Why a duck? Why an ark?

Here's a fun piece by art director, Dan Cooper, that he did for Pomp and Circumstance. Unfortunately, this old copy doesn't convey any of the incredible color and light subtlety of Dan's original. For a real treat watch Fantasia 2000's Pomp and Circumstance and pay attention to the color and light. 

If you look carefully you'll notice that the ark is actually shaped kind of like a duck. Only a great art director pays such attention to detail.

I learned so much from all  of my crew. Thank you all.

(CLICK TO ENLARGE)

You can see some of Dan's personal paintings at his blog: http://dancoopersblogsplotch.blogspot.com/

Icarus Duck Storyboards

Fantasia 2000 was one of my favorite movies to work on. But it was also dangerous for me. I was working on an early version of Beethoven's Fifth and wanted to find a way to look at the score while hearing the music and seeing the storyboards to link it up. This led me to discovering MIDI and computer music. Using Notator Logic an early version of Logic Pro I could watch the score while hearing the music. It really helped learn more about the music which had 20 or 30 instruments playing at one time to follow the lead melody lines and sync up with the storyboards. The dangerous part was that it rekindled my old love of playing music and lusting after unaffordable synthesizers. Computers could now recreate the old synthesizers leading me to spend a lot on music equipment and software.

Anyway back to the Duck... I came up with an idea to cast Donald Duck in the role of Icarus Duck set to Wagner's music of the Ride of the Valkyries. Some of you might know it as the helicopter theme from Apocalypse Now. Donald wants to impress Princess Daisy Duck but feels small compared to the other majestic birds like swans and cranes. So he tries to top them flying up to the sun. Big mistake. You know the rest.

This is also featured as one of the bonus features on the Fantasia box set. Disney animator, Terry Naughton helped storyboard this sequence. (CLICK TO ENLARGE)

These were completed in the pre-digital age with pastels and grease pencils. The storyboards were pinned with pushpins to a 4x8 sheet of cork board and hung on the wall. You pitched the story using a 3 foot long wooden "pitch" stick.