Production
Production Organization
Dori Littel-Herrick, Dean of the Animation Department at Woodbury University, in Burbank, California, called us one bright spring day wondering if we’d like to have our documentary feature be the focus of a summer animation class, offered only to seniors in animation, who showed great promise. Of course, we agreed, and the class was formulated […]
Production Characters
Many of the original crew members who joined us were designers, which was perfect, because we had decided to animate the stories our UPA interviewees told, so we needed characters to be designed to “act out” those stories. There we several great character designers who signed up early on and took stabs at the first […]
Production Scenes
Somewhere in those early days between the interviews getting under way and the crew starting to build up, two major changes took place regarding the format of the UPA documentary. Tee Bosustow’s background in documentaries held fairly close to the professional standards of that form; interviews, illustrated by stills, film clips, and live action dramatizations, […]
Production Transcripts
Once we decided to create the narrative flow with interview clips, rather than an uninvolved narrator, transcripts became a most important early production phase. Since we didn’t have any transcribers on board after the first interviews were complete, we turned to Destiny McCune, who’d created transcripts for Tee Bosustow’s earlier documentaries and informational films and […]
Production Festivals
UPA presentations at animation festivals became a key element in the progress of the documentary, because not only were we able to get the word out via the attraction of seeing UPA films, but it was also one of the few ways we could afford interviewing international animation artists. The festivals paid our air fare, […]
Production Tributes
This 2014 UPA documentary production class, where Mike Kazaleh was a guest speaker, occurred just a few doors away from the “Testing the Waters” UPA Tribute at Woodbury University in 2003, over a decade earlier. Although that 2003 tribute was a very small event, it proved to Tee and the people he was working with […]
Production Interviews
The beginnings of production began with videotaping interviews with surviving UPA creatives. We’d done a few audio interviews for the Filmex Tribute in 1978, and a few others, plus we found existing audio interviews in various places, but the first videotaped interviews we taped were of Alan Zaslove, Barrie Nelson, and Jerry Beck in 2001. […]
Earliest Production Seeds
I often think that the seeds of the documentary began with the UPA Tribute presentation at the Filmex International Film Festival in Culver City, in 1978, but, in actual fact it probably began the evening of March 23, 1950, when my mother, my brother, Nick, about to turn ten, and I, sat in front of […]
