Animator! Carpe Diem! (Part 3)

Animator! 

Carpe Diem! 

(Part 3)

Sachi showed me into a small office and gestured vaguely towards the work piled upon an animation desk. 

“Take a look at the scene,” she said. “See if you can figure out what it needs. Nobody’s touched it since the animator left this morning. We’ve got to finish it by 10am tomorrow and get it to camera. Okay?”

“Okay,” I answered, sitting down at the desk.

“I’ll be back in a minute,” said Sachi. “Want a coffee?”

“Yes, please.” 

Show business, there really is no business like it. 

That morning I’d been at the right place at the right time and showed up with my demo reel, looking for a job. Now here I sat, at another man’s desk to finish his scene. 

A scene urgently needed in a timely manner.

Aha! It’s always better to be lucky than good! 

I rolled through the scene. It was an action scene of a big, burly guy throwing a body into the trunk of a car. I rolled through it repeatedly, trying to visualize it, get familiar with it, seeking its essence. It was quality work. The drawings were solid… the animation smooth and fluid. 

I breathed a sigh of relief. It was a good scene to show what I could do. The animator had used a system I could understand and the drawings were interesting without being too difficult. 

By the time Sachi returned with the coffee I was feeling confident I could finish the scene before the deadline, provided I could work all night.

“Well, what do you think?” asked Sachi.

I sipped my coffee. “Yeah,” I said. “I think I can handle it. It’s a fun scene, and it’s mostly done. All I have to do is not mess it up.”

“Good,” said Sachi. “Anything you need?”

I mentioned working all night and asked if that would be okay. Sachi nodded, saying, “Sure, a few of us will be.”

“Mind if I use the telephone?” I asked. “I’d like to call my wife and let her know what’s up.”

“Help yourself.”

“Thanks.”

Sachi left me to it, and after telephoning I began working on the scene. It was interesting in that the drawings were done straight onto frosted cels with colored pencils. Not graphite on paper, as I was used to. One had to be precise and clean with the drawing, rather than my usual scratch and search technique. I had never seen a frosted cel before and I quickly learned I had to be careful, as any erasing would leave smudges, destroying the drawing and meaning time lost in making another. Also, when handling the cels, soft cotton gloves had to be worn to avoid fingerprints, but I had used gloves before and was used to that.

I got down to work. After a while, I fell into a rhythm and began enjoying myself. I love animating. More than that I love making movies. And if you love doing something, it’s hardly work, is it? When I first started my working life, back at the Ministry of Works in New Zealand, we worked in muddy ditches at the ends of picks and shovels with our muscles and our backs and the sweat of our brows. Physical work! Dangerous and manly, with plenty of cursing! I wondered what the ghosts from my past would think of me now, sitting here in New York drawing little drawings in a Broadway film studio built to resemble a child’s playroom. For sure I knew, wherever they were, my ghostly workmates wouldn’t think that sitting on your ass drawing little pictures with colored pencils was anything remotely like working. 

Rest in peace, brothers. Your work is through.

I stopped for a late lunch, ducking out for a slice of pizza, a bottle of Rolling Rock and a cigarette. The beer was a most appreciated luxury, but I was working now and could afford it. A further luxury was a second cigarette, sitting on a bench in the sunshine, resting my sore leg and watching people go by. 

Funny how much friendlier New Yorkers looked after I’d had a meal, with a full belly and a job to go back to. 

Back at the desk working, I had an idea. The action by the burly guy when preparing to throw the heavy body into the trunk of the car (in animation, this preparing type of action is called anticipation) could be exaggerated more, or ‘pushed’ as we call it, to good effect. The body that was supposed to be heavy would have a much better chance of looking heavy this way, and the viewer would have slightly more time to appreciate what was happening. It would mean making the scene longer to accommodate the extra time that the action would take (a few tenths of a second), something that wasn’t always possible in a tightly edited film, so I would have to check with Sachi about it.

“Okay,” she agreed. “Let’s try it and see what it looks like. But, for now, don’t throw out any drawings and don’t change the original X-sheet. We can shoot it both ways and see which we like best. We’ll change the sheet later if it works out.”

I got down to work again and the hours flew by. I couldn’t see the day ending and the night beginning from the windowless office, but the tempo and noise of the busy studio during the day was gradually replaced by an eerie quiet. 

