Helena Rubinstein

This is the third in a series of posts I've been doing this week showcasing some animated shorts I created at FableVision for the documentary The Powder and The Glory. It appears in the film when they are discussing a moment in the midst of the Great Depression when Helena Rubinstein cleverly managed to buy back her company from Lehman Brothers (that's right, the now defunct Lehman Brothers)---and made a huge profit to boot! You might notice her height deficit. Rubinstein was only 4' 10", so I couldn't help but play up her Napoleonic stature.

I stepped out of black and white with this one, and decided on a washed out palette of greens, reds, and browns, to match that look of early 1930s Technicolor. It tends to read as a limited palette, but those of you who are familiar with the color Fleischer cartoons from the 30s will know what I'm talking about. The audio (as with all of these shorts) is rough cut, so the final version includes sound effects and whatnot.

Click PLAY to view the animation below. A note to those of you in RSS reader land to hop on over to my site to watch it here (the Flash embed doesn't show up in Google Reader for some reason).



Related posts:
History, animated.
Flappers and Lipstick
A Robbery! (animated)