I’m pretty sure I saw this first one in person, or at least a replica. Rodin’s work needs to be seen in person to really appreciate it for what it is. These pictures just don’t do it justice.

Here’s me in front of “The Shadow” at The High Museum in Atlanta in 2006:

“I saw Michelangelo at work. He had passed his sixtieth year, and although he was not very strong, yet in quarter of an hour he had caused more splinters to fall from a hard block of marble than three young men in three or four times that amount of time. No one can believe it who has not seen it with his own eyes. And he attacked the work with such energy and fire that I thought it would fly into pieces. With one blow he brought down pieces three or four fingers in breadth, and so exactly at the point marked, that if only a tiny piece of marble more had fallen, he would have been in danger of ruining the whole work”

That’s an excerpt from the book below. I finally set aside some time to study the gigantic Michelangelo book I got from my girlfriend for my birthday last June. Over the past week I’ve been consistently blown away by his work. This is the book I’m referring to:

It has to be the best “art of” book I have ever seen. It is massive! Michelangelo knew the human form better than anyone. The wealth of anatomical drawings in this book alone prove that beyond any doubt. His trademark is the ideal beautiful form. I tend to lean towards his sculpture more than his painting as his sculpted females look more like actual females whereas his paintings of females just have female heads slapped on ideal male bodies:

“…without having seen the Sistine Chapel, one cannot form a true picture of what one person is capable of.” - Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

I can’t wait to see this stuff in person.

Sculpture does not get better than this:

The causes yield and bow to the results;
Hence it is art that overpowers nature.
I know, I’ve tested it in beautiful sculpture,
Time and death to the work will not keep trust.

Thus I can give a long life to us both,
By either means, with carving or with paint,
Portraying the face of the two,

So that a thousand years after our death
They’ll see how you were beautiful, I faint,
And that I was no fool in loving you.”

Now technically this isn’t the best book on Michelangelo money can buy…this is. But it is the best book you can afford.

George Price is probably my favorite New Yorker cartoonist that I’ve seen so far. There’s so much energy in his drawing style that appeals to me as an animator. Totally reminds me of Hirschfeld as well. I’d imagine this is what Hirschfeld would look like angry or in a rush. Fantastic stuff. These were scanned from an old New Yorker anthology and are all from the 1930s onward. My eye is immediately drawn to his strips no matter what else is on the page.

(Not all of these have the captions with them, sorry)

From the 50s on George’s style would degenerate more and more. The designs would become cluttered, the compositions unclear, and the style would become completely angular. If that wasn’t enough, his characters lost all their “life” and expression with his new way of drawing eyes. They would all look like crazies.

Here’s a ten minute clip of Richard Williams work on the Raggedy Ann and Andy movie. It’s a pretty hard to find film now, so I figured I’d upload what I’ve seen of it. I have no intention on sitting through the whole film, as it looks pretty bad from a story perspective. The designs are very different, hairy as John K would say, but I like them here, though they don’t allow for the most amazing animation I’ve seen out of Dick.

Next up, and the last in this series, is about a half an hour’s worth of Richard Williams commericals!

I watched this film the other night and I noticed a lot in the way this film was shot to tell the story. This film is basically about a day in the life of a racially diverse New York lower to middle class neighborhood in 1991. It’s a very hot day, so warm colors are dominant throughout the film until the sun sets at the end.

To illustrate racial prejudice and domincance among the members of the community, there’s a number of shots that are repeated throughout. There’s a lot of dynamic up shots, and a lot of dynamic down shots. When there’s no animosity between the characters, the horizon line is horizontal:

Also notice how the shots here are composed. Mama Sister is on the left of the frame, while Spike is on the right. One shot is predominately red, while the other is predominately green. Complementary colors and contrasting compositions.

When there is animosity the horizon line is rotated giving a more skewed or violent scene:

Radio Rahim dominates almost all of his scenes. He’s made to look big and mean with the use of close ups against medium shots:

Look at this great shot:

Here both parties are meant to look menacing and neither is dominant. Both use extreme up shots or horizontal shots:

Rahim’s up shot was a little more extreme, predicting a win of the music showdown

Coming back to a shot from above, look how it plays against the shots of the cops in this scene. This is total separation through color; Cool blue with warm lighting against hard red with cool lighting:

Now look at this scene where the main characters are having a discussion about race. Everything is relatively calm and both retain the same status:

…Until of course we get a “prejudice montage.” This is supposed to be aggressive, and put you in the shoes of the prejudiced. The shots are point blank and frontal with the actors breaking the fourth wall:

More animosity:

It started off fine.

But the shots get more contrasted as the animosity increases:

Look at these great shots:

By the end of the film there is no more animosity between these two characters (see shots from above):

So the shots aren’t skewed, and the angles aren’t as extreme. It’s also not as hot out so the shots are cooler aesthetically (as well as emotionally).

