Two weeks ago we started work on this new music video for Dexys. By “start”, that’s from the blank page. Just the music track, no creative, no design, no boards. We did have a brief creative treatment that we put together in a few hours just prior to starting the job.
This was fast and cheap and we hope it hits that Venn diagram center as “good” too.
NBC Sports asked us to contribute animation to four segments with Peter King for their Super Bowl XVI pregame spectacular.
Here’s one with Steve Young. As an admirer of 49ers Coach Bill Walsh, this was particularly fun.
This was designed by Keenon Ferrell.
Our animators for the whole series were Emmett Goodman, Pilar Newtown Katz, Alex Fyock, Shannon Baney, and Taisiya Zaretskaya with art production by Natalie Greene and Winnie Wu.
I didn’t have a television in the 1990s. Whenever I stayed in a hotel or visited someone with cable I would switch right to public access (or it’s higher production value cousin Channel 25 WNYE). Public access is pretty much the best (and the worst and therefore the best) of humanity.
So anyway, we decided to start a YouTube channel in hopes of becoming the Contrapoints of animation.
Here’s the page: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzbZsZYeLvXrY-bLxpJD1uw
We’ll be putting up videos talking about animation-related jibber jabber about once a week in addition to putting up some new work. Smash that like button! Ding the bell! Comment and subscribe!
Following is an interview with Fred Mogubgub originally published in The East Village Other.
On first reading, I found it a little irritating -the inarticulate questions, the stoned replies. Really just the lack of “facts”. Facts are what we look to the archive to provide. Dispelling the need for quantifiable information, there are some great thoughts, especially when it comes to collaboration and business practice.
This is also the only published mention that I’m aware of concerning Dawn Comes.
Some more “facts” about the interviewer’s screening of The Day I Met Zet would have been good. Perhaps he saw it broadcast on WNDT (now WNET-Thirteen) or at the screening where Mogubgub had to physically cover the projection to censure the nudity.
This interview was conducted by East Village Other editor Jaakov Kohn
Fred Mogubgub produced “ZET” and is now producing “DAWN COMES.”
Fred Mogubgub is a man in a state of exstatic [sic] amazement at the full scope of human possibilities.
After years of successful commercial film work, Mogubgub has found his soul and as yet hasen’t [sic] ceased being amazed by his discovery.
It has given him a quality of childish wonderment that so perfectly shields the sharp, observing, directing and controlling eyes of its beholder.
To talk with Fred Mogubgub is a multi-media experience. Engulfed by a beehive of activity and noisy agitation, one becomes increasingly aware of the fact that not even for a moment does a detail of his surroundings escape Fred’s keen head.
Despite the steady bombardment of super-rock and Sixth Avenue traffic, not being the most conducive backdrop to a conversation, the man’s innate tranquility made up for it all.
EVO - Fred, could you describe to me your current project?
M - I am working on a TV set.
EVO - I have seen your last film, which I consider to be the best animated collage that I have ever seen.
M - I agree, it’s the best that I have seen.
EVO - You started to shoot a new film last week. Do you have any concept or notions as to what you want to do? What is it all about and what do you have in mind?
M - Just to do another film. As far as the film itself is concerned - it will take care of itself.
EVO - Do you usually work without a plot or sequence?
M - I work from minute to minute.
EVO - Even Fellini, who works without a script, usually knows what he wants to do. What is it that you want to do?
M - Whatever happens from minute to minute - that’s what I want to do.
EVO - Are you experimenting? Is there a point that you wish to prove? Is it a concept or a dream that you desire to put on celluloid?
M - No. I just feel like I am working on a film. I am working on a film from day to day and that’s where the film is at. Everything is part of the film. Whatever I have done is part of the film. It is all going to make the film happen.
EVO - What are your thoughts about the film? What is your overall concept?
