping Beauty, right?" His face dropped and he said "Dammit... Is it that obvious?" He decided to retime it in order to make it less obvious and I was thrilled that I got to do a few of the new inbetweens for this scene.

Pencil Tester vs. Art

Tom Roth sent this in as a comment on the "More Art" post:

Sometime back around 1979 I bought a Lyon/Lamb videotape pencil tester. Although a couple of big studios had them at the time I was the first individual animator to get one, the prototype unit.
So I decided to pay a visit to Dick Williams, who I’d worked for on Raggedy Ann and Andy. He had just set up a studio on Hollywood Boulevard. Dick and Art Babbitt shared a room there. Dick was busy animating a commercial as Art worked on the Thief.
Enthusiastically, I told Dick about this wonderful new gadget I’d gotten that you could shoot a test and play it back immediatly. This was back when they had to send scenes out to a camera service, shoot it and then send it to the lab so they could see the dailies the next day.
Of course, Dick was intrigued but Art interjected that he didn’t think it was a good idea because it would “become a crutch”. They certainly didn’t have anything like that when he was at Disney so it couldn’t be of much value.
Dick’s respect for Art was such that Art’s word was law so that was that. They had a complex relationship. Even though Dick was Art’s boss he always deferred to Art’s opinion.
A few weeks later, Dick rang me offering a job, and, eager to escape from the Hanna/Barbera factory where I worked I gladly accepted.
It wasn’t long before Dick started ‘sneaking’ over to my house at night to shoot pencil tests on The Thief. Later, I moved the Lyon/Lamb unit into the studio So, I guess, in a sense Art was right about it becoming a crutch because everyone in the studio became immediately dependent on it, including Dick.
Art never used it until one day in about 1983 he came shuffling into my room saying “Say Tom, mind if I use your infernal machine?” This, to me, was a great personal triumph as I have always considered myself an advocate for new technology.
When I think back today about the technology we used then- before the digital revolution- it seems amazing that Dick accomplished what he did. The technology then was little different than it was 60 years earlier.
Back then, there was talk that someday computers would ‘take over’ animators jobs. Art hated the idea but said if they do, animators would have to operate the computers.
I think time has proven him right.

The first day in the life of an assistant animator

Like Andreas mentioned in his earlier blog, I also remember how Dick claimed he tried to cast his animators in a way how their physique fits the appearance of the characters they get to animate. While I am 6 foot 3’’, I still have both eyes, 2 rows of even teeth and do not weight 25 stones. Somehow the words “One eyes”, “Beasts of war” and “Warmachine” must have been floating invisibly over my head, because that is where my destination at “The Thief and the Cobbler” lay.

So here I was - arrived from Germany and just settled in - on my first day on the film. Armed with my own (plastic) peg bar, pencil, eraser and pencil sharpener (the manual kind that school kids use) and sure that somebody would scream “Imposter” and I would be unmasked as the talentless and clueless n00b that I was. (Sorry for using this internet term, but it is very fitting here, as you shall soon read).

After meeting Dick Williams in person, my first encounter with a proper animator was being introduced to Brent Odell. Apart from being very talented and ever patient and friendly to me, I will always remember him fondly for teaching me the word “One eyed trouser snake”. You really only have mastered a language when you can do crosswords in that language or swear like a drunken sailor. I was never one for crosswords.

The first task was inbetweening tiny elephants that were hoisted upwards inside the warmachine. They were armoured, spiked, covered in rivets and they were many. They were also to be coloured in a shade closely to the background art while lightning flashed and rain poured. And of course they were to be animated on “ones”. In fact, so many scenes were animated on ones, that at one point the entire film was renamed as “Once” – A typo, we all were sure.
By the end of my first day, I proudly presented my first three drawings to Brent, only to find out that I had inbetweened on “halves”, 3 drawings where only one was needed.

Certainly this seemingly futile exercise helped me with the many scenes that followed.

Have no fear...

