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FilmmakerJ — Me with a -Land Before Time- Cel
Published: 2013-11-12 18:27:39 +0000 UTC; Views: 2305; Favourites: 32; Downloads: 0
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No, I am not at an animation convention, and this is not a traveling exhibit. I am actually one of the lucky folks to be attending the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD): an art college which Don Bluth was kind enough to give his entire animation archive to. And in fact, he is still finding more stuff to send to SCAD. I only hope SCAD will continue to have the resources to properly store and preserve this collection of animation materials.
Absolutely everything Don Bluth and his team has ever made and attempted to make is here: from the initial sketches, screenplays, storyboards, model sheets, all the way to roll backgrounds and finished painted cels. The college has had to painstakingly categorize, sort, label, and re-box 100s of crates and containers filled to the brim with material. They've managed to find stuff from "Banjo the Woodpile Cat," Don's animated sequence from the 1980 movie "Xanadu," nearly everything from "The Secret of NIMH," and all of his other films.
However, the only things this collection does not contain are things from "An American Tail" and "The Land Before Time," because those films were made under the creative control of Steven Spielberg and with funding from Universal Studios. So Spielberg likely has most of those films' production materials stored somewhere else.
The only reason why I'm holding a cel from "The Land Before Time" is because only a box or two worth of material from either of those movies has managed to stay in Don's personal belongings, and so they wound up here in the SCAD collection.
I have a few more photos of my time looking around the archives with my Animation History class, and I shall be returning later to get some photos of some "Secret of NIMH" cels, and drawings and cels from the animated sequence in "Xanadu," since I know my mom loves that movie.
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Comments: 32
That is awesome. I actually have a few cels of the Land Before Time movie myself and have been searching the internet far and wide for info on other cels or Don Bluth Material. As well as trying to buy more. Most collectors I talked to have mention that a lot of sites that had cels from Don Bluth movies have either sold out or or went out of business years ago. Not to mention that some cels are not even on the market (As you mentioned with Universal owning most of the production material) Though I must say "SCAD" is something I haven't heard until now. If you have time to tell me more about it I'm more than willing to listen and learn more about.
Also for my advice for others down in the comments to look out for when buying cels are as followed:
1. If you find a cel on Ebay, always do your homework first before buying. Such as check the timestamp where the scene takes place and compare them. Check to see if description of the item is right and always ask questions.
2. Also know common animation terms such as Concept Art, Hand painted limited additions, Lithographs, Production cels and more. Some Art Galleries know what they're selling however if it's just a person selling from their own collection, they might not know what they're really selling.
3. Also with Deleted footage cels, those ones are truly a challenge. I can't give much info on them other than just go with your gut on it. I even have a cel of the show EE&E on Cartoon Network with the characters doing an action that wasn't in the episode. I couldn't find any info on deleted scenes from the episode but I know for a fact that the show does go through a few scene that never even made it on TV or even in the Eds Big Picture Show movie. So it's likely the scene I have is in fact a deleted scene cut for time restraints.
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Don Bluth and Gary Goldman personally donated more than 95% of the sketches, design and model sheets, painted cells, background rolls (many backgrounds were painted on 12" tall x 5' long rolls that the SCAD library had out for display), and scrapped ideas that had been stored in multiple buildings before 2005 I believe.
Since then, the head conservationist at the SCAD library, along with numerous students with a major in historical restoration, have been sprting, categorizing, and labeling 1000s of pieces of material for archiving them for future generstions of animation students and historians to come and study.
It was stated to me and a class of mine that Gary Goldman gets very ticked when he sees a cell show up on EBay or other online venues where it shouldnt belong. None of the items now at SCAD are to be removed for any reason. They are a permanent resident, so long as the collection can be stored and maintained.
In fact, Don and Gary went back to SCAD to retrieve certain items relating to Dragon's Lair when they were running their Kickstarter and Indiegogo campaigns.
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Wow that is awesome. Thanks so much for this info. I'm glad a lot of these cels are being kept somewhere safe. I hope to one day meet Don Bluth and Gary Goldman to get my cels autographed. I don't intend to sell them but I do plan to put a few of my cels I've collected over the years in charity auctions once I find some and get everything together.
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Bluth and his team near completion of their pitch presentation for Dragon's Lair: The Movie
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Is it possible that some of the Land Before Time production materials you have at SCAD shows something that belongs to one of the scenes that were removed from the movie? If yes, would be awesome to see.
I managed to get my hands on 4 LBT cels a while ago, but during the last few months nothing showed up on ebay or something again. I would love to get a cel with Littlefoot or Ducky.
Hope dies last.
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You would be very unlikely to find any new cels from the Don Bluth films, because every bit of material is now either in the possession of SCAD, per the wishes of Gary Goldman. Or in the case of An American Tail and LBT, they are in the possession of Universal Studios. These few random cels and drawings from LBT, and I believe a background painting from American Tail, were just left lying around in Don Bluth's warehouse or office, and never found their way into the Universal Studios Archives.
