Who Was Stan Green?
I have long wanted to do a blog post on Stan Green because the brief time I knew him had rather a profound effect on me. But as always when I do a post, I like to have some pictures or graphic images of some kind with which to enhance the words. In Stan Green's case, this has been a considerable problem.
In the first place, I don't personally have any pictures of him or by him. I have no images from the one television commercial on which I assisted him. In the second place, the internet has been little help. He does have a listing in the IMDB (Internet Movie Data Base) but there is nothing biographical or anecdotal, just the chronological listing of his screen work, which ranges from doing layouts for The Lone Ranger animated show in the mid 60s to his period at Disney feature films.
What he is best known for amid the animation industry is having been key assistant to Milt Kahl for the last period of that man's animating career, working with him through Robin Hood (1973) and The Rescuers (1977). He is known to have done much of the animation of the great Kahl villainess Madame Medusa.
When he retired from Disney, he moved with his wife up to Newport, Oregon, and took some work animating locally in Portland, where I lived and worked at the time.
My partners and I had been doing some work with a company called AN/FX, and that is how we ran into Stan Green. The animation technology then (about 1980) was still artwork to film to video tape if you were producing for television. In those days, it was also pencil drawings to Xeroxed cels but the painting was still done by hand. AN/FX had a new state-of-the-art rostrum camera of which they were justly proud.
Stan was hired by the owner of the company to design a character and do full character animation for a TV commercial. Stan required assistants for inbetweening, and so my friend Don Wallace and I were contacted.
I talked to Stan personally only a few times. The important thing to me was, that he handed out his scenes for inbetweening, and I got to do a big chunk of it. I never learned so much, so fast as during those few days.
More about this next time...
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