"We were like Wile E. Coyote and Sam the Sheepdog. We would
have these intense discussions about how to solve certain problems,
but then it would be time to go to lunch so we would stop and
go to lunch, and then we'd come back in the afternoon and argue
some more."
It may seem strange for graphic artist and co-producer Brad Stalnaker
to compare his relationship with writer and co-producer Mary
Lucille DeBerry to the complex machinations of Wile E. Coyote
and the easygoing but unbeatable Sam the Sheepdog. ("Don't
Give Up the Sheep," Warner Brothers cartoon, 1953.)
However, it's not surprising considering the three years Stalnaker
and DeBerry spent practically living in the world of cartoon
animation to produce a film at WNPB-TV, the Morgantown site of
West Virginia PBS, called The Griffin and the Minor Canon,
which premiered on West Virginia Public Television in March 2002.
Stalnaker, in particular, is a great fan of the renowned animator
Chuck Jones, who directed the famous Warner Brothers cartoons
featuring characters such as Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, and The Road
Runner. But The Griffin and the Minor Canon, based on
the short story by Frank R. Stockton, is no Looney Tune. It's
an animated film that tells a complex, but humorous, moral tale.
The story is about
a lonely Griffin (a mythological creature that is half eagle
and half lion) who flies from the "Dreadful Wilds"
into a town to admire his likeness in a sculpture over the church
door. The frightened townspeople force the church's Minor Canon
to deal with the creature and the two become friends. The people
eventually persuade the young clergyman to leave town, hoping
the Griffin will follow him, but the plan backfires when the
Griffin decides to stay and take over his friend's duties.
Everything about the film has a West Virginia connection. The
voices of the characters are by well-known actors with West Virginia
roots, together for the first time in one production, including
David Selby, Chris Sarandon, Don Knotts, Kathy Mattea, Soupy
Sales, John Corbett, Linda Purl, and Ann Magnuson.
Stalnaker and DeBerry, both alumni of WVU—as are Selby,
Sarandon, Mattea, and Knotts—made the film for prime-time
television viewing and for use in West Virginia classrooms. They
worked with an advisory committee to create an extensive study
guide geared to grades 7-12.
Stalnaker, an Elkins native, graduated with a BFA in graphic
design from the College of Creative Arts in 1986 and began working
full-time for WNPB-TV while still a student. DeBerry, from Harrisville,
received a bachelor's degree in speech and drama from WVU in
1960 and returned to Morgantown in 1966 to begin working at WWVU-TV,
later renamed WNPB-TV.
"The main mission at WNPB was to do stories about and for
West Virginians," said Stalnaker, who now works at WVU Television
Productions. "It was an unbelievably creative place to be
back when we started this project."
"Both
Brad and I wanted to do an animated drama based on a story by
a West Virginian," DeBerry said. "First we wanted to
do a Christmas story by Davis Grubb called A Tree Full of
Stars, but the rights were unavailable, so we looked for
another story. I went to the West Virginia and Regional History
Collections at WVU and found numerous books by West Virginia
authors. When I read The Griffin and the Minor Canon,
by Frank Stockton, it seemed ideal."
Stockton (1834-1902) lived in Charles Town, West Virginia, during
the last three years of his life. As one of the most widely read
writers of his era, he published more than 50 volumes of work
in his lifetime and is best known for his short story The
Lady or the Tiger? He also wrote fairy tales, fantasy stories,
Christmas stories, monster tales, ghost stories, and science
fiction.
The Griffin and the Minor Canon first appeared in the
October 1885 edition of St. Nicholas: An Illustrated Magazine
for Young Folks. It has since appeared in many anthologies
and in a 1963 book illustrated by Maurice Sendak.
It was one of Stockton's many stories that appeared to be for
children, but that were also for adults. In many of his stories,
Stockton creates archetypal characters, such as the Griffin,
who rage against the stereotypes often assigned to them.
The Griffin is an individual who has lived hundreds of years
and has great knowledge of many things, including a great sense
of humor and personality. He journeys to the town because he
is lonely and wants to know more about himself. However, the
townspeople fear him because they believe the myth that he is
a monster who eats people. Their beliefs create the comedy, tragedy,
and conflict of the story.
