Friday, April 10, 2009

Big House Blues David Feiss - Good action and Beautiful Graphic Style

Here's some very stylish animation by Dave Feiss.
Dave was a child prodigy.
He completely figured out how to animate on his own by trial and error when he was a kid.
He reworked his film camera so it would take still pictures on movie film, then started experimenting.
He started by shooting a new frame every 12 x or so and then saw that that looked too static. He kept doing more and more frames per second and shooting it until he came to the conclusion that shooting each drawing twice, generally looked the best. (On "2's")
He's a complete natural and seems to be good at anything he tries to do. He animated a few scenes in BHB.
He worked from our layouts and my direction but added his own touches like the bulldog throwing punches at the boys.
He was one of the first of the 80s bunch to have a combination angular and organic style at the same time.
His poses are beautiful, aren't they?


Ted sent in a couple of the layouts from the scene. These are what we give the animators. Thanks Ted!
The voice of the bulldog was done by none other than Henry Porch, the guy who picked a lot of the music for Ren and Stimpy.
Here, he read the line a little strange so I posed it out to match and Dave animated it.






Dave went on to create and produce "Cow and Chicken" a couple years later, which I thought was the best drawn and animated cartoon of the 90s.



http://www.cartoonthrills.org/blog/spumco/RenStimpy/1BHB/FeissBulldog.mov