Read these images left to right, like a comic. These 3 scenes where done by Alex Williams, assisted by Jerry Vershoor. For the first scene (image 1) Ken Harris had animated a rough version of the Thief, a rough Cobbler had been done by Art Babbit. From what I remember Jerry got to do a bit more here then just inbetweens. I think he animated some secondary bits and also the butterfly.
The 2nd scene (images 2,3) was very long. Dean Roberts animated the left half of the onlooking crowd. Gary Dunn did the right half of the crowd. I think this might have been the only time that Andreas didn't animate the courtiers.
Alex had found a clever way of utilizing the xerox machine to work out the size increases in the characters as they walk towards camera. He even shot the taped down xeroxes to work out the timing.
Another thing I like about this shot is how Roy created dimension for the ground in this BG, without using perspective just by smaller spacing of the squares towards the back, right and left.

Reading Dick's Moods

One of Michael's posts reminded me of one of my favourite stories.Dick is legendary for his temper and outbursts and one would do well to learn to read his mood. My desk at the Forum was situated between Roy Naisbitt's at the window and Dick's in the middle of the large floor.This gave me an exceptional vantage point to observe Dick and I learned quickly what kind of mood he was in. As mentioned before, even when very busy, Dick was always approachable to be shown a test.If I saw him frantically flipping drawings, I usually waited a while as not to disturb him in 'action'.
One day he was hunkered down, working on a scene, when one of the assistant animators , who shall remain nameless, sauntered towards his desk. As this guy had a talent for stepping into dog%$@ , my attention immediately focused on the action to unfold.He hadn't read Dick's mood of utter concentration and approached him with a cheery: Hi, Dick, can I ask you something? Dick kind of surfaced from his animation fever to look at ... and gave him his attention. Needless to say, I was already grinning at that point.... said: Dick, can you draw the fish from Pinocchio for me?
If you ever stood near mount Aetna with the ground shaking, you may have an idea of what happened next ( to my delight, I might add, not for nothing is the word Schadenfreude a german word).
Dick's face turned purple, he threw his pencil across the room and started on one of his rants at the top of his lungs, about how he was trying to f^^#$^ make a movie and he wanted the f^$%$% fish from f$#^@ Pinocchio.
Still makes me laugh to this day.

Where did it all happen?

Well, here.
This is the inside of the Studio Christmas card when the production moved from Soho square to Camden for Roger Rabbit.
I think Hans Bacher gave me this card which has a picture of the iconic Soho square studio on the front.
We occupied the left half of the building on the first floor, for FX and editing and the right half on the second floor for animation.
Though the inside is more appropriate to anything relating to the Thief, the front of the card is nonetheless a who is who of all the players of the R.R. days.































Hans, Raymond and probably the most important animation personality in my life, the undefeatable and brilliant Mr. Meyer are depicted in the doorway of the studio.
I leave it up to all you guys to identify the rest...
Oh Nostalgia, you are such sweet sorrow.
Ah, yes and does anyone know who painted the artwork?

Ok, on a more jolly note, I remember the beginning of 1991 to be particularly snowy, the last time we had real snow in London.
I was on my way back home after a couple of Winter warmers at the Bone house with Sharon, Tanya and most probably Dennis and the rest of the Irish, when we were confronted by a bunch of suited people, bankers I surmised.
Now, in Germany, people would either just leave you be or they hit you with a snowball and then run away, but no, these guys raised themselves to their full height on the other side of the street and said:

Would you mind awfully if we has a snowball fight?

Aah, London, how queer thou art...

The tale of the punch.

I began working at 138 Royal college street in a room on the first floor, that I shared with Alyson Hamilton and Margaret Grieve.
Andreas was in the room next door with Barbara Mc Cormack the colour stylist.
There was also a small wooden box on the floor that was hiding the part of the rostrum camera that was too high to fit into the ground floor, but that is another story...
Brent Odell who I was assisting, had already moved into the Forum, some 300 yards away and after about two weeks I too was moved into the larger studio.
He would speak in a thick northern accent and, having just arrived in the country, I nodded to his every instruction but did not actually understand a word he said, but that's another story...
Dick occupied a corner of the first floor, just outside the projection room, which was also home to the accounts team, but that is another story...
The Idea was that he would spent an equal amount of time at the Forum and at 138, there was however a problem.
In his room at 138, Dick had a Disney Cel punch, that was used on Roger Rabbit. For the Forum a brand new Chromacolour punch was purchased to serve the animators. Dick would bring over a Scene he had animated at Royal College street and proceed to punch his paper to do the breakdown drawings at the forum.
There was however a small difference in the distance of the pegholes from the edge of the paper.
As Dick liked rolling the scene off the pegs to check if it worked before linetesting it, he got increasingly annoyed that the drawings no longer lined up when registered by the paper edge rather than the pegholes.
One day...:God dammit Ian, this piece of shit, every time I roll this, it jumps all over the f%^&*£g place Jeezus Krrist, I'm working my fingers to the bone and this shit can't even line up...Damn, damn.... or something to that effect.
He then instructed Ian Cook to deposit the old punch at the bottom of the Thames.
I approached Ian, offering to do the disposing for him and, after consulting Dick it was agreed that for £1 sterling and the guarantee that the punch would disappear that night and never surface again, it would be mine.
That is how I bought my first animation punch for 1 quid...
A bargain, methinks...

