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Tuesday, December 12th, 2023

Story: Alvin Show Pilot Board

This is a very special post. Here is the complete storyboard to the pilot cartoon for The Alvin Show (1961). This is the board that Format Films and Ross Bagdasarian Sr. (aka: David Seville) used to pitch the show to the networks. It was probably done by Disney/UPA storyman, Leo Salkin. Salkin was the Associate Producer on the series and handled a lot of the story duties, working side by side with Bagdasarian to develop both the Chipmunk and Clyde Crashcup cartoons.

I know that this might look like a checkerboard on your screen at this resolution. I made an extra effort to make the large size images big enough for you to read clearly, so please click on the pages and take the time to sit down and read this from beginning to end. I think you’ll be amazed at how well it plays in your head. It’s like you’re watching the cartoon.

The drawings are simple, yet funny and expressive. Note how the compositions frame the action clearly, without clutter. Many current TV shows repeat the same oblique two-shot setups over and over. But this board keeps things interesting through clever staging and cutting.This is truly a model for television storyboard artists to follow. Enjoy!

Stephen Worth
Director
Animation Resources

This posting is part of the online Encyclopedia of Cartooning under the subject heading, Animation.

Posted in alvin show, bagdasarian, format films, leo salkin, storyboard, upa, writing | Comments Off on Story: Alvin Show Pilot Board

Monday, March 29th, 2021

REFPACK038: Advice, Art and Animation

LAST CALL! This Reference Pack will be removed from the server on Friday. If you haven’t downloaded it yet, do it now before it’s gone!

Every other month, Animation Resources shares a new Reference Pack with its members. They consist of an e-book packed with high resolution scans and video downloads set up for still frame study. Make sure you download the Reference Packs before they’re updated. When it’s gone, it’s gone!

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Animation Resources has just posted its 38th RefPack! This time our Reference Pack is jam packed with advice, art and animation. First up is a brand new podcast in the Animated Discussions series titled "Different Artists, Different Paths". Director of Programs Davey Jarrell and Animation Resources President Stephen Worth talk about how a young artist can go about charting a course to find his own way in the artistic world?

The topics include: Studio Artists And Independent Artists, Versatility and Functionality Vs Personal Style And Creativity, Finding Your Place in the Business, How Independents Can Compete With Big Studios, and How To Team Up With Other Artists To Split The Workload.

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In 1956, the great French film director Henri-Georges Clouzot (Wages of Fear, Les Diabolique) produced a very remarkable film. The concept was simple: point a camera to look over the shoulder of the greatest artist of the 20th century while he worked. The result was much more than just another art documentary. It was a probing study into the way an artist sees and how he goes about the act of creation.

The millions and millions of little choices an artist makes are the thought process behind the magic. This film allows you to look through the eyes of a great artist and understand how he went about creating. Animation Resources hopes this will help you refine the way you make your own daily artistic decisions.

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In every medium, there are innovations that change the course of the entire art form. Beethoven’s symphonies broke the established symphonic form and ushered in the Romantic movement. Marcel Duchamp painted “Nude Descending a Staircase” and opened the door for abstraction. Isadora Duncan shattered the stuffy conventions of ballet and inspired a whole generation of dancers to express themselves in a totally new way. In animation, there was UPA’s “Rooty Toot Toot”.

The artists at UPA incorporated elements of modern art and sophisticated magazine cartoons, like those in the New Yorker, to create more abstract and expressive cartoons. They began with the Fox & the Crow, but soon abandoned funny animals in favor of human characters. Each cartoon was a step or two more modern than the one that came before it, culminating in the Academy Award winning short, “Gerald McBoing Boing”. But the format of the “funny cartoon short” remained unchanged until “Rooty Toot Toot” came along in the Fall of the 1951.

Many thanks to Animation Resources’ Advisory Board Member Steve Stanchfield and Thunderbean Animation for sharing this beautiful high definition transfer with our members.

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With every Reference Pack, we’ll be including a bonus video or e-book from one of our past Reference Packs. This time we are sharing a wonderful e-book full of influential political cartoons by Louis Raemaekers.

Raemaekers was incensed by the stories of atrocities during WWI and began to produce intensely personal anti-German cartoons which led the Germans to push leaders in his home country to charge him with the crime of “endangering Dutch neutrality”. When those charges were dropped, Kaiser Wilhelm II put a bounty of 12,000 marks on his head. Raemaekers fled with his family to Britain, where he was celebrated as a hero and put to work producing propaganda pamphlets for the British government. These cartoons became world famous, and soon Raemaekers was making a tour of the United States, encouraging America to support the European fight. Theodore Roosevelt was quoted as saying the Raemaekers did more to win the Great War than any other civilian.

