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…

A Ghost, a Girl, and Solid Gold False Teeth

That night in bed, Suzie and I shared a cigarette and talked. We often had long, rambling conversations in bed together. We’d always been able to speak our hearts, and listen to each other as best friends do. 

We knew… at such times dreams can be born. 

We were happy together. We’d been around the world together, had fun together, been tested together, could rely on each other. Suzie lived for the moment and adored life as it came, a true gypsy soul untethered and free. I was enjoying the present but, still without a job in animation in New York, brooding a little about the future. 

I listened while Suzie quietly talked of her mother in South Africa, whom she missed. She spoke of her brothers and sister and their life before her father went “crazy mean with his dopp,” meaning the booze, and she cried a little for things that were lost. Suzie didn’t often cry, but sometimes, after lovemaking, she was more emotional than usual. (Who isn't?) She naturally had a very loving heart and our act of love had set it astir.

After a long pause, she whispered, “I saw him again.”

“Who?”

“My father. He was sitting on the edge of our mattress.”

While we lived in the shared apartment on Seventh Avenue, we slept on a mattress on the floor. For privacy we had hung a row of curtains around. I sat up and looked down towards my feet. 

“When did you see him?” I asked. 

“Yesterday. Just after you left the apartment.”

“Oh? You sound okay. Is everything all right?” 

She had seen the ghost of her father before, in every place we had ever lived. Australia, Africa, New Zealand, and now New York. He was a well travelled ghost, this father of hers, I had to admit that. I had never seen him, but this did not stop me from believing wholeheartedly that Suzie had. He appeared at times when Suzie was by herself. She would walk into a room and he would already be there, sitting quietly with his hands in his lap. He wore a look of inner reproach on his haunted face, as his anguished eyes followed Suzie’s every move.  

He never spoke a word, just sat there on the end of the bed and stared with haunted eyes at his daughter. The way Suzie thought of it, her father was the one who was being haunted, not her.

“He was just checking up on me, to see how I was getting along in the big city,” said Suzie quietly. The little girl who used to be, wanted to believe in the protective father who never was. 

Laying next to me in the dim light, Suzie’s eyes glistened with tears, tears not for herself, but for her tortured father. She believed he suffered the fate of being an unhappy ghost because of the unhappiness he caused other people while he was living, with his violent alcoholic rages and especially the murderous intentions of his ghastly suicide. She blamed his ghostly troubles on his addiction to alcohol when he was alive and held her father, now that he was dead, virtually blameless, at least as far as his soul went, the thing of him that was his essence and that really mattered. 

Within Suzie’s small frame beat a giant’s forgiving heart.

“Had you seen him lately?” I asked. It had been a while since she had mentioned her father and I was curious. Suzie could be casual about things, and sometimes she failed to mention that, oh, by the way, I saw the ghost of my dead father again the other day. 

“No,” she said. “Not for ages.” She thought for a minute. “He’s never been to America before.”

“Did he try a pretzel while he was here?”

Suzie laughed quietly and her splendid white teeth showed. We both detested the twisty, salty things sold on every NYC street corner.

I pulled her to me and gently kissed her mouth. Her cheeks were damp with tears.   

“Goodnight, Suzie,” I whispered.

“Goodnight, dahling.”

She snuggled into me with her long arms folded on my chest. I held her close as she fell asleep. How innocent she looked when asleep. Like a child. 

My heart swelled with love for Suzie. 

Laying there, listening to Suzie breathe and looking up at he ceiling, I thought some thoughts to myself in the night.

So, Suzie had seen her father’s ghost sitting on the bed. Well, that had happened before and would probably happen again. So long as Suzie was okay about it, why should I worry? I stared up into the dark and allowed my mind to wander. Suzie. It was fun in the bathtub tonight. Even after twelve years together, I found her as exciting a lover as ever. It was always no holds barred! Life was fun at the apartment, with friends all around, but it would be good to have our own place, if we could ever afford it. At least I had a job working as a messenger, but it was hardly worth it. The work itself wasn’t too bad, the people I worked with were friendly and interesting, but the money was terrible. No matter how much I worked, there was never enough. It was grinding us down and making life tough. When would animation work come my way? Would it ever come my way? Somehow, I knew it would. It was just a matter of not giving up, of that I was convinced. It was just a matter of persistence. Of believing blindly and carrying on! 

That, and luck. Plain, old, dumb luck.

Well, I thought, I’d always been a lucky bastard. Ask anybody. As my father-in-law Mick used to say, “Rusty lad, if you fell into the toilet bowl headfirst, I swear you’d come up with a set of solid gold false teeth! Ahaw haw haw!”

I smiled to myself and closed my eyes.

Soon I was fast asleep.