At a young age, Lucie Julliat enjoyed drawing and playing percussion. She attended Emile Cohl School in Lyon, France where she made an animated film called "Percussions" about a Chef who wants to dance, but is stuck working in the kitchen.
Her big break came when she was hired as an assistant animator on "Klaus" and she has been working ever since. I sat down with Lucie to find out what an Assistant Animator does and how 2D animation production is being done now.
The Animator still creates the Key Poses and makes timing charts which the Assistant Animator or Inbetweener will complete, however on some productions, the Animation Assistant could do the in-between drawings as well as the final clean up drawings and on other productions each task would be done by more than one person.
Learn more in this interview below...
Here are some recent samples of Lucie's work including Space Jam: A New Legacy...
If you know anything about animation, you should know all about Winsor McCay. He was a very talented illustrator and cartoonist who experimented with animation by creating one of the first character animation characters known as "Gertie the Dinosaur".
I recently contacted Winsor McCay using the new Ouija Zoom app where I got to ask him a few questions about his work.
Well, that should be worth a few ad clicks to add to the blog's tip jar. If you enjoyed this at all, please click on the ads and it will let me know that you did.
Working on several new interviews on the Animateducated YouTube channel and wanted to let you know they are up and running.
The first is an interview with Alfredo Cassano, who animated Jesper in Klaus. Alfredo and I teach online at CG Spectrum and I reached out to interview him and find out more about his animation background.
The next upcoming interview is with David Steinberg aka D. J. Steinberg who has become a Children's book author with 25 books written and still going. David came from Animation production where he worked for Don Bluth, at Disney Animation and recent at Nickelodeon.
In this interview, he explains what its like to write Children's books, work with illustrators and reads some of his published works. Now if I can just get his dog Oscar back to him, everything will be fine.
Thank you to all the new people who have subscribed to Animateducated on YouTube; we just hit 578 subscribers! More interviews and animated things to come! Thanks again for watching and helping this blog/channel grow.
As a teenager, I discovered a Green Wizard who inspired me to learn more about
animation and filmmaking in general.
Mike Jittlov was a mathematic/language major at UCLA when he took an animation class to satisfy his art requirement. His first student films were two 2D shorts called "The Leap" and "Good Grief". His interested grew from there and soon he was making other short animated films, "Swing Shift", "The Interview," and "Animato".
Here's one of his early films called "Animato" which he made to show off his animation talents to future employers, the ploy worked and caught the attention of a producer at Disney (see way below).
"Swing Shift" was to follow below...
Here's an
article he wrote about making the film for American Cinematographer magazine, long, long ago... Note the price!
I wrote him a fan letter and got a chance to talk to my on the phone. He was very friendly on the phone and answered lots of my animation questions. Eventually, I met him at a science fiction convention in Florida when I was in high school. I had collected a few articles and post cards in very small detailed writing from him and will be glad to share it below if anyone is interested to learn more about this very creative person.
Disney was celebrating Mickey's 50th and hired Mike to come up with the following 3 shorts featuring Mickey Mouse. This is Mike Jittlov's Stop Motion Mickey Mouse which he animated and stars in. Disney was not going to give him screen credit, so he animated his credits in the big parade number at the end.
Jittlov then made his famous short film called "The Wizard of Speed and Time" which got a lot of attention and he would eventually make a feature film of the same name. Here's the short film that inspired me into animation...
Cleverly, he weaved a lot of segments from his past films into the story line. And the film will never win any acting awards. Jittlov was able to finish the film which wasn't under his complete control, but still contains some impressive special effects. Here's the feature below...
He would return to the big screen briefly as a dark spirit from the 1990's film "Ghost".
He's also pretty well known in the World of Origami. Here's a link to a dollar bill skull he designed if you are interested. https://youtu.be/y5wR8QgOoUw
I have been trying to get him to do an Animateducated interview, but he's a little shy about that these days. Maybe he'll change his mind? Happy Birthday Mike!
