Obituary: Ralph (artist) Sept 11,1934- March 31, 2025

Ralph and Vivian Liegh of "Gone with the Wind" fame

Ralph was an artist and like most artists he drew his entire life. He made it into a profession as an illustrator of cards, posters, etc. until his 50s, when he started to work for me at Box Office Video on Newbury Street in Boston. To be honest, Ralph had a lot of issues as an employee. He had trouble understanding the phones and was a little scatterbrained, always rushing about keeping himself busy but not always in the most efficient way. He was also one of the best employees the store ever had at the same time. His knowledge of films, old-time movie stars and polite genial manner was a big reason people come in to rent movies with us over the other 2 videos stores on the same street. 

Tobias Allen, me, Ralph and Paul at the premier of our film "50 Years" 

One of Ralph’s passions was paper doll books and up until his death he sold them at conventions. His books were amazing, detailed and hand painted in a way you could almost feel the cloth of the costumes. Another passion of his was "Gone with the Wind". He wrote and illustrated a sequel with100s of drawings and it took him about a decade. His story followed directly after the film and he integrated period actors who he thought might have been used if this was actually made at that time. Again, the work is amazing. 

A sample of Ralph's paper doll art

He and his husband Paul MacMahon (1933-2011) lived a couple blocks from me in Dorchester, Massachusetts so I would often visit for supper and talk about films and look at their (mostly Paul’s) frankly ridiculous collection of memorabilia. They were together for about 57 years and married the last 7 after that became possible in 2004. Ralph kept Paul’s ashes in his old chair with his teddy bear, something he had his whole life, next to it. Their story inspired me to make the documentary film "50 Years", which they both spoke of their lives separately and together up to just after getting married. 

Paul and Ralph at the spot they met in New York City in the 50s

After Paul’s death, Ralph and I became even closer as friends and I visited him when I could. Having moved to Montréal, Québec made it a little difficult but we managed to talk on the phone, exchange letters and have our visits that would take all day as we caught up on each other’s artwork and projects and personal lives. I don’t know many artists or "creatives" and my talks with Ralph are precious memories for me and likely won’t happen with anyone else. His passing is a loss for me on many levels. 

It’s a loss for more than myself, though. Ralph was a piece of gay history who guarded that history by telling his story and guarding the photos Paul had taken as a journalist over the years, a legend in the paper doll world and a good friend to everyone in his life. This is a hole in the world that can’t be filled.

Good bye my longtime friend. The last 40 years were not enough. 

Ralph as a child

Documentary restoration: The Twelve - Boston gar bar logos

 I started my next documentary restoration. Each one gets more complicated and prepares me for the next. This was originally made in 2006 and, as usual, with no budget. The former 1270 security head, Bruce, found all sorts of photos and some very rough video about the club, its owner and the people who went there. I had a clip taken from a memorial video that showed many of the old gay bars in Boston which wasn't ideal but it was all I could find. 20 years later, there is a lot more info on the web but still not as much as I would like. I went through photos, newspaper and magazine ads and found a good 20 logos I could clean up or redraw and give a consistent look too to replace the bad video with something more professional. In 2011 I re-edited the 2006 version and took out some bad graphics of my own and this time I hope to do more of that and elevate the doc closer to today's standards. I discovered Final Cut Pro will isolate the voices  and it took out the background music which will give me more options for re-editing the film as the original interview files are long gone. 

Outriders (2003) restored and updated to HD

 

In 2003 I made a documentary for the 20th anniversary of Outriders, the gay group that ride annually from Boston to Provincetown in one day. I did it for almost 20 year when I lived in Boston and it is a great ride with great people. The standard definition version, like most Sd videos just doesn't cut it on modern devices so I am upgrading my older films so they can still be relevant and hopefully inform people about things like Outriders which is just a fantastic organization.

Animation Project: Masque of the Red Death - Prospero

 

This was a bear to do, The coat is not from the plugin I used to make the characters I spent 30 hours trying to attach it so it would animate with the figure. In the end... there is a way to do in the plugin itself which takes 1 minute. God damn it! At least I know about this feature and use it in future. It needed mnor tweaks after it was done but that is often the case. 

Animation Project: Masque of the Red Death

 

Male party guest. This was done with the Humgen plugin and a medieval shirt I bought to speed up the process of making all the models. Adding the shirt to the plugin model was challenging but I figured it out.  My plan is to make and rig maybe 10 guests and then "fake" the rest with illustrations for the people in the background. I can only render so many characters at once so I have to be prudent with them. I think I will try Prospero next as he is one of two characters that actually do anything and I already made the robed figure. Doing all this will make future projects much easier to set up. 