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At Animation Resources, our Advisory Board includes great artists and animators like Ralph Bakshi, Will Finn, J.J. Sedelmaier and Sherm Cohen. They’ve let us know the things that they use in their own self study so we can share them with you. That’s experience you just can’t find anywhere else. The most important information isn’t what you already know… It’s the information you should know about, but don’t know yet. We bring that to you every other month.

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Haven’t Joined Yet?

Check out this SAMPLE REFERENCE PACK! It will give you a taste of what Animation Resources members get to download every other month!

CLICK TO DOWNLOAD A Sample RefPack!

Animation Resources is a 501(c)(3) non-profit arts organization dedicated to providing self study material to the worldwide animation community. If you are a creative person working in animation, cartooning or illustration, you owe it to yourself to be a member of Animation Resources.

Posted in art, refpack, upa | Comments Off on REFPACK038: Advice, Art and Animation

Friday, October 9th, 2020

REFPACK036: One Of UPA’s Earliest Films

REFPACK 036

Members Only Download

Every other month, members of Animation Resources are given access to an exclusive Members Only Reference Pack. These downloadable files are high resolution e-books on a variety of educational subjects and rare cartoons from the collection of Animation Resources in DVD quality. Our current Reference Pack has just been released. If you are a member, click through the link to access the MEMBERS ONLY DOWNLOAD PAGE. If you aren’t a member yet, please JOIN ANIMATION RESOURCES. It’s well worth it.

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DVD QUALITY VIDEO:

Brotherhood of Man

UPA / Bobe Cannon / 1945

Recent current events have inspired many cartoonists and animators who haven’t engaged in political cartooning before to start applying their talents to help change the world for the better. Obviously, that is a huge undertaking… much more difficult than just putting across simple characters and situations. How do you go about tackling an issue of monumental importance with small budget animation? The cartoon we are sharing today proves that perhaps the best way to approach complex issues is with simple animation.

In 1943, Zack Schwartz, David Hilberman and Stephen Bosustow formed a company called Industrial Film and Poster Service (later known as United Productions of America). Their first client was the United Auto Workers, and they were contracted to create industrial films to be shown to UAW members. The first film they produced was Hell-Bent For Election, which was directed by Chuck Jones in 1944. The film promoted the re-election of Franklin Roosevelt, and it was very successful. The following year, work began on Brotherhood of Man, directed by Bobe Cannon.

Brotherhood Of Man was designed to promote racial tolerance and co-operation. The arguments used in the film derive from a pamphlet distributed in the mid 1940s by a New York organization called Public Affairs Committee. During World War II, the military had established integrated units for the first time, and Black, Asian and Native American soldiers had distinguished themselves in service to the country. Segregation was beginning to crumble, so an effort was made to begin taking the first steps towards equality on the home front. This was a subject that had never been addressed in an animated film before.

This film was revolutionary from a graphic standpoint as well. It employed a totally new design aesthetic. Simple, stylized characters and backgrounds based on line and solid shapes of bold color were employed, rather than rendered volumetric forms with realistic perspective. This style of artwork had become popular in magazine cartooning- Virgil Partch, Henry Syverson and Sam Cobean had all worked at Disney before the strike, and had built careers by pioneering a clear, simplified style at Colliers, The Saturday Evening Post and The New Yorker. But stylistically, most animated films in the mid-1940s were still following Disney’s lead.

Bobe Cannon had animated on Chuck Jones’s The Dover Boys which experimented with stylized designs and graphic simplicity, as well as Hell-Bent For Election. He wanted to try taking it even further with Brotherhood Of Man. Along with a story team that included John Hubley, Ring Lardner Jr. and Phil Eastman, and animators Ken Harris and Ben Washam, Cannon established the house style for UPA that would dominate for the rest of its existence.

One of the core precepts of political cartooning is boiling an issue down to a clear, simple image. When a person sees a strong, direct statement visually, it defuses counter arguments, and makes the viewer understand the point immediately. Trying to convince people with words isn’t like that… you have points and counter-points, rhetorical arguments and digressions that cloud the issue. A simple image is much harder to refute than words. Cannon’s simple designs boil these difficult concepts down into a basic, universal symbol of humanity. The drawing style alone succeeds in putting across the point of the film before the characters even speak.

We hope this film gives you ideas of how to put your own cartooning skills to use to enrich and educate. Many thanks to Animation Resources’ Advisory Board member, Steve Stanchfield of Thunderbean Animation for sharing this important film with us.

REFPACK036: Brotherhood of Man (1946)

MP4 Video File / SD / 10:36 / 125 MB Download