Hi All,
It’s been a pretty fun week here so far at Thunderbean. I’ve gotten back from a trip to New York to scan a lot of films, plus I had the chance to have a nice dinner and conversation with my friend and Cartoons On Film Blu-ray Guru Tommy Stathes, along with longtime friend Nelson Hughes. I’ve been sorting out all the stuff for the special sets over this past week and working on building things quickly to get to the next projects— and there’s so many things going on!
Our fearless leader, Jerry, is in New York this week again, and as I write this at 10:22 PM he’s waiting for me to get it together. Instead of spending a bunch of time writing, I recorded a short zoom video to showcase some of the Van Beuren Tom and Jerry project we’ve been working on — and are almost finished with after several years. Over the next week or so I hoped to have all of it wrapped, or close. There’s one other piece of material that just became available, so if we’re able we’ll upgrade that one film, but otherwise it’s started to get to the point of building it into a final set, on two discs. I think this short video gives you some idea of what things are looking like and how part of the process sort of goes once things are somewhat cleaned up.
Let me know what you think in the comments, and have a good week all!
Steve Stanchfield is an animator, educator and film archivist. He runs Thunderbean Animation, an animation studio in Ann Arbor, Michigan and has compiled over a dozen archival animation DVD collections devoted to such subjects at Private Snafu, The Little King and the infamous Cubby Bear. Steve is also a professor at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit.
I’m intrigued by the notion that two different 16 mm prints can be digitally combined to achieve a semblance of the original Movietone aspect ratio. This raises a question about a cartoon that was not showcased in this video, namely “Rabid Hunters”. The film print scanned years ago for the Thunderbean T&J DVD had cropped off the top part of the frame, so that in the scene where the rabbit is up in a tree playing his face like a trombone, very little of him is visible. Have you been able to restore the rabbit to his erstwhile trombone-faced glory? That scene is my favourite part of the cartoon, at least what I can see of it.
What a fantastic behind the scenes peek at your work. Love to see this as a semi-regular feature of your posts.
Years ago, Eric Stedman tried to “erase” the Spanish subtitles on a copy of what still may be the only print (a beat-up 16mm reduction print) of THE LONE RANGER RIDES AGAIN (1939) Republic serial. All the chapters had been spliced together, with the original openings and closings spliced out. Eric attempted to eliminate the Spanish subtitles by digitally copying bits of the image from frames of film without subtitles and overlay them over the images with the subtitles. Considering that this was done about 15 years ago and from a print that was not all that good to begin with, the results were a noble experiment.
I don’t know if technology is so good now that you could digitally “cut and paste” the very bottom portion of a print and attach it to the print that had the top three quarters – roughly – printed and not see any kind of gap. IF it could be done without too much time and expense, I’d say try it!
Steve:
This is Chris Mulwee.Did I ever pre-order Flip The Frog? I just can’t remember Please reply to this post and let me know one way or the other,
If you go on the Thunderbean shop you can message Dave with the chat bubble in the bottom right corner.
I asked about my order on that site but no one was there it seemed