Animation Project: Masque of the Red Death

 The robed figure. Already rigged for movement, though the eyes will need better control. I haven't gone much further with this lately. I haven't had the energy to figure out what needs to come next. 

Animation project: Remaking a Cinema 4D character in Blender. Charles Webster Billingsworth the 3rd

 

About 36 hours into this but it's very close to being done and could actually be used now if I had to. I saved some of the characters I made as just geometry I could import into Blender so I could reuse them, hopefully. I figured it might get me faster to the point I was at in Cinema 4D skill wise with Blender. Charles is someone I want to use again, I had a lot of fun with Mike Luce making his series. He was very fluid and stretchy and I think I can get working again. 

The eyelids have been the biggest challenge, I had a plugin in the old software that set up eyes and lids and a control panel for them with a click. This time I have to use geometry nodes and set it all up manually. I have that all work except the control panel. There were issues separating the top and bottom beak as well. I would like to ad short fur but not sure how to go about that yet and finally, I use saved poses like for fists, eye blinks and facial expressions so they don't need to be done from scratch each time and I hope to start that today. 

The rigging plugin I got for Blender (Auto-rig Pro) is pretty sweet and saves me so much time, the learning it has not been terrible even for a bear of little brain like me. It has some features that were a pain to do before even on character like this which is basically a human like bode with a giant beak! 

I have a few more old characters to revive and that should teach me a lot. 

Documentary: Tobias Allen - Why I Paint This way (2001 restoration)

 In 2001 I films a short documentary about (then) local Boston artist Tobias Blaine Allen.  It was edited in iMovie which was amazing at the time. I looked at it online recently and it looked TERRIBLE. 240p was fine on You Tube when it was uploaded and its unwatchable now. 

Today I found a better copy but still low resolution on my hard drive and upscaled it to HD. Then I brought it into Final Cut Pro and did some colour correction and audio fixes. Sadly, there are no copies of the images of the art in the film to replace those in the doc so I exported the worst of them as images and did my best to make them look nicer. They still don't look great, or ever did, they were shot with an early 1.5 megapixel Sony digital camera. 

The process took about 7 hours to complete the 1 minute film and now it's HD and looks and sounds much better. Hopefully Toby with think so! I will delete the older film so no one has to see how bad it looked on modern devices. 

Animation Project: Masque of the Red Death

 I have started preproduction for "Masque of the Red Death" based on the story by Edgar Allen Poe. This has some new challenges for me such as there needs to be many more characters in some shots than usual. I keep it to three as a rule to not overtax my computer but since switching to Blender and having my MAC in 10 processor i9 with a good graphics card I feel I can push farther. For the crowd scenes I might use 2D characters for the background and have several 3D ones who can have more movement. I was hoping I could find some free or cheap medieval costumes but not much much so far. I will have to wing it. 

This image is the opening shot after the title sequence and when the narration will begin. It took a few weeks to design and put together despite using some great plugins to lessen the work load. HunGen for the bodies, Fire_fx for the bonfire, Auto building for the houses and castle, Alt tab easy fog 2 for the atmosphere, and Fauna sketcher to ad crows in the sky and flies (not visible in this shot, for the bodies. The fog rolls forward and the trees have a slight breeze blowing them. Depending on how the narration works out this could be several shots or one longer tracking shot. This is straight from Blender so there will be some colour grading etc in post eventually. 

One big challenge, other than my dumb debutant Blender mistakes, was placing the flickering light for the bonfire. making was easy enough but when I placed it in the bonfire it wasn't visible and the render time went up 4 times! I am using Eeevee to render as I did with my first Blender short "the Hound" as its pretty good now and getting better but also fast. This shot takes 30 seconds to render (with the light issue 20 minutes!)

Next step is the model the interior castle rooms where the story takes place. it's 7 rooms, identical save the last one but in different colours. I will need to learn to making some blood effects for this one and continue to work on getting better performances from my characters. Hopefully I can get together with the voice actor for the narration sooner than later as not having it slows down production. 

This was a suggestion from some people and I assumed the story was beyond my skills for years but I think I might succeed now and upon writing the script I realized it was not as long as I thought and got some good ideas on how to economize the plot to fit a short animated film. 

Poster: Earth VS the Flying Saucers

(Image was updated after getting some feedback)

 
Another in my sci-fi series of posters done with affinity designer and publisher. I watched it the other night and thought it would be a quick and simple project and it was. The saucers are pretty basic and the alien didn't have much detail.