SPECIAL PROJECT UNIT on The Yellow Submarine As many of our readers and listeners are already aware, Dr. Bob has assembled a book on the history of the Beatles animated classic film, Yellow Submarine. We are very happy to announce that this book is scheduled for publication with Krause Publications tentatively for January of 2002. Its working title is Inside the Yellow Submarine: The Making of the Beatles Animated Classic. Here is an abbreviated excerpt from the book detailing the thrilling sequence that many people recall as their favorite: the Lucy in the Sky dream within a dream fantasy |
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The sensitive Canadian artist, George Dunning, was acting as a rather reclusive film director on the set of Yellow Submarine, handing most of the responsibility for the film over to his two unit directors, Jack Stokes and Bob Balser. Unfortunately, Dunning passed away at age 59 in 1979, but most of the Co-Creators interviewed for Inside the Yellow Submarine remembered the Lucy sequence as one of his most important contributions to the film. Others insisted Billy Sewell was more responsible for this innovative sequence. We were disappointed to learn that Sewell had also passed away at an early age, but we did locate Anne Jolliffe, an Australian animator on the Yellow Submarine crew, who has vivid memories of how this thrilling sequence was executed. Rotoscoping is the animation term for tracing over a live action film and then painting in the outlines. This method is almost as old as animation itself, being used, for example, on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to achieve its stunning life-like qualities. What made the Rotoscoping done on the Lucy sequence so special was Dunnings/Sewells approach of loosely painting all over the outlines, using the brush strokes to define the image instead of the outlines, giving it the floaty fantasy look that made this sequence so breathtakingly memorable (providing visuals to one of the best-loved Beatles tunes didnt hurt, either). |
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George Dunning
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It was a seminal work, wasnt it?, said Jolliffe from her home in New South Wales, adding that working on it was just as wonderful. I think everyone who worked on it had one of the happiest times of their lives. The privilege of being able to work on Yellow Submarine was such a relief from what wed been doing, and the crew was so much fun, too. It was really a hoot. |
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Jolliffe, like many of the Co-Creators of Yellow Submarine came to the crew after having worked for two years on The Beatles cartoon series which were enormously successful for ABC and King Features. TVC of London was one of several small animation houses around the world which produced the animation for these series, and they approached their crews the same way on both projects. Yes, I worked on the Beatles series, explained Jolliffe. I was in a small group that were called cells in those days, four people, and we worked on the first and second Beatles series. Then we graduated to the Submarine. We had people working together as a sort of family group all the way through. We had a director animator, two animators, and one assistant between us, and the assistant was being trained. Those assistants now have studios of their own, of course. |
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Anne Jolliffe
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As one of only two female animators on the crew (there were over a hundred women on the team, but most of them were in the trace and paint departments), Jolliffe was especially grateful for the exciting artistic challenge of animating The Beatles in a feature film that would hopefully live up to their musical legacy. Traditionally animation has been a mans world. I was the first woman animator in Australia, and I had to go to England finally to avoid doing commercials all my life. There are lots of female animators now, about half the animators are women and they all seem to be under twenty. But in my day it was really hard. There was a lot of prejudice against women animators not so much in England, but certainly in America. There was one other female animator working on the Submarine: Hester Coblentz, who is no longer with us having died a couple of years ago, sadly missed and remembered with great affection by us all. |
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Ruby Keeler
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The Lucy in the Sky sequence was being produced in a building separate from the majority of the Co-Creators on Yellow Submarine, who were working out of rented office space in Soho in downtown London of the swinging 60s. As the Co-Creators neared the premiere date for the film, a slight emergency developed in trying to enfold the Lucy sequence into the rest of the plot of the film, which was evolving at its own pace a few blocks away. As Jolliffe remembers it, the Lucy sequence was adapted from an original piece that Bill Sewell had been working on before the Yellow Submarine. When Sewell began to feel his project was being compromised, he quit and moved to Canada before it was completed. I was caught up into the Lucy in the Sky sequence, said Jolliffe, explaining she was removed from my group which they rather resented because I was one of their key people. Sewell was a fellow Australian and a good friend of Jolliffes so when he left the production, she was asked to help integrate the unfinished piece into the rest of the film. Bill had been working on a lot of experimental films that were under George Dunnings aegis, because Bill was an Associate Director of TVC. He was a very influential person in my life, and I worked with him on several occasions. He was quite cross because he had been making his own film called Half in Love with Fred Astaire. It was Rotoscoped from archive film, and he employed four or five very pretty girls (Bill had an eye for the ladies), to do random painting on little segments of this Fred Astaire film. He and George fell out. I dont know whether it was entirely because George decided to use Bills film for the Lucy in the Sky sequence or not, but when Bill was offered a job in Canada, he took it. Because he was not actually working on the Yellow Submarine; he was doing that other work that TVC kept doing as well as the Submarine. So, he left and went to Canada to work for the Film Board, and I was asked to go and sort this stuff out.
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