M - I just to want to make a film. I am working my film all the time. How I am making it is however I am. Sitting here talking to you -it is still a film that I am making an therefore everything that happens will be in it. I am ALWAYS working on my film. THIS IS A FILM.
EVO - When I walked into your studio I noticed three walls full of prizes that were given to you. What were they for? What does your past work consist on [sic]? Features, Commercial, What?
M - Short films and commercials. All my work relates to what I want to do now. I want to make a good film and I need money to make it with.
EVO - Are you still involved with commercials?
M - I am getting into it again.
EVO - Are any of your commercial currently shown on TV?
M - One, for the Beneficial Finance Co. It really doesn’t matter. What matters is what I am doing today.
EVO - Understood. YOU are making a FILM. The reason I asked you about your past work is because I want to find out what you are doing NOW.
M - I am concerned ONLY with what I am doing NOW. The film is what I am doing. Now what is it all going to be about? O.K. Let me see if I can figure it out. If I’d start making a film with you right now, it would give you an idea. I am starting with myself and move ahead. But somehow or other I would have to control it.
EVO - Are you usually in control of your creative energies and efforts? Do you try to retain control over your material?
M - Like I am now -Yes. I come close to that. I like to feel I am in control because then I can make sense of it. It’s just like everything else, one does their closest thing. Just do what you do. That’s what counts.
Now the FILM is about the GIRL. I don’t know why it is about a girl. It just happens to be about a girl. A study of today’s human being. When she comes in we’ll know her.
EVO - I have seen a large number of girls parading in here trying to land the part. It seems that none has hit you as yet. Is that correct?
M - That isn’t true. They all have something.
EVO - Are you trying to establish a composite image of today’s girl?
M - I don’t know. As long as it is a nice girl.
EVO - Do you limit yourself in Age?
M - No.
EVO - Have you used many women in your commercials?
M - Not too many.
EVO - Do you feel that your past work was the thing you had to to [sic] do in order to be at the point that you are at now?
M - Only when you succeed as an artist you know. Let me tell you. Right now I know that I am experimenting with that box (TV console0. That’s the thing I am concerned with now. I can’t really describe it, but what’s going to be in the movie is coming out of that box. It’s all layers of paint added every day. I think the whole thing out every day. It just keeps changing. The set itself does not work but just changes every day. By me. It’s one constant change I want to do something and it’s getting to be interesting. It’s starting to work out somehow. I feel it’s going to come to a point where it will probably just glow. There are so many layers and it will look like it’s on all the time. I am trying to say what I can within that glow. So I create my own little glow. A living thing made out of art. I concern myself with creating real matter out of art. It lives, somehow.
EVO - Do you paint?
M - That’s what I am doing -painting.
EVO - Do you have any art school training?
M - Yes, I have had some training. I went to art school in New Bedford and in New York. I dug what was happening here and got turned on by the city. this town was full of excitement. The city really turns me on.
EVO - Haw [sic] long have you been in New York?
(continued on Page 16)
M - Maybe 18, maybe 20 years. I am not sure.
EVO - Do you live in the city?
M - No, I live in New Jersey.
EVO - Do you have a family?
M - Yes. Wife and two children.
EVO - How do you relate to your fellow human beings? Do you find it easier to communicate via film rather than on a personal basis?
M - Yeah, I guess so. That’s my language. That’s the way I talk.
EVO - What I saw of your communications struck me as being extremely eloquent. The sensible, straight forward way in which you massage your audience is remarkable. Technically I don’t know much about films but I am aware of intercommunication. To me it was an I and Thou entity unto itself.
M - It’s a feeling, a real thing. That’s the thing about the sculpture, the box. It almost lives and I don’t know if it can be done on film. Yet it all comes from the machine.
EVO - Remember that what you feed into the machine is what comes through. I think that you succeeded very well in the film I saw. That’s why I called it animated collage rather than photomontage. You thing is alive and it moves.
M - That that’s always there. Very spiritual.
EVO - And very visual too.