The media curator at SCAD specifically said that Gary Goldman would be ticked off if he found out that new cels or artwork from Don's films were being put on the market that weren't already in the possession of a private collector. So if anything that wasn't already purchased back in the 90s and early 2000s is put up on Ebay, then it would have had to have been stolen from the SCAD library. Which is very unlikely to happen.
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so you don't think any of the LBT materials you have show something from the removed scenes?
There was a time, about 10 months ago I think, when some LBT cels appeared on ebay and another site that only sells animation film materials from all kinds of movies. The cels on ebay scored extremely high prices but the owner of the other site gave me a pretty good deal for the 4 cels he had.
I made a journal about those when I got them if you're curious: Awesome Stuff
The background is just a print of course.
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I suppose the next time I watch the movie I can keep the image (of the cel I was holding) up on my computer screen, and then periodically see if it matches anything. I would also suggest you do the same with the cels that you have, if you aren't sure if those could be from the deleted footage.
It's such a shame that the deleted scenes are reportedly gone forever, at least the finished film negatives. The actual animation and backgrounds may still be out there somewhere. But there'd be no way of knowing whether that stuff could all be regathered, with their time sheets and number charts in order to rebuild the scene and rephotograph it all. And even if you could do that, I've been told that quite a bit of the recorded sound for the Don Bluth projects was captured on tape media that is nearly unreadable due to the rarity of the audio players required to play the tapes back. And so simply trying to hear the audio created for those scenes may also be impossible at this point.
My hope, though, is that when Universal finally wants to put LBT on Blu-ray, they may be hiding the fabled lost deleted scenes, and they'll include them on the blu-ray release as a major bonus feature. There'd be no reason not to if the footage still exists in a reasonably accessible form.
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You don't need to do that. That moment is from the scene when Sharptooth has his first scene, I know that much.
My 4 cels are in the movie as well, when Cera jumps over the tar pit and Petrie falls into that mess.
I don't think the film negatives are gone forever (or you know something I don't). It's just that it is proven that the scenes were actually all done and removed AFTER the film was already completed. You can see some of these moments on youtube, mostly because of commercials back then.
So yeah, it may be impossible to regather all the cels and backgrounds (and as you said the audio is probably gone as well, plus the task would take quite a while to reshoot them and I doubt Universal would do that), but I would be very surprised if the parts were cut out of the negative film and then just thrown away. I think these cut outs are in some box at Universal and may or may not see the daylight if said Blu Ray ever comes out.
Again, if someone would have just thrown the finished negatives in the trash, this person was not in their right mind if you ask me - or is that a common thing when it comes to movies?
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Well, by 1987, I think we finally realized that keeping and preserving movies was a good idea, now that we had home video media storage like VHS and Laser-disk. But back in the silent movie era, and during early television, tons and tons of stuff was just dumped, thrown away or burned because no one really thought it would get replayed or redistributed again. So it has happened.
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Are you saying that you hate 3D CGI, or that you hate painting 2D in the computer?
Because no one paints 2D on cells anymore. And I completely understand why. For one, it's too expensive, it's time consuming, and it's actually a big waste of materials. Nowadays animators animate on paper, scan them in, and ink and paint things in Photoshop. Disney's actually been doing that since "The Rescuers Down Under."
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both
a lot of animators got laid off because of both 2d computer painting
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Well, while I feel sorry for people losing their jobs, as I was for all of the 2D animators in 2006. I can understand why they laid off their cel painters. I mean, that would've been back in the 1980s, right? When they introduced the CAD system. And painting digitally really doesn't add anything or detract anything from the experience of watching animation. Maybe it does on a very very small level. But I'd argue that cel painting verses computer paining has an even smaller difference than Film vs Digital photography. At least you can perceive film grain, where as I'm sure cel painters were trained not to leave traces of their paint stokes.
There is something to be said for the visual appearance of cels when they're photographed in just the right way to leave a small shadow beneath them on the background. But other than that, I don't see much of a good reason to ever revive celluloid painting, other than for the sake of doing a particular project completely according to vintage tradition.
However, I am completely behind the idea of initially animating on paper and animator's peg-boards, because a lot of what makes hand-drawn animation work lies in drawing on tactile paper and being able to flip the pages to check the movement.
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BAH! Cel colors are more prettier and it feels better, i even asked someone who doesn't know what the difference was, until i told them he chose cels.
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Which two films did you compare?
Because it's a big difference between showing someone cels on film, and cels on digital, compared to solely digital painted animation. But then again, the only time cels were used in film was when they were shot on film. So it very well could still be the film stock rather than the paint itself, or maybe the way that light reflects off the paint when being photographed.