Guest blogger Paul Dilworth:

Dick did ask me to do BGs after I met him on his doorstep. I had been going down Haverstock Hill trying to get commissions for house portraits. In the Spring and Summer I found I could get a couple of watercolors a week. I showed him some photos of rich peoples' houses that I had painted. He mentioned he was a film director. It must have been out of generosity of spirit that he rang me the next week and I had a go at a BG. To be absolutely honest I did recognize him on the doorstep, as I had been called in at the very last minute to help render an advert, in the Soho Square days, but I'm very sure he didn't recognize me. Anyway that is how I started on "The Thief."
I really appreciated the chance to work on the film. When I did my 3rd or 4th BG Dick said "put it in the bath." I was kind of shocked, thinking he may as well have said "throw it in the bin," but apparently that's what Errol did with his. After the initial shock, (within a second or two) I realized it was good advice, and not meant to be disparaging at all. The watercolors spread into one another and you can re-stretch the paper and go over it again. It gives it a nice hazy grainy texture. Errol's BGs were so good, and they all have that worked in quality.
John Leatherbarrow made them look so much better by his amazing wizardry under the camera. Here is a photo of this first BG. It was already half done I think, and I just added more colors to it. I remember doing the big flagstones in the Nanny and banana sequence before this, but they were just big squares. If you compare the two images you can see how John was able to exaggerate the contrasts so that in the actual film it looked really dark and the furnace glowed.
I think in those days at 138 Royal College St. (that's Dick's studio in Camden) there might have been only Roy, Neil, Raymond and John working there. Dick must have freelanced BGs out to people. When the film came out I certainly had no wish to be considered as "head of BGs " on the credits. I certainly wasn't. It just ended up that way on the credits. With regards to Errol's work, as I remember, Roy used to use bits that had already been painted by Errol (probably pre-production stuff) and combine them with his new fantastic layouts which fitted the scene, the animation, the match lines etc. better. It wasn't so much "cut and paste" as it was making use of some great stuff that had already been painted by Errol. Common sense really. The other BG artists who worked on the Thief were Douglas Kirk, Inga Davelouse, Claire Wright , Sue Tong, Jo Billingham, Malcolm, (apologies not remembering his last name,) and someone who regularly worked at Soho Square as a BG artist, but I'm dreadfully sorry not to remember her name too. There were other BG artists in America also. Working on the Thief was such a good time, seeing things emerge in rushes every day, and being part of something great.

First Thief scenes

After the pan (Dec.13 post) the camera jumps in closer for this scene revealing the Thief. Paul Dilworth mentioned earlier that while he didn't paint the long pan BG for the previous scene he probably painted the BGs for these closer scenes, but I just checked with him and he said: "I think those bgs were all Errol's. They have that watercoloury effect and odd colour juxtapositions which looks great on film."
Paul will be doing a guest post soon and he might have some photos of his BGs.
Drawing the Thief required less emphasis on 3 dimensional construction than a Disney character for example. Instead it was more important to maintain a certain iconic graphic look (an exception would be Mickey Mouse's ears that are constantly cheated to maintain the iconic look). In that way he is closer to a Looney Tunes character. Dick would often say: this doesn't look like him, rather then he is off model. There were no modelsheets for him, sometimes for an extreme angle Dick would make the design up as needed. There were a few rules, though. If you watch this scene in the film you can clearly see how the overlap on the ears had to be approached. Instead of changing the shape of the ears, bending them towards a reversal, you would just rotate the ears a bit up and down.
He has no eyebrows, instead we used the zigzag pattern on his hat to support simple expressions. For a frown for example you would first pose him with his head tilted down using the reversal of the hat edge to define the top part of the eye. Then you would start to draw the zigzag pattern from the middle out starting with a V shape.