Here the scene starts calm. Horizontal lines, mediums shots:

But that quickly changes as the hate builds up. Again the same conventions are used. It has to be this way, or we get confused as an audience. Once you pick a way to illustrate something, you’ve gotta stick to it. Notice how the skewed angles are also opposing each other, creating more contrast, and racial separation:

Characters with a lot of differences but not much animosity:

Look at the use of complementary colors in this shot:

The calmer the characters are the more flat and normal the shots are. There’s a lot of overhead shots and handy cam shots in this film also which further immerses you in this neighborhood. By the end of the film it feels like there nothing outside of this community, because there’s enough drama and controversy here for anyone.

I learned a lot wathcing this film. Check it out if you can.

The quintessential Leyendecker baby. Every year a new baby would ring in the new year on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post.

Leyendecker created this iconography which is still used to this day:

This is probably the most brutally honest perspective of the film industry I’ve ever read. I will undoubtedly read this book time and time again, but when I don’t have the time, I will refer to this page for my exerpts below.

Speaking on the truth in Dramas:
The audience has a right to these dramas, and filmmaker and the studios have a responsibility to attempt them.

*Page 78 subtext

The Three Magic Questions:
1. Who want what from whom?
2. What happens if they don’t get it?
3. Why now?

Stay with the money. The audience came because you advertised the star. Shoot the star.

Burn the first reel. Almost any film can be improved by throwing out the first ten minutes.

If you think that perhaps you should cut, cut.

If you laughed at the dailies, you aren’t going to laugh at the picture.

If you can’t figure out what the scene is about, it’s probably unecessary. If it is necessary, it’s necessary only once.

The scene that works great on paper will prove a disaster.

If enough people tell you you’re dead, lie down.

Individually they’re idiots. Collectively, they’re a genius. Anyone who speaks of the audience’s understanding as diminished has never had to make a living by appealing to them.

When your plan of battle is proceeding perfectly, you have just walked into an ambush.

Life, in the art of drama or of the carver, cannot be aped, and the attempt to remove the element of chance must doom the project absolutely. For another name for “chance” is “mystery” and another name is art.

On the other hand, there are films of which we, quite literally, applaude the grosses, while the films themselves are unwatchable (e.g., Titanic).

Now, the more the audience is told about the hero – the more their legitimate, indeed, induced desire is gratified – the less they care.

As we enter the cinema, we relax our guard. We do so necessarily, because to resist, to insist on reality in the drama, is to rob ourselves of joy. For who would sit through a cartoon thinking constantly, “Wait a second, elephants can’t fly!”

A traditional recipe for genius: inspiration, a plan, not enough time.

These men, and their performances, are characterized by the absence of the desire to please. On screen, they don’t have anything to prove, an so we are extraordinarily drawn to them. They are not “sensitive”; they are not antiheroes; they are, to use a historic term, “he-men.” How refreshing.

For if a regular person wandering in a mall somewhere may be shanghaied into watching a test screening, and if his opinion, and the opinions of his like, are the basis upon which executives determine how to place their bets, why not eliminate the executives entirely and proceed directly to the mall wanderer? Which is effectively what has happended in the casting session.

Feel free to treat everyone like scum, for if they desire something from you, they’ll just have to put up with it, and should they rise to wealth and power, any past civility shown toward them will either be forgotten or remembered as some aberrant and contemptible display of weakness.

Stanislavsky wrote that the last ninety seconds are the most important in the play.

I meant to post this at Christmas, but anyway…

Next week I’ll post a bunch of his commercials and some stuff from Raggedy Ann and Andy.

This time the sound works! Enjoy!

I wouldn’t recommend this book unless you are comfortable with a lot of pyschobable. This book is FULL of pyschobable: Oedipus complexes, sexual insecurities, etc.

Basically this book is a high-minded discussion of the effects of fairy tales (and therefore most animation) on children. It discusses fairy tales from a story aspect, which is what interested me in the first place (that and the fact that Mamet recommends the book in his, “On Directing Film.”) While I did pick up a lot of good information, which I’ve listed below, the book is very long, and very dry. Just stick to my notes, all the good stuff, that which is applicable to film-making and animation, is listed below.

“Safe” stories mention neither death nor aging, the limits to our existence, nor the wish for eternal life. The fairy tale, by contrast, confronts the child squarely with the basic human predicaments.

We grow, we find meaning in life, and security in ourselves by having understood and solved personal problems on our own, not by having them explained to us by others.

Fairy tales enrich the child’s life and give it an enchanted quality just because he does not quite know how the stories have worked their wonder on him.

The fairy tale is therapeutic because the patient finds his own solutions, through contemplating what the story seems to imply about him and his inner conflicts at this moment in life.

