On special request from Marcello ....
yes, it was a lucky coincidence that my daughter wasjust a coulple of month old when I started to work on that movie, was the best reference I ever had ...
Wednesday, August 31, 2005
Tuesday, August 30, 2005
Today I would like to share some memories of " Roger Rabbit" with you. That goes quite some time back into the year 1986/87. At that time we had a small studio in Düsseldorf , "The madT.Party", where we were doing all kinds of stuff, storyboards, designs, illustrations, mainly for the local advertising agencies. We, that is : Hans Bacher, Uli Meyer ( Hey , Uli , read your comment earlier today ! Greetings to London, I'll be back soon....hope you're doing well ) and Jens Wiemer, a wonderfully gifted illustrator , who sadly has passed on to soon.
Through this work , we had met Richard Williams who was often animating the commercials , that any of us would have been working on before. Through our common interest in animation and the love off the work of Milt Kahl a friendship deveoped and when Hans and I were visiting him one day in London, he had been talking to Spielberg and Zwemeckis and was looking for artists to increase the manpower of his lil' studio in Soho Square, to manage the amount of work that would be necessary to handle "Roger Rabbit"
We were hired on the spot and found ourselfes doing character designs, most notably for the weazels.
We used 40's gangstermovies as reference, we were working back and forth , I would do sketches, Hans would clean them, put 'em into backgrounds, there is no telling who did what. The drawings were all over the table, whart a great way to work. Hans and I were used to work like that , since we had been working on the Kwak-comicbooks.
We were working in London's Forum , a former departmentstore in Camden, which Richard had moved his studio to. w3hen we thought our work was over and we were preparing to go home, Zemeckis sent us to L.A., to work on the Toontown-Sequence, you'll rememberr, the only sequence in the movie, in which we'll have a life-action-detective in a cartoonworld.
Nobody knew , whart was going to happen in this sequence, apart from that it had to be zany like a Tex Avery cartoon. In other words: all those things, that EWddie hated about cartoons, would happen to him there.
We spent quite some time, watchinfg Tex Avery-Cartoons, analyzing them and taking notes to be able to find stuff quickly.
After that we just went overboard with ideas of our own, meeting with Zemeckis and the writers regularly.
Above : Yours truly entering Amblin's lobby in the morning and working with Jeff Prize , Peter Seaman and Bob Zemeckis
Below : A few of a couple of hundreds story ideas and Eddie Valient, the way I used to draw him for the inspirationals.
What a great movie, a great expieriene that was, remember, this was way before computers and we did it as we went along, wonderful times...I may sound like a war-veteran here, but those were great times. Think of it: just a few weeks ago , I had been a student of grafic-design, now I was right in the heart of Hollywood, in Spielberg's office.It all came back to me, when I was reading Spaff's interview , that was posted somewhere a couple of weeks ago. I don't know if he remembers me as well as do. I saw Richard again last year in Annecy and we chatted a bit.
Monday, August 29, 2005
Wow, blogging is fun !!!
I'd like to take the opportunity to introduce you to the work of Ferenc Pinter, a gentleman I adore a lot.
He's an Italian illustrator and he is doing the covers for lots and lots of Pulp-Magazines in Italy, as well as tarot-cards, bookcovers etc. I never came across a compilation of his work and you won't find much on the internet as well. Nevertheless the guy is a master in his minimalistic style. Enjoy...and whenever you get to Italy, stop by the next newsstand...
Sunday, August 28, 2005
And this is Alfred J. Kwak , ( The Yellow Duck, playing with the dolphin ) a comicbook-character that I created together with dutch singer/songwriter Herman van Veen and my friend, teacher and colleage Hans Bacher ( who some of you might remember as Art Director/Production Designer on "Mulan" and many, many other projects) .
Alfred originated as a character in a musical stage show in the late 70's. I first gave him his current design in 1984 for the German poster of the stage show, in which Herman van Veen appeared as the entire cast and narrator on stage. Subsequently we did 3 comicbooks with more adventures and were approached by a Dutch producer for 52 episodes for TV. The show broadcastet worldwide ( exept U.S.) , was awarded many times and since we were always approaching the current problems and issues of the world in a very childlike manner, Alfred was officially nominated Unicef-Ambassador in 2003for the rights of children.
Currently we are working on a couple of new projects all around the duck and we are getting ready to build the Alfred J. Kwak- House in Goch, Germany as a refuge for children in need.
Welcome to my Blog !!!
First, let me introduce myself :
My name is Harald Siepermann and among many other things I am a Character Designer for animated movies.
I have been working on "Who framed Roger Rabbit", "We're Back ", "Balto", "Mulan","Tarzan", " The Emperor's New Groove" ( ..when it was still called "Kingdom In The Sun" ), "Treasure Planet", "Brother Bear", and many, many other projects.
I live in Hamburg, Germany with my wife andd kids and I think it best, to just show you some pages from my current portfolio.
I'll be trying to update this Blog as regularly as I can, I'm going to show you sketches and things that inspire me and that I admire. You'rew most welcome to share and enjoy this lil' blog with me, if you like.
Well, what more can I say : Welcome to the show, have fun, enjoy and if you have any questions or comments, don't hesitate to let me know, Harald.
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