Around five in the morning, that dreadful hour after working all night when everything is gray and uncertain, including the animator, I struck a drawing I couldn’t get right. It should have been a simple drawing, too, making it all the more frustrating. I tried over and over, wasting cel upon cel, but still it wouldn’t come. I was tired. I decided to take a break. It would do me good to get up and stretch my legs for a bit, to focus my eyes on something further away than the end of my arm, maybe have a cigarette and another cup of ... 

“Coffee! Hey, Rusty, wake up! Fresh coffee.”

I had fallen asleep at the desk. 

“Huh? Who?” I lifted my head from my crossed arms on the desk, blinking in the strong light of the Luxo lamp, which I had neglected to turn off. “I wasn’t asleep,” I lied, and I heard Sachi laugh. My mouth tasted of pencil shavings and pink erasers. The side of my face was hot where it had been exposed to the drawing lamp.

“Coffee?” repeated Sachi.

“Oh, yeah. Thanks.” I accepted the hot coffee with gratitude. “It’s been a while since I’ve pulled an all-nighter,” I said. “Working, that is.”

Sachi smiled and asked how it was going. She looked fresh and awake.

“What time is it now?” I asked.

“Seven-thirty.”

“Two more hours, no more,” I promised.

“Perfect!” she said. 

To be continued…

Animator! Carpe Diem! (Part 2)

Animator!

Carpe Diem! 

(Part 2)

Sachi stopped halfway down the corridor.

“Well,” she said, turning to me. “Today’s your lucky day!”

“Oh yeah?” I answered hopefully. “I like the sound of that!”

I had just been interviewed and had shown my demo reel, hoping to land my first animation gig in New York with the company Sachi worked for, Broadcast Arts.

Now we stood chatting in the corridor.

Sachi said they had a problem, and maybe I could help. Nothing to do with White Cloud bathroom tissue, the job they had called me about which started next month. This was something else, an emergency, but if I did well, then the White Cloud job was as good as mine.

“An audition, eh?” I answered. “Sure, if I can help.” 

What else was I going to say? 

“Call it a chance to prove what you can do,” answered Sachi. She explained that the animator who had been working on the scene, after working more than two days and nights straight, told the boss (Wolf) to shove his deadline, and had gone home to get some sleep.

“I totally sympathize with the guy,” said Sachi. “The hours on this one were murder and getting worse! But, you know art directors, we had to change something at the last minute and now the schedule’s all screwed up! Wolf! He took this job knowing the deadline was crazy. Hope he’s charging them plenty.”

The problem was, said Sachi, they needed the scene now. Right now.

I nodded my head. Sounded like animation in America wasn’t any different from animation in New Zealand… a job fit for lunatics, optimists, geeks and dreamers.

I’ll let you decide which of those I might be.

“I want to ask you something,” I said to Sachi. “I wouldn’t want to steal someone’s job or anything like that. He went home to take a break, right? And here I am, in the right place at the right time. A miracle! You know, like those old movie musicals, where the star twists an ankle and the understudy, in this case me, gets his big chance!” 

“Yeah,” laughed Sachi. “That’s pretty much it.”

My life wasn’t about making movies, I told Sachi, my life was becoming a movie!

“Let’s hope it’s not a tragedy, where we all die in the last act,” said Sachi, and we laughed together.

We had stopped in the middle of the corridor and people streamed past in either direction. The buzzy energy of the studio was very positive, and I felt myself becoming energized too, and swept up by the rightness of the moment.

Now was my chance, I must seize it!  

“Don’t worry about John,” said Sachi. “You’re not taking his job, you’re helping him out.” She looked me straight in the eye for a moment, before adding, “If you can do the work like you say you can.”

“No worries there,” I bragged, trying not to look worried. 

What else was I going to say?

“Hey! Sachi!” Up rushed a young man wearing lab coat and white gloves. He nodded to me before turning to Sachi, saying, “Wolf says where’s the polarizing filters for the big Mitchell? He was sure we had some and I can’t find them anywhere!” 

He didn’t look very well, kind of clammy and quivering. But you see that a lot in the animation business. His gloved hands (he wore soft white gloves for handling cels) were trembling slightly and he had that odd, greenish cast one gets from lack of sleep and too much caffeine. He must have been a camera operator, I figured, because he was looking for polarizing filters for a Mitchell, which is a type of animation camera, and he had an X-sheet (exposure sheet, the guide to how a scene will be photographed) on a clipboard under his arm. With a deadline approaching he’d probably been working long hours, too, like everyone else. Maybe longer. Hours of tedium alone in the dark, adjusting the camera incrementally and photographing cel after cel, frame after frame, painstakingly building up a movie one-twenty-fourth-of-a-second at a time.