M - I was trying to evoke audience participation. A Ying and Yang kind of thing but then who knows?
EVO - What do you think?
M - I don’t know. Whatever it is, it’s probably the secret of life.
EVO - Are you trying to find the secret of life?
M - YYYEEEAAHHH. I guess so, I don’t know. Maybe it’s better just to live. Just to do what you are doing. I mean something monotonous has to be next to something interesting to make it interesting.
EVO - How long have you been turning on?
M - 13 years.
EVO - Have you ever had hallucinogenics?
M - No. I want to do it without psychedelic drugs. I like to make interesting journeys. I don’t like instant journeys. I am just an artist working on his thing.
EVO - Are you apprehensive about psychedelic drugs?
M - No. I believe in myself.
EVO - Do you believe in God?
M - Yeah. I believe in God. I believe God is YOURSELF. I do things from day to day. Who knows, one of these days I may even take a trip. I turn on to my work. I am constantly working. Right now I don’t have time for a trip.
EVO - Do you work well with people?
M - Yes, I think so, I let people do whatever the hell they want to do.
EVO - Do you maintain control over your thing?
M - I don’t know if I maintain control anything. I just talk to the people that work with me. They can all do what they want.
EVO - And all relating to a central idea.
M - Yes. I believe in what they believe in. We believe in the same things. We just express it in our different ways. The big problem today is finding a way to communicate a feeling and be understood.
EVO - Have you experiences the frustation [sic] of being misunderstood.
M - Yes but feelings change through participation.
EVO - When did you experience the big changes in your life. The change in your consciousness?
M - Two years ago.
EVO - How old are you?
M - 40- could be 41. I am at a point where I want to participate. I feel things are together now and what will come out of it will be just love and beauty.
EVO - Are you interested in what’s happening on the outside, like the political scene?
M - Political scenes don’t change that often. It’s the same all the time. It is a difficult subject to talk about because every thing else is moving so fast. It is incredible how long it takes till one reaches some sort of an understanding. I don’t really know what I am talking about. Trying to defend it all isn’t easy.
EVO - What are you trying to defend.
M - Myself. What I do and peoples right to participate.
EVO - You are involved because your work expresses what’s happening.
M - That was what was happening when I made the film. What was happening to me. What’s happening to me today is an entirely different story. It’s happening now from day to day. In my films I on exactly what I feel.
EVO - You certainly came through. After I saw your film I came away with the distinct impression that I have known you for a long time.
M - Because I did exactly what I wanted to do so. That’s why. I hope I succeed again. The only way to find out is to continue making films. One should be able to find someone with a lot of money who just gives it to you and [page] says “Go ahead and do with it whatever you want.” Everyone says it is impossible. I don’t believe that. Someone will see a good film and say “Here is the money, go ahead.”
EVO - Has that happened to you?
M - It’s getting closer and closer.
EVO - How do you support yourself while doing what you are doing?
M - We make T. V. commercials.
EVO - In your TV work -do you have control over your material?
M - Yes, we don’t let anyone hold us back because we work together.
EVO - Do you feel that you succeeded in bridging the gap between your commercials and your films?
M - Yes, I have definitely done that. I think it is a good think. In our case we have had complete freedom in the production of our commercials. What you do with that is a different story again. You can take it and put [sic] You have to create and put in it what you feel.
EVO - Do you have any interference from your clients?
M - Not interference. Just communication. People that come here want a great job. They know what they are coming for and what they come for we do. They come for what we do.
EVO - Do you believe that like in some Scandinavia countries nudity will finally be used in commercials? Do you think that the sanctimonious taboos will finally be broken on the TV screen.
M - Sure, without any doubt. If anything is moving ahead it will be television. The saying “Whoever controls TV controls the world” is correct. So is McLuhan.
EVO - I think Nixon’s election proved that point.
