Sunday, March 02, 2008

Donald and Daffy Followup

Kevin writes:

Mark [Kausler’s] comments [regarding his and Joe Ranft's boarding of the piano duel] confirm what I suspected — the director of photography took what were undoubtedly well-staged boards from Mark and Joe and, making his best guess of how the animation should play, arranged the set and the rigged props and shot the plates. Imagine filming a scene without actors, then dropping in the actors later. It’s a setup for a mess, especially if you don’t really understand what animation can do. I can also imagine that a live-action filmmakers may not have been used to looking at animation storyboards ...

I would dearly love to see the piano-duel sequence shot the way Ranft and Kausler boarded it. It was a brilliant idea to make them battling musicians. As I wrote before, there’s some wonderful animation in there (props to Mark and Dave Spafford and everyone else who animated those ducks), and if the camera work and staging were clear, the thrills and excitement of the sequence would come out of the character animation, the way it should ...

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

And Zemecki's lack of understanding of animation continues with drek like polar express and the awful flop beowulf.

Anonymous said...

You can consider them drek, but Beowulf and Ploar Express were only flops in so much as they cost too much to make. PE made 162million and Beowulf made 82 million. For a PG13 animated film 82million is something to look at.

Anonymous said...

Something that I didn't talk about in my previous comment was that there were two storyboard crews working alongside each other on WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT? The live action boarders would sometimes be fed business by Joe and I, and sometimes we got sketches from them to re-draw or insert cartoon characters. The Daffy/Donald boards we drew were carefully labelled "toon" and "real", to work out which props were actual and which were animated. Then the entire sequence was re-drawn by the live board crew. They put their trade-mark yellow arrows all over the drawings to guide Dean Cundey and the set builders. The story process on Roger was layered and complex, the results on screen were often quite complex as well.

Larry Levine said...

Mark, What was Chuck Jones'
response when his storyboards for the Donald and Daffy scene weren't
used? What was his role as consultant after this point?

Anonymous said...

Larry, Chuck was not kept on as a consultant, he was let go or he left voluntarily, I don't know which. He had a private office at Amblin' and Joe and I had unofficial orders to not "bother" him. He never came back to our quarters, either.

Kevin Koch said...

Mark and Larry, I hope you won't mind that I'm adding these comments to the post that Steve is linking to here. If it's not cool, say the word and I'll take 'em down.

Anonymous said...

It's OK, Kevin. Let's see what other folks remember.

Larry Levine said...

Kevin, It's my honor.

Mark, Thanks for the information!

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