Thursday, February 20, 2014

Ollie had a cranky Assistant...


…while he was working on a few close up scenes featuring the centaurettes from Fantasia's Pastoral sequence. Further down are Ollie's original rough drawings that were handed out to an assistant to be in-betweened. (Unfortunately I don't have the animation of the two cherubs, who create this sort of hat from a piece of bark and flowers.)


The designs for the centaurettes were created by Fed Moore, who had been a mentor to Ollie when he first joined the studio. These animation drawings show a complete understanding of Freddie's way to draw girls' faces. Full cheeks, a round nose and eyes with long, almost straight lashes.
I am sure Ollie animated scenes like this one very quickly, he re-numbered  the drawings several times until the right timing was achieved. I should say he also re-numbered them very quickly, making them a little hard to read for anyone else down the production pipeline.

The last drawing includes a note to Ollie from a very upset assistant, who was either fearless…or naive.













5 comments:

  1. I've read a lot about how animators would write notes to each other and it seems most of them never had anything nice to say. In your time at Disney did animators still do that? I read about Nik Ranieri winning the "prize" of not animating Ursula properly, I wonder if he got a note?

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  2. Thanks for sharing these gems...In 3d, we don't have that problem as we do our own breakdowns and in-betweens. Ollie really nails these Fred designs...great stuff.

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  3. Just imagine if this assistant had done that on a Milt Kahl drawing!

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    1. lol I was about to say the same thing! XD

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    2. This made my day! I would give up half my life to be back there and witness all that magic [and drama]!

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