The fairy tale offers fantasy materials which suggest to the child in symbolic form what the battle to achieve self-realization is all about, and it guarantees a happy ending.

Myths project an ideal personality acting on the basis of superego demons, while fairy tales depict an ego integration which allows for appropriate satisfaction of id desires. This difference accounts for the contrast between the pervasive pessimism of myths and the essential optimism of fairy tales.

The more secure a man is within himself, the more he can afford to accept an explanation which says his world is of minor significance in the cosmos.

On the other hand, the more insecure a man is in himself and his place in the immediate world, the more he withdraws into himself because of fear, or else moves outward to conquer for conquest’s sake.

This is why many fairy tales begin with the hero being depreciated and considered stupid. These are the child’s feelings about himself, which are projected not so much onto the world at large as onto his parents and older siblings.

Cleverness may be a gift of nature; it is intellect independant of character. Wisdom is the consequence of inner depth, of meaningfull experiences which have enriched one’s life: a reflection of a rich and well-integrated personality.

The adult’s sense of active participation in telling the story makes a vital contribution to, and greatly enriches, the child’s experience of it.

The world becomes alive only to the person who herself awakens to it.

Only after one has attained inner harmony within oneself can one hope to find it in relations with others.

David Mamet’s books are always entertaining reads. David Mamet is to live-action screen/play writing what John K is the animation: The wise-ass old curmudgeon with a chip on his shoulder and a knack for expressing his opinions in a way that makes you laugh AND think…because he’s usually right. I recommend anything he writes. You don’t have to agree with him on everything, but at least let him affect you. I have more exerpts from more of his books coming up soon. Click the book or title to be redirected to Amazon where you can buy this book.

A good writer gets better only by learning to cut, to remove the ornamental, the descriptive, the narrative, and especially the deeply felt and meaningful. What remains? The story remains. What is the story? The story is the essential progression of incidents that occur to the hero in pursuit of his one goal

Let the cut tell the story. Because otherwise you have not got dramactic action, you have narration.

If you find that a point cannot be made without narration, it is virtually certain that the point in unimportant to the story (which is to say, to the audience): the audience requires not information but drama.

Only the mind that has been taken off itself and put on a task is allowed true creativity.

It is the objective of the protagonist to keep us in our seats

How do we keep their attention? By withholding all information except that information the absense of which would make the story incomprehensible.

You tell the story. Don’t let the protagonist tell the story. You tell the story; you direct it. We don’t have to follow the protagonist around. We don’t have to establish his “character.” We don’t need to have anybody’s “back story.”

The more we “inflect” or “load” the shot, the less powerfull the cut is going to be.

Make each part do its job, and the original purpose of the totality will be achieved – as if by magic.

If the job is the objective, then when that job is given or when that job is absolutely denied, the scene will be over.

The less the hero is inflected, indentified, and characterized, the more we will endow him with our own internal meaning – the more we will indentify with him.

When the hero either gets a retraction or finds that he cannot have a retraction or will be restored. The story will be over.

Everytime you make a choice as a director, it must be based on whether the thing in question is essential to the story telling.

It’s the nature of human perception to go to the most interesting thing.

You tax the audience every time you don’t move onto the next essential step of the progression as quickly as possible.

It is the nature of human perception to connect unrelated images into story, because we need to make the world make sense.

To get into the scene late, and to get out early is to demonstrate respect for your audience

If a person’s objective is truly – and you don’t have to do it humbly, because you’ll get humble soon enough – to understand the nature of the medium, that objective will be communicated to the audience.

If you’re honest in making a movie, you’ll find that it’s often fighting back against you.

The acting should be a performance of simple physical action. Period. Go to the door, try the door, sit down. He doesn’t have to walk down the hall respectfully. This is the greatest lesson anyone can ever teach you about acting. Perform the physical motions called for by the script as simply as possible.

Cartoons are very good to watch – are much better to watch, for people who want to direct, than movies.

Every time you show the audience something that is “real,” they think one of two things: (1) “oh, dash it all, that’s fake” or (2) “oh my God, that’s real!” Each one of these takes the audience away from the story you are telling, and neither one is better than the other.

We don’t have to know it’s a slaughterhouse. We have to know it’s where he wants to go.

Stick to the channel. The channel is the superobjective of the hero, and the marker buoys are the smaller objectives of each beat, and the smallest unit of all, which is the shot. The shots are all you have.

The task of any artist is not to learn many, many techniques but to learn the most simple technique perfectly. In doing so, Stanislavsky told us, the difficult will become easy, and the easy habitual, so that the habitual may become beautiful.

It’s not up to you to decide whether the movie is good or bad; it’s only up to you to do your job as well as you can, and when you’re done, then you can go home. This is exactly the same principle of the throughline. Understand your specific task, work until it’s done, and then stop.