Camera operator. I’d done that too, when making my own films. You had to be crazy to do it. Crazy, and geeky because it requires an incredible amount of focus and accuracy.

“We need the polarizers for 18B!” he explained excitedly, adding, “It’s the scene with all the elves!” as if that made all the difference.

“Okay,” said Sachi. “Take it easy.”

He appeared to be a geek on the edge of exhaustion, green and trembling. Just wait till the rest of you starts twitching, I thought. Better ease up, brother, or curl up somewhere and get some sleep. 

I recalled how my dad, exhausted after a ridiculous number of hours on the job, would curl up under his Disney animation desk and take himself a well earned snooze. (He had proudly hauled that desk from the Disney studio in Burbank, where he’d spent seven years animating, all the way to New Zealand when we immigrated there in the 1960s. Later, in one of life’s strange twists, at my dying mother’s request I became my father’s apprentice, and learned animation from him.) When, from exhaustion, his eyes could no longer see and his hands could no longer draw, dad would curl up in the spacious footwell of the giant desk, the chair rolled back out of the way, and have a nap.

“Call me at three o’clock, please, son,” he’d say before closing the door to his office. “I’m going to get a little shuteye.” Inside, he would lift the phone off the hook (purely habit, for who was going to call at three A.M.?) switch off the Luxo lamp above his drawing disc and lastly, turn off the music he always had playing as he worked. 

He would pause for a few seconds with his hand at the recording machine, listening with pleasure, before turning the volume down and off with a soft click.

My father loved music. Country and western music, mostly.

You’d think that I, after listening to my father’s music all those years while I learned animation at his side, would love country and western music too, wouldn’t you?

Well, you’d be wrong.

It was a bittersweet day for me when for the first time I stayed awake and carried on while my father had to succumb to exhaustion and take to his desk for some sleep. Yes, I was proud of myself for having the strength to carry on where I saw my father stumble, but I was also sad because I had crossed an invisible line I knew I could never recross. For the first time in my life, my father seemed smaller than me. 

I hadn’t seen the line or even noticed the crossing of it, but I knew I would never think of my father in the same way again. 

“Okay,” said Sachi to the young cameraman. “Tell Wolf I’ll be right there.” 

He hurried off. Sachi leaned against the wall and breathed a deep sigh. She was tired, too.

“There’s no business like show business,” I said, trying to indicate I understood.

“How would I know?” laughed Sachi. “I used to be a school teacher. Now I work in an insane asylum!”

   To be continued…

Buck and the Big Mosquitoes (Pt II)

Part II

The scenery rolled by as I drove the Falcon and listened to Buck in the seat beside me. He paused to take another swallow of rum and then sat silently for a moment, looking out the window. After awhile he turned and saw me scratching absentmindedly at an insect bite on my arm.

“Ten thousand bastards!” he cursed. “The mosquitoes are bad this year! I killed one the other day that was as big as a bleedin albatross!” 

He leaned towards me conspiratorially and uttered, “It’s the female mosquito that bites, you know, lad. And, as I may have mentioned, I’m absolutely irresistible to females! Hahaha!”

May have mentioned? By now Buck had told me a thousand tall tales, many of them with benefit of stimulating and willing females, for he was fond of a good copulation, to hear him tell it. How Buck loved to spin a yarn! It was his favorite thing to do, except perhaps, if one believed his stories, fornication. It was almost as if he believed these stories he was telling, he told them with such gusto and conviction. I was a willing and eager audience, for I like tales of fornication as much as the next bloke and besides, I was young and naive and still couldn’t tell or at least wasn’t insulted when a man was telling the truth or not. 

After all, the lessons of a lifetime cannot be learned in one day.

“Blasted mosquitoes!” said Buck and he good-naturedly cursed mosquitoes in general for five minutes straight. Then he cursed, for another ten minutes, a particular mosquito who had recently attacked him. 

