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| "Follow your nose!" |
Every so often you find an unexpected find at an unexpected place. Every couple of months, the Lansing Collectable Toy, Comic and Record Show is held at the Okemos Conference Center. It's one of those fun events to wander around and look at the nostalgia. People are there selling records, comicbooks, old G.I. Joe, Micronauts, Shogun Warriors toys and much, much more. There's no admission fee, just come in and browse. I'm usually on the look for the old Marvel Red Sonja comics from the 70's and 80's at a reasonable price. My plan is to donate my comic book collection to the Wallace Library at R.I.T. when I die, so I'm looking to complete the full run of those two series along with a couple others.
Well this time, there was a guy who had included a box of animation cels with his toy selection. Lots of Filmation stuff: He-Man, She-Ra, Conan, Ewoks, and My Little Pony. But stuffed in there was a single bag with about forty production drawings from a couple of Kellogg's cereal commercials.
Now animation cels are wonderful for framing and hanging on the walls, I'm in total agreement with everyone on that score. But I still love production drawings more. Mainly because you can really see the mind of the animator at work in the different shades of pencil that make up the drawings, the areas that have been erased and redrawn, and the notes that they leave behind--in the above and below cases: a timing chart written in the margins.
You can also see scene instructions like "Reg BG4". This one puzzles me. Could be a notation on what background cel to use. Could be something else. Would really love to see the X-Sheets for this commercial.
I'm slowly working on an assignment for my animation history class that deals with how animation was used in advertising. These drawings will make for some great examples to show my students, even moreso if I can track down the commercial that utilized these drawings. There are a fair number of 'how we made it' videos on YouTube from feature film and short film productions; not so many videos on 'how we made that cereal commercial'--which makes production drawings like these all the more valuable to people like me.
A most excellent find, if I do say so myself.
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