M - Well, I don’t know about that guy. Who knows where evil lies? TV can be used for good and for bad. For many it is their only [continued on Page 23] contact with outside. I feel that I am participating at this point. I feel like I am directing people. I would like just to participate but someone has to make the film. Therefore I direct people.
EVO- That’s how things are. There are those who direct and those who are being directed and as long as this pattern interchanges -that’s what freedom is.
M - Right, but all I want to do now is work on piece over there (TV).
EVO - Do you think you intimidate people?
M - Maybe.
EVO - Do you have a desire to convert and change people to your own state of happiness?
M - I just want to convert myself. I feel that things are going my way.
EVO - How much time do you spend in your studio.
M - Most of my life.
EVO - Do you find that you dual existence - here with your work and in New Jersey with your family conflict with each other?
M - No trouble at all. I have a beautiful wife and beautiful children and I enjoy every minute with them. You are what you are and everything seem to come out right.
EVO - Do you do your own photography?
M - Yes, except the film I am working on now. This is the first time I employed a film crew. I feel like participating with other people. This way I feel that I am communicating.
Wilson Picket blasts Mustang Sally all over the place when the commotion finally died somehow, I asked my last question: “In summation Fred, what is happening?”
M - I think participation is the most important thing that’s happening. I goes on every day. It’s happening to more and more people and that in the end is what really matters.
This Saturday in Bethlehem, PA I met George Nicholas at the South Side Film Festival. His film, Smoke -N- Suds, played with our film Ride in a short animation section. That program also included my current favorite festival film Take Rabbit, a rare piece that includes a real Virginia Woolf conclusion without being grim.
George credited Blue Kraning with the wise advice to NOT animate his story (I’m glad he didn’t take the advice, his film is a fun snapshot of long gone era). After our Q&A I told him that I know Blue, but I know him through his mother really (and also his brilliantly talented wife). We then waxed on about the amazing Suzan Pitt. George said she wasn’t doing well and was with the family in New Mexico. “She hasn’t made enough art,” I remarked selfishly, “she’s a person who is always creating but, for me, it’s still never enough.”
By the next morning, she had died.
There are countless people who knew her well, worked with her closely, and lived by her side for years. I hope they share pieces of Suzan that she left with them and that they keep her work vibrant. I only worked with her briefly, peripherally, on a project that barely warrants a footnote in her career. That time, to me, is seminal. I’d like to share my favorite story from it.
I had been working at The Ink Tank for around a year. I was doing office work. Answering phones. This was an era when people called on the telephone so frequently you needed a person dedicated to answering it. I hated it.
The studio had just begun production on a series of short films for The Children’s Television Workshop (to once more age the story, they’ve been known as Sesame Workshop for around a quarter century). Maciek Albrecht was directing and setting up a studio in Krakow to handle the animation. We needed someone to run the show stateside. R. O. Blechman has just seen Joy Street at the New York Film Festival. Always a man of stellar taste, he immediately loved it. He asked Suzan Pitt if she would handle the production from the U.S. She had never done anything like that before, but no one involved in the production had done anything like it, what difference would one more person make.
One of her conditions was that the studio would pay for the transfer of her 35mm films to DigiBeta (go ahead and laugh, it was the best 720x486 NTSC had to offer).
Since I knew nothing about just about everything, I figured I would take every opportunity to observe the mechanics of production and to watch as much film, especially animation, as possible. I had seen Joy Street on VHS, and it immediately became the greatest animated film I had seen. I had probably seen about 20 at this point in my life. It edged out -barely- John and Faith Hubley’s Eggs.
A nighttime transfer session was scheduled to run some of Suzan’s older films (at SyncSound, I think. Possibly Magno but I think it was SyncSound since they were doing the audio post and were trying to push their film-to-tape operation. It’s also possible this was at TapeHouse since the show was mostly transferred there, but I don’t think it was).