“Talk about persistent, mate!” laughed Buck. “I was weak from loss of blood after her first attack. She had got me in the neck,” he pointed to the spot, “right here! Blood oozed from the wound and this seemed to drive her into a frenzy! I swear she had a look of malignant evil on her horrible, ghastly face, or the thing that we would call a face, matey, if she bleedin had one!” 

Buck paused at this point for another swallow from the bottle. Then he began again, a little breathlessly, with plenty of gesturing. “Just as she came in for the kill I knocked her down with an uppercut to the proboscis. Blast her! She was so tough I had to take off my boot and hit her three times with it to finish her off! Ugh! What a bloody mess.” 

For a moment Buck’s mouth turned down in a frown of remembrance, before he lifted the bottle again and gulped down the dark, sweet rum. 

“Ha! Ha! It was her or me, mate,” he said, “but I survived to tell the tale!”

“Of course,” he continued after a bit, “the biggest, nastiest mosquitoes I ever saw were in Africa. I remember once, crossing the Kalahari, when I saw in the sky, just off the road in the bush a little way, what I took to be giant vultures. 

“They were hovering over the dead carcass of an old bull elephant, the bastards! Getting out of the car, I grabbed my gun and pith hat and sallied forth to see if I could run off those bloody, damned vultures! 

“Because I hate vultures, Rusty Boy, terrible birds of ill omen that they are!” Buck reduced his voice to a whisper. “As I silently approached, my mouth went dry and my hands started sweating. I was fair-dinkum scared mate, for Death is all around you, every minute, in the African jungle.”

Buck took another drink while I thought about death being all around me all the time. Then he solemnly uttered, “I thought to myself, ‘Buck old boy, it’s a good day to die!’” 

I glanced over at Buck. He had that look on his face now, as if it were still a good day to die. 

“I clenched my buttocks,” he continued, “sharpened my eyes, strained my ears and crept forward. Bloody hell! They weren't vultures at all, but horrible monstrous mosquitoes, buzzing and prodding that poor elephant!

“Raising my gun, I took out the biggest one with a double blast, which thankfully scared off the others. Naturally, I wasn't stupid enough to wait around and meet any of her relatives, so I buggered off just as easy as shitting in bed and kicking it out with your foot!”

Buck took another pull from the bottle while I thought about shitting in bed and kicking it out with my foot.

“Too right, mate!” he continued. “I stopped only long enough to assist that old elephant to its feet, with a native trick I learned from an old Zulu witch doctor. 

“That elephant wasn't dead at all but was merely playing possum.”

“Huh?” I said. “What?”

“You didn't know that elephants played possum?” asked Buck, pretending surprise. “Oh yes, and they also, most of them, play the accordion, too.” Buck leaned in closer and whispered, “Although that's a bleedin well kept secret, mate, you have to be an experienced elephant handler or an old Zulu witch doctor to know that one.”

I laughed, but Buck, unconvinced that I was swallowing his tall tale, continued, “You don't believe me? Well, where the blasted hell do you think all that accordion music comes from in the African night when you're trying to sleep out there in the veldt under the stars?”

“I dunno, Buck, I’ve never been to Africa.”

“Bloody hell mate!” laughed Buck. “Use your noggin! An elephant could hardly play the harmonica or the saxophone with that long trunk of his, now could he?”

Many years later, I happened through the circumstance of living to find myself under the stars on the African veldt at night, yes and in a tent close by the Kalahari dessert too, just as Buck had described to the boy I used to be. 

I’d been in Africa a few years trying to make my living as an animator. I may have mentioned that being an animator is a rather hit and miss way of making a living. Anyway, I’d run out of animation gigs, so I had come along from Johannesburg to help some archeologist friends find fossils in the petrified mud of southern Botswana. My friends spent every winter there, cataloguing bits of seashell that had turned to stone uncounted centuries ago. 

We’d worked hard in the sun all day, and now after a good dinner with lively conversation, a little dagga and some strong Cape wine, we’d said our goodnights and gone off to our separate tents for sleep. I was laying in my cot, not asleep but not awake, listening to the wind rustling through the endless African grasses (or was that the strains of accordion music I heard wafting on the air?) when it hit me that Buck was right.

It really was a good day to die.
“Keep an eye out for elephants!” I called to Death and the ghosts and the African night, and I heard my friends gently laugh at my shenanigans.

“Goodnight Rusty, you old fool,” they laughed. “Sleep well.”

“Goodnight friends,” I answered. “You too.”