You would also be careful with the areas at the outer corner of the eyes where the ears connect, avoiding tangents. In the first drawing I got it wrong, if you watch how the lines of the screen right eye and ear connect.
The flies over his head followed him with a 16 frame delay, so they would hover over the space that his head occupied 16 frames earlier. This created nice overlap when he was moving.
Often the proportions of the Thief and his size in relation to his environment changed from scene to scene and sometimes even within the same scene. This would be a major concern in other studios, but Dick while aware of it said that it didn't bother him as long as it wasn't noticable.
I believe all these scenes introducing the Thief up to when he walks up the stairs to the Cobbler's workshop (not the ones with the Nanny, see Andreas' Dec.10 post) were done during the time between Roger Rabbit and the 90-92 Thief period.

The RR deal had allowed Dick to close down his studio in Soho. This included paying considerable amounts of severance pay to long time employees, which had never been an option before. Because of his reputation Dick had been able to demand payment up front from his commercial clients, which is very unusual. However as he was pumping money into the Thief, incoming funds were used up immediately. The studio always needed to keep rolling and bring in new projects to cover the current expenses.

He moved his operation to Camden where he had bought a small building to house his personal production, while the RR operation rented lots of space in an office building close by, called the Forum. After RR the studio shrank down to a small group: Dick himself, Roy Naisbitt, Neil Boyle, Raymond Guillaumet and John Leatherbarrow. With the financial situation in limbo they plowed ahead, for the first time able to concentrate on the Thief full time. They did only one commercial for Air Canada to help pay the bills and a short title bit for the “I Framed Roger Rabbit” documentary.

At the Oscars after accepting his Oscar for RR Dick was approached by Producer Jake Eberts (Ghandi, The Mission), who expressed interest in becoming involved. He eventually engineered the deal with Warners.
Ken Harris had probably animated a rough version of these Thief scenes and I would guess that they were redone by Dick, assisted by Neil. Neil also animated the non-character bits like the boots in this scene:

By the time I joined the studio in March 1990 Neil had started to animate his own scenes , but this scene was in rushes a few times and I remember admiring the animation on the boots. For me they made this scene and created a nice connection with the BG. Also very nice interaction with the ears. These quiet Thief scenes juxtaposed against the wild stuff with the Nanny feel nicely underplayed.
One thing I like about a lot of the scenes in this film is that they are done with good taste.

In this scene Dick's drawings suggest that the Thief might have a huge behind or maybe it's all the stuff under his coat that he has stolen. In later scenes we can see that he has a very thin body.
Some people feel that the Thief is a self caricature of Dick. He told me that he designed him as a caricature of Ken Harris, without telling him. I think both are true.

UPDATE:
The last 2 scenes were entirely animated by Neil. See Jan. 30 post.

More Art

Steve Worth from the Asifa Animation Archive left a comment on the Dec.11 Ken and Art post (Thanks Steve!) which I would like to pull up here:

“I worked with Art at FilmFair when he was animating on Thief. Williams had him reworking scenes that Ken Harris had already animated. (I remember some scenes of vultures.) Art was pretty unhappy with the job. He said he didn't see anything wrong with Harris's work, and Williams couldn't articulate to him what he wanted to be done differently. There seemed to be a communication breakdown between Art and Williams, who was working in London.”

The vulture character Phido is Zigzag's pet. Dick designed him as a caricature of Peter Lorre. The model had changed quite a bit from the time when Art had animated him. The scenes with him where redone again in the 90-92 period, some of them by David Byers-Brown and Dean Roberts.
Dick's 2nd studio in LA (he also had a 3rd one in NY for a while) was located in a building at the T-section of Barham Blvd. and Cahuenga Blvd. I'm curious if Art worked there full time and was working freelance at FilmFair. Steve, do you remember the year?