Nighttime telecine was usually about half the cost of a daytime transfer. I don’t understand the economics of this, maybe it was a supply/demand thing. Less that night transfers cost less, more that post houses could charge premium during the day to advertising clients. Typically the night operators weren’t as experienced as the day operators, often causing the half-priced transfer to take twice as long.
Nighttime also meant I could attend the session and not miss out on any important filing or phone calls that I was getting paid to handle. So I went with Suzan to transfer Asparagus, which I had never seen. In the dark room she told me how she had dozens of friends and students animate the stop motion theater scene by having each person take care of a single character in the audience. That way each puppet would have an individual performance, and really, anybody could do it. (Really, anybody? Even a no-talent like me?!?) Anybody.
So we sat there in the dark for a few hours, ordered delivery and talked about regular people things and getting the right colors in video. And then the ultimate scene of the film rolled on. The scene in which the faceless woman takes the asparagus into her mouth and pulls up to reveal an “asparagus” shaped fountain of jelly beans, down again, and up to reveal a rainbow and down and up and down and up. 23-year-old me became incredibly uncomfortable. It is fair to say I’d never seen anything like that. To this day, I doubt I’ve encountered any art as charged with psychological depth, feminist agency, unparalleled artistry and sheer eroticism. And sitting right next to me was the woman responsible. An artist. A capital A Artist. She was thirty years older than me, older than my parents but right then she was the coolest, foxiest, brightest kid in town.
I didn’t see her much after her stint at The Ink Tank. The next season of the show I even kind of took her job (not really, since she was a creative force and they really needed a person to make schedules and be a “producer” since Maciek was going to be directing from Brooklyn). She was always kind to me when we did pass and we emailed on and off a few years back. She was great, she left a legacy that makes us better.
This is an essay written by John Hubley originally published in ASIFA, 1975, no. 1. I’ve made minor formatting edits.
The newsletter also recounts his exhibition with Faith Hubley at the American Cultural Center in Paris, at the the initiative of the French Association of Animated Cinema.
New Trends in Characterization in Animation
by John Hubley
In my approach to animation I am looking hopefully for fresh, stimulating ideas in certain aspects of the conceptual process. I am especially concerned with developing “character”. By character, I mean individual, specialized, human character as differentiated from the comic-strip generalities that are the familiars of popular animation. Traditionally the drawing of animated characters is stylized and frequently insensitive and unrelated to actual life modes. We animation artists have too often been content with comic-strip simplicity in terms of drawing, and more than that, in terms of characterization. Young artists today strive to bring more definition to the drawing of character. I think the new vision of human beings as animation “characters” presents a most urgent and promising prospect that needs purposeful extension.
When an animator draws a character he creates a symbol. By abstracting and purifying his representation as an object-organism, an artist creates his equivalent of a writer’s word. With motion he modifies it, and endows it with the power of dynamic transformation which can heighten and intensify the dramatic content. Just as a writer chooses those words which best suit and reveal his purpose, we as artists must chose characterization that go beyond mere linear caricatures. We live in a technological culture which tends to depersonalize and dehumanize its inhabitants. Why should we be content with stamping the same feature upon our work? I can foresee characterizations that go beyond the surface, physical aspects of a character, his facial expressions, movement body shape and bring to light visually dramatically relevant characteristics, his repressed emotional patterns, physical body systems, his drives and dreams.
“Balablok” (Bretislav Pojar, 1972)
Previous examples of this approach are few. Bretislav Pojar created a film at the Canadian Film Board in which a character is shown living with a miniature duplicate of himself inside. When he is confronted with a traffic policeman’s rage, the inner man reacts in various ways which affect the outer man’s behavior. (Disney did something similar in early Pluto shorts, where good and evil impulses in the form angel and devil “consciences” inside Pluto’s brain, struggled for control of his action.) Our own studio is currently preparing a series of three half hour film dramatizations of the Eight Stages of Man inspired by the work of Erik Erikson which will be treated in a somewhat similar manner. We are concerned here with basic character “strength” to which Erikson has given terms such as “Basic Trust” , “Basic Mistrust”, “Autonomy”, “Shame”, “Identity”, “Generality”, etc. So our problem is to show infants as they interact with their social environment; growing inner strength which becomes the core of their lifetime personalities. At this time we are dealing with a series of “inner” images appearing within the characters. The multiple aspect of these inner images reacting and counteracting with the “real” events of a person’s life, is beginning to reach in the direction of joining so-called visual and non-visual aspects of reality.
