anaglyphs

‪if you ever visited my photo-blog, you would have noticed that I am a big fan of stereo-photography. years ago I used color-slides and watched them in a broken apart old viewmaster. today with all digital images that doesn’t work anymore, but – there is a new way – you create out of the 2 stereo-image components an ANAGLYPH. in some simple steps red and cyan-blue is added to the 2 images in photoshop and the layers are combined to one picture. now you can see the 3D-image effect through special red/blue glasses, the blue needs to be on the right side.‬

‪during my flights I shot a lot of stereo-photos, not by using a special 3D-camera, just one camera and shooting 2 pictures. the stereo effect in the end happens when you wait about 10 seconds between the 2 shots, it looks like as if you had moved the camera sideways. you can see a lot of those images on my other blog.‬

‪a while back I found out that this same technique can be used to create stereo images from normal tv-documentaries or even feature films. whenever the camera moves sideways, like shot from a car or helicopter, you screen-capture 2 images with a small distance ( you find the best results after a while with a bit experience ), and these final anaglyphs look stunning, as you can seen below. there was nothing 3-dimensional looking planned in all these films, you create the effect artificially. I especially like 3D results from historic film footage. maybe someone is as crazy as I am and give it a ‘shot’… ‬

images © ZDF 2.german tv

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look studies

© bilderfabrik

moments 25

corto maltese

HUGO EUGENIO PRATT, june 15, 1927 – august 20, 1995, was an Italian comic strip artist who combined strong storytelling with extensive historical research. like his most popular creation, CORTO MALTESE, whose stories first appeared from 1970 on, pratt was a restless world traveller all his life. born in rimini, italy, he spent most of his childhood in venice, then moved with his parents to ethiopia. back to italy he became part of the VENICE GROUP, an association of writers and artists, one of the members – DINO BATTAGLIA. together with them he worked on several comic strip series until because of poor work conditions for comic strip artists in post war italy he moved with a few others to argentine in 1949, where he created numerous comic series for argentine magazines. then pratt taught for a while at an art school in sao paolo, brazil, until in 1959 le left for london to contribute his work to war picture libraries. he briefly moved back to argentine, but settled finally from 1962 on in europe, first in milan, italy, then from 1970 to 1984 in france, later in lausanne, switzerland where he died in 1995 of cancer.

pratt is considered to be one of the greatest comic artists, who cited ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, JOSEPH CONRAD, FENIMORE COOPER and JACK LONDON as influences, along with cartoonists WILL EISNER and MILTON CANIFF. pratt’s cult series protagonist, CORTO MALTESE, an anti-hero sailor-adventurer world-traveler, takes the reader to the most fascinating places in the world, from the WWI-era pacific islands and their smugglers and pirates to dramatic events during the russian civil war after the october revolution and the spanish civil war.

one of pratt’s stories, CORTO MALTESE IN SIBERIA from 1975, has been translated to the big screen as a traditional animated feature film. LA COUR SECRETE DES ARCANES released in september 2002 in france. directed by PASCAL MORELLI and with stunning backgrounds by FREDERIC BLANCHARD, GISELLA GIAMPIETRO, LUCIE TREMBLAY, OLIVIER VATINE and JEAN-FRANCOIS MIGNAULT, creates a believable ‘pratt-world’ with all his characters come ‘alive’. it must have been a challenge to go from comic to animation. it shows in some parts of the film, – what works in a graphic novel doesn’t necessarily work in film. but, compared to a lot of other animation, this film is a visual masterpiece. below some of the artwork.

© hugo pratt / ellipse animation / canal+

big day

I just found these historic color-slides hidden with 1000s others in one of my slide boxes. it was a big presentation in the disney studio that day, sometime in the fall in 1995 – the first presentation of the style designs for MULAN. we had mounted on boards some of the older paintings together with the latest look. that was as far as I remember the meeting where I was asked by some higher ranks if I could add a bit more detail to my designs, they looked too empty, the audience might think disney could not afford more elaborate backgrounds. oh well…

© disney enterprises, inc

F K Waechter

‘to draw means – to spread the black in your eyes over a white surface’ is a quote the german illustrator and cartoonist FRIEDRICH KARL WAECHTER came up with. waechter was born 1937 in danzig, fled after WWII with his family to west-germany. after his studies in graphic design at the alsterdamm artschool in hamburg he moved to frankfurt where he first worked as a cartoonist for DIE ZEIT, but moved on very soon in 1962 to the new founded satirical magazine PARDON. he created the magazine’s logo, the little devil, and contributed until 1992 numerous cartoons and subversive nonsense. together with comic-writers and cartoonist-friends like ROBERT GERNHARDT, HANS TRAXLER and CLODWIG POTH he founded the NEW FRANKFURT SCHOOL. additional to his PARDON-work waechter created a number of unusual children books, like his version of THE ANTI-STRUWWELPETER, his version of THE BIBLICAL CREATION and some more anti-authoritarian fables. besides teaching, writing books and working for the theatre stage, he co-founded another german satirical magazine in 1979, TITANIC. F K WAECHTER died in 2005 after a battle with lung cancer. during my study years I grew up with PARDON and his work and he is still one of my favorite cartoonists. below a few examples of his work.

