Saturday, October 31, 2015

Happy Halloween!

Forget Christmas. In Ray Bradbury's fiction, Halloween is the biggest holiday of them all.

As I was browsing through some files on my laptop, I came across a couple of images from The Halloween Tree which I don't think I have used before on Bradburymedia. They are background paintings, used as establishing shots in the 1993 Hanna-Barbara film based on Bradbury's novel. Ray wrote the script for the film, and won an Emmy Award for his efforts.

The paintings, below, are shown here as you never quite see them in the film. Both are used in panning shots - the camera moves across each one, from one side to the other. A couple of years ago, I took frame grabs from the DVD and stitched together several frames to create the panoramic images you now see.

I wish I could give due credit to the original background artist(s), but unfortunately I have no idea who they were. The film's credits are not specific about who created the backgrounds, and there are any number of artists who might have been responsible (see the full list of film credits here).

I've always been quite taken with the second image below, a representation of the fictional Green Town, Illinois. It looks very like old Waukegan, the real town it is based on.

Click on the images to embiggen.



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