As DeBerry and Stalnaker
set to work, they were amazed at how close together their thinking
was on everything.
"Our backgrounds were perfect for this project," DeBerry
said. "I would wake up in the middle of the night and have
an idea and I would come in and say 'Brad, I thought of something'
and he would have thought of the same thing!"
"We had many things to work out, but whenever we had a question
about what we should do, we went back to Frank Stockton and the
answer was always there," Stalnaker said. "It was like
he was right over our shoulders the whole time."
DeBerry wrote the screenplay, using a professional screenwriting
software program called Final Draft to translate the story into
script form. It underwent ten major rewrites and for public television
its length could be no longer than 28 minutes and 46 seconds,
making it a challenge to get the timing right.
Throughout the process, they kept in mind the words of the great
Warner Brothers animator Chuck Jones: "If you show it, don't
say it. "
"I loved the words so much," DeBerry said. "I
especially love the part of the story where the Griffin sees
the statue of himself for the first time, but using Chuck Jones'
rule, we showed the action instead of describing it and those
words went out!"
DeBerry developed some of Stockton's minor characters and added
others. She turned narration into dialogue and provided some
characters with more physical and emotional characteristics to
make them come alive.
"We didn't add
very much," she said. We did add classroom subjects to a
scene where the Griffin decides to take over the teaching of
the school children. One reason we did this was so we could talk
about mythology. At the same time, we really wanted to remain
truthful and faithful to Stockton's story."
One of the things they agreed on at the beginning was that the
animation would be "stylized realism," using black
and white drawings, color paintings, and three-dimensional computer
models, rather than cartoon-like images. Both DeBerry and Stalnaker
knew about and admired the style used by Frederic Back in an
Academy Award-winning film called The Man Who Planted Trees,
based on a story by Jean Giono.
"Some children's books have mixed styles and I also liked
that," Stalnaker said. "I wanted the variety. We use
black and white for the starkness of the Dreadful Wilds at the
beginning of the film and then the color grows as the story moves
into summer and fall, and at the end, when the Griffin dies,
we go back to grays and browns. We did all that by design."
Stalnaker spent about two years creating the drawings, first
making rough sketches, and then creating a storyboard for each
of the film's 64 scenes. There were 175 drawings per scene.
He drew on a special tablet hooked up to his computer, which
enabled him to see the pictures come alive on the TV screen in
front of him. He also sometimes traced footage of actors filmed
on videotape to achieve realistic motion, a process called "rotoscoping"
that was created in the 1930s for cartoons such as Popeye
and Superman. For the 3-D sculpture for the church, he
sent a model of the Griffin to a computer company in California
that made a 3-D wire frame of the sculpture, onto which he put
texture and color. Vic Baker, a WVU alumnus and associate director
of WVU's Virtual Environments Lab created the 3-D model of the
town.
Along the way, Stalnaker utilized several computer software programs,
including Painter, Photoshop, and the animation programs AfterEffects
and Lightwave.
While Stalnaker worked
on the animation, DeBerry began casting the character voices,
working from a list of about a hundred West Virginia actors.
She first called Selby, who agreed to portray the Griffin, and
then Sarandon, who said yes to the Minor Canon. Selby and Sarandon
are lifelong friends who first met as students in the WVU Drama
department during the 1960s.
"We made up a dream list of people to work with and I thought
if we could get two or three it would be great, but we got everybody,"
Stalnaker said.
DeBerry saw the television episode of Touched by an Angel
in which Linda Purl reads a book to children. "I brought
it in and everyone thought her voice was perfect for the narrator
of the story," DeBerry said. Coincidentally, Purl's mother
is from Harrisville and her family lived just down the street
from DeBerry's family.
DeBerry also scouted and cast local actors and singers, including
Catherine Thieme of the WVU College of Creative Arts, actor and
former Morgantown newspaper editor Ralph Brem, and Patrice King-Brown,
a WVU theatre graduate who is a television news anchor in Pittsburgh.
"Everyone seems
to think we got all these people together in one room to record
the soundtrack," Stalnaker said. "Actually sound engineers
recorded them all over the place—in Los Angeles, New York,
Nashville, and Pittsburgh, as well as in Morgantown—and
we directed them over the telephone with our voices fed into
their headsets."