© F K Waechter / pardon

new class

today I had my first class in the new year, illustration-techniques for students from animation and visual communication mixed together. we introduce in that class for the first time 3 sessions of life drawing. it shows how important DRAWING has become for our school, good! below some sketches from a life drawing class last year

mulan findings 3

you probably remember the MULAN-poster, the red-one on the left .this version was used in the US and in europe, other versions were developed for the rest of the world – here you can see 2 alternatives for asia. FRED TIO and his designers in disney publications created the designs. I remember the presentation meeting, wow, I could not believe my eyes. stunning! it could not be better! but not everybody was excited, for some of the executives the motif and the execution was not ‘disney’ enough. it was a fight. fortunately the poster was chosen and became a huge success. the cover for the follow-up vhs-cassette ( at that time there was no DVD yet ) is another story, less nice.
anyway, the dragon was from the beginning the ‘leitmotif’, I developed the first one for the emperor’s seal. for internal use I came up with a preliminary logo as header for our artwork with a more stretched dragon. that dragon made it into the final logo. for a while I was involved in the search for that logo, a typical lettering and even the title. in the very beginning it was FA-MULAN, as you can see we had several very different titles and chose the simple short ‘MULAN’ in the end. a good choice.

funny coincidence – I live now for 2 years here in singapore. and in one of singapore’s many parks, the chinese garden, there is a HUA MULAN ( her original name ) sculpture.

© disney enterprises, inc

more russell patterson

© russell patterson

mulan findings 2

before I became the official production designer for disney’s MULAN in december 1994 a small team of visual development artists had explored all different artistic directions for a possible style of that project. some of them had nearly worked on and off for 2 years on that. it was a challenge, the chinese typical painting-look was very difficult to copy for the use in animation. it still was supposed to be a disney movie but the studio wanted to come up with a story-typical style for the new projects. it had been successfully done with HERCULES, ALADDIN and LION KING where art-historic and geographic elements had been combined and ‘disneyfied’. below a few of the hundreds of paintings and sketches from that early stage of development. some more will follow

© disney enterprises, inc

studies 5

some more composition sketches for the book…

albert hurter

ALBERT HURTER was the first visual development artist in the disney studio, most of characters and environments for the disney shorts in the thirties, the SILLY SYMPHONIES, but as well as for the features SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS, PINOCCHIO, DUMBO, FANTASIA and THE RELUCTANT DRAGON were designed by him. born in switzerland in 1883 he studied architecture in zurich and went then for seven years to an art academy in berlin. probably because of the dangerous situation and the beginning of WWI he left europe in 1914 and went to new york where he was introduced to the animation film industry. in the barre-bowers studio he worked on the MUTT & JEFF cartoons and became very fast well known for his amazing drawing talents. around 1930 he applied for work at the disney studio where he was disney’s VISUAL SKETCH ARTIST for more than a decade, drawing whatever came to his mind, playing with the ideas of a new story and working on films they would be produced long after his death, like PETER PAN and LADY AND THE TRAMP. I am sure that he introduced the disney artists to european masters like HEINRICH KLEY, WILHELM BUSCH and the caricature artists of the SIMPLIZISSIMUS. in 1942 he died of a weak heart, and seven years later a book HE DREW AS HE PLEASED was pubished, put together by TED SEARS, one of the story artists hurter had worked with. the book has about 700 of hurter’s sketches throughout his years at disney, and a lot of them have always been my favorites. I post them below in a bigger size.

michael sporn has posted the complete book in 2 parts on his blog – you can find it here and here.

© albert hurter and disney enterprises, inc

mulan findings 1

you probably have made that same experience – you search for something and find tons of stuff way more interesting than what you were looking for. it took a long time since my archives has grown too big, but it was worth it. you will see a lot of it in my next posts. today I start with some of my oldest MULAN color designs, from 1995, a mushu cel set-up and a directional map with sequence numbers.

© disney enterprises, inc

2013

…all my best wishes for the NEW YEAR.

this is post number 800. some more statistics – I started this blog sept.12, 2008 and it has so far about 3.5 million views. it is encouraging that there is so much interest, thank you for your comments as well.