Artists around the world are defying to old “linear shape” order in graphics. Let’s hope we can defy the animated caricature and opt for humanizing and optimizing human capacities and “character” in animation.
“Everybody Rides the Carousel” (Hubley, 1975)
Several years back on the old blog I wrote about my first experience listening to Joe Frank.
Joe, like millions of others who never met him, I feel like I can call him "Joe" died this morning after continuing and compounding health issues.
We are fortunate that he created the work he did, and we can revisit his singular voice anytime through www.joefrank.com
More still, his impact on radio broadcasting played no small part in the tone of the podcast boom where personal narrative and exploratory fiction have become dominant forms.
His work was famously "borrowed" to form the basis of Martin Scorsese's "After Hours". Other than a few bit parts and cameos, it's a disappointment that his involvement in cinema will largely be remember for that film he "didn't write".
The great Chel White made a few pieces with Joe's scripts, including "Magda".
I've never really understood when musicians or artists say they're "influenced" by another's work. What does that mean? How does it look? What are the results?
With Joe, I think I get it. His approach to form, to narrative, and most of all to emotional honesty is truly something I think about almost constantly in work we do. I've never met him, but he's been between my ears. There's probably no other artist who "influenced" me greater.
Here's a thing that is almost embarrassingly close to showing that influence.
Here's something we recently finished -sequences for a documentary by Lomax Boyd of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute published by the great Nautilus Magazine.
This is a good example of a simple design development process.
We had a couple graphic ideas that we liked. On one end, we felt the story called for resolute but fluid line work. Counterpoint to that, I love mid-century dinosaur art and felt that could be a rewarding inspiration.
This book of postcards is probably the best 25 cents I've ever spent
The difficulty, of course, is creating a reasonable visualization of pre-history (at a very specific place and era) within the parameters of a short documentary's production.
This is an early concept drawing.
The illustration style has to support the mood and concepts of the film, but is ultimately secondary to the narrative development of the sequences (generally speaking). The great trick in this was to demonstrate concrete things -like a mummified caribou (which is very hard to depict!) -while the narration touches on broad, semi-abstract ideas.
Mummified caribou
In science and educational animation the visuals usually need to match the spoken script. It's important to note that this isn't always the case in other genre. A fictional film or personal narrative is often illuminated when the picture plays differently from the script.
Scimitar Cat
Fortunately, Lomax, the director, has some great ideas and input to get the narrative aspects of the animation working.
Pleistocene Party!
Riding the coattails of Yusaku Maezawa's record setting purchase of Jean-Michel Basquiat's Untitled (1982), here's a little film we did for Sesame Street several years back using the artist's work.
The budget fell slightly shy of $110.5 million. Actually, it was probably close to $1105.00.
Outrageous fortune aside, here's what the auction winner had to say about the painting:
“When I first encountered this painting, I was struck with so much excitement and gratitude for my love of art. I want to share that experience with as many people as possible.
I wish to loan this piece — which has been unseen by the public for more than 30 years — to institutions and exhibitions around the world. I hope it brings as much joy to others as it does to me and that this masterpiece by the 21-year-old Basquiat inspires our future generations.”
I love a man who loves a thing so much he wants the world to share it.
With this new incarnation of the website, maybe we'll keep up the news/blog page more. Keep checking to find out. The old blog is still archived here: www.aceandson.com/blog