But you have to remember, that unless a film is being shown on film, it's all making its way to a digital format. Every film you watch was digitized in order to bring it to you on DVD and Blu-ray. So if a computer can replicate the color space of a piece of film, then it can also replicate that same color completely digitally. I know there's still subtleties between the two, but you'd probably have to show me two specific examples for me to make a better judgement.
In fact, if you can get two images of the films you're talking about, I'd love to see them and discuss this further, because I guess I'm not really sure about the issue anymore, now that you've brought it to my attention. lol
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i compared this
img3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20…
cdn2-b.examiner.com/sites/defa…
as you can clearly see the first one is better,
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I totally agree with you that the first one is better. And the colors are definitely more well-represented. But it isn't just because it's painted on cels.
It's also better because the composition isn't as flat and lifeless, the characters aren't small compared to the space, the animation was more loose back than rather than homogenized and cookie-cutter, like it is now (in fact most animation from back in the 90s was much better than it is now. Although "Steven Universe" manages to be very loose sometimes, and reminiscent of 90s cartoons), the color choices in general were much better, and there is a softness to those old video transfers that's actually nice sometimes.
The comparison might be a little different if you were to have a full HD-res version of both images to compare. The colors and line edges would be much crisper in the earlier episode which would make the comparison even more interesting, because there would be so much more to compare. And I think more people would be in favor of the earlier episode, simply because everything was handled more honestly then, as well as for all the other reasons I mentioned.
So yes, I'd pick the first image any day in this comparison.
Now let me give you a more evenly matched comparison: Ignoring either film (if you're familiar with them) which of these two images do you prefer?
Number 1: www.blu-ray.com/movies/screens…
Number 2: www.blu-ray.com/movies/screens…
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I like number 1 better.
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Okay, fair enough.
But why do you like it? What about it feels or looks better?
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well to put it this way
cel feels like it's really there
true digital is more crisp but real life is not crisp. It has more darker shades, like cel.
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Well that's true too. There does seem to be a softer and darker sense of color with painted cels. But that could also be because filmmakers chose color schemes that were more subdued. This new millennium has all been about coloring in bright fluorescent colors. Even my own artwork has trouble being subtle, I just throw every color into it at a really high saturation. I'm still trying to cut that down a bit. lol
But I mean, you go back and look at certain anime series that made the jump from cel to digital, and the differences in colors and design are so jarring that it hurts your eyes. The animation no longer looks rough (which is preferable here), it no longer has good lighting, the colors are so crisp and bright that they pierce your eyeballs through your brain, and you just can't take the stories seriously. Now the ugliness of computer painted animes is no longer a problem (mostly) because they've learned to get a lot better at it and make it more seamless.
But still, back in 2000, stuff looked really ugly. Thankfully Disney at least knew what they were doing when they started coloring their films in computers with "Rescuers Down Under" and "Aladdin," way back in 1991. And in fact, just look back at Rescuers Down Under, the colors they used were so much more subdued even compared to Aladdin just the year after.
Rescuers: www.blu-ray.com/movies/screens…
Aladdin: img96.imageshack.us/img96/4112…
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Do you know if there is anyway to authenticate a piece from the Secret
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Well, not really. I can't imagine how many fakes there would be out there, considering that Disney movie sketches and cels would be much easier to get around and fool people with.
But I do know that my college now owns most if not all of the remaining production materials for "The Secret of NIMH." So what ever is floating around on Ebay or elsewhere is likely something that had been given out to fans by Don Bluth himself, and is now being resold by one of the people who got it from him. If it isn't that, then it may be a fake. But again, it seems kinda unlikely that it would be a fake, because the artwork is pretty distinct, and all of the animation sketches and clean-ups that I have seen look legit.
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I agree with that. I don't think many people would go through the effort to hand paint a copy of a cel and try to sell it. However, I wouldn't say it's not possible for people to make fakes or copies as seen here. www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARXwDS…
Now this is just meant for learning purposes and not to dissuade anyone from buying cels. I just use this to show that it is possible to re-create cels but I highly doubt someone would just for monetary means. I would also like to mention that it's important for people to always research the cel they are buying as well as check to see if that cel has popped up anywhere else. I've seen numerous cels of the same scene pop up on different auction sights or blogs claiming they have the cel. In that situation, all you need to do is check the date of the item because it could've just been sold to someone and they are just selling it. That's pretty much all the advice I can give to people.
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Ok. Well, I put it up on my page as one of my deviations. It's of Jeremy the Crow and I just wanted to know. Thanks!
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Oh my God! You lucky buck!
I would do anything for 3 NIMH cels!!!
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3 is the most i think i could have; Each one is $350.
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Well I hope you get a hold of one or two. Because whatever is floating around out there now is all there is. Everything else is now the property of SCAD. And if anything from SCAD's collection ever got taken and put up on Ebay, I've been told Gary Goldman, Don's right hand man, would find out about it. lol
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