West Virginia Public Television co-workers added their expertise
to finalize the production. After recording the voices, sound
editor Chuck Kleine added music, sound effects, and natural sounds
such as the flapping of bird wings. Although there are no songs
in the production, composer/musician Scott Simons, a WVU music
alumnus who currently performs in the Morgantown band The Argument,
scored and played the musical elements to complement the scenes.
The final editing, done by John Nakashima and WVU alumnus Pat
Sergent of WNPB, included mixing the sound and video on a non-linear
editing system. The soundtrack was pre-mixed at a digital audio
workstation and the video portions were joined together directly
from Stalnaker's computer. Close captioning completed the project.
The Griffin and the Minor Canon premiered at Fairmont
State College on March 18 and at the Cultural Center in Charleston
and also on public television on March 19. It premiered nationally
on public television in late September.
The program is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Ruel E. Foster,
WVU Benedum Professor of English, who served on its advisory
committee, and who died in 1999.
"I like to watch the film with other people," Stalnaker
said. "Everything comes together at the comic relief moment
when the characters inspired by Don Knotts and Soupy Sales come
on screen.
"It's also fun to see if people recognize that, although
the location of the story is ambiguous, we put Seneca Rocks and
Dolly Sods in the opening scenes of the wilderness!"
Also integral to the film are two poetic quotations, one added
at the suggestion of Dr. Foster and the other found by DeBerry.
Hans Christian Andersen, nineteenth-century Danish author and
a contemporary of Frank Stockton's, wrote the first: "Each
one's life is a fairy tale written by the hand of God."
The second is by Kirk Judd, a West Virginia poet who lives in
Clarksburg: "Nothing loved dies."
The quotations relate to two universal themes found in "The
Griffin and the Major Canon"—the inevitability of death,
but also the unique and magical quality of each creature that
lives upon the earth.
At the premiere of The Griffin and the
Minor Canon at the Cultural Center in Charleston on March
19, Governor Bob Wise presented actor David Selby—the voice
of the Griffin—with a Distinguished West Virginian Award.
Also recognized at each premiere—where Selby was the featured
speaker—were the production team and members of the Humanities
Advisory Committee who helped DeBerry and Stalnaker on all aspects
of the production, including the teaching materials. The committee
members were: Dr. Judy Byers, director of the West Virginia Folklife
Center at Fairmont State College; Dr. Ruel Foster, WVU Benedum
Professor of English; Dr. Valerie Cretaux Lastinger, associate
professor in the Department of Foreign Languages at WVU; Phyllis
Wilson Moore, a Clarksburg writer who promotes West Virginia
authors and literature; and Ann Egan Smucker, of Bridgeport,
a children's author, poet, and historical writer.
"Each scholar on the advisory committee brought something
unique to the project," said DeBerry, who also wrote the
study guide for the film. "We selected them based on their
backgrounds in the humanities, their location, and their areas
of expertise. All were involved in teaching and tried to make
the study guide interesting to children. They also had a lot
of input on the script."
Selby also did a workshop in Fairmont on the morning of March
18 with Fairmont State's GEAR-UP program, a federally funded
project that promotes academic advancement for West Virginia
middle and high school students. The students did storyboards
and other activities suggested in the study guide and Selby demonstrated
the process he used in recording the voice of the Griffin.
The Griffin and the Minor Canon was partially funded by
the West Virginia Humanities Council and the National Endowment
for the Humanities, with additional support provided by the Television
Friends of West Virginia Public Broadcasting.
VHS copies of the program have been provided to all West Virginia
public libraries and to the state's middle, junior high, and
high schools. Individual copies can be ordered by calling 1-800-672-9672.
The study guide, VHS copies, and more information about The
Griffin and the Minor Canon is available on the web at: http://www.griffin-minorcanon.org.
Film Festival
Nomination
The Griffin and the Minor Canon was entered in the Los Angeles
International Short Film Festival on October 20, 2002. The film
didn't win any awards, but Stalnaker and DeBerry were thrilled
anyway: "I'm just glad to be at festival!" said Stalnker.