Joseph Gilland.

I will never forget the first time I picked up Richard Williams’ epic animation book The Animation Survival Kit, and read that hilarious little bit where Richard innocently asks the Disney master animator Milt Kahl if he ever listened to music while he was animating. Mr. Kahl responded by almost tearing his head off, exclaiming that he was “not smart enough to do more than one thing at a time,” and that when he was animating, he needed all of his concentration in order to do the best possible job. The following page shows Richard Williams huddled over a desk, with “Animation is concentration” written across the back of his shirt.

Well, today a young up-and-coming animation artist might ask one of the old-time animators (like me), “Hey, do you ever animate while you are text messaging someone, downloading music to your iPod, updating your Facebook, checking your e-mail, reading an article on the AWN web site, and watching a movie at the same time?” Hey, I am not exaggerating, this is something I see every day in the animation workplace and, quite frankly, I think it is something that is costing the animation industry untold millions of hours and dollars of lost productivity, not to mention the loss of creative talent that is being diluted by this relentless barrage of digital input.

I first began to really notice the phenomenon of digital distraction back in 1998, when we first moved into the state-of-the-art four-story Walt Disney Feature Animation Florida building at the Disney-MGM Studios. I was amazed to learn at the time that every single workstation in our new building came with full cable television, broadband radio and Internet connections. It seemed like a really nice perk, and I certainly didn’t complain, but I couldn’t help thinking, weren’t we supposed to be working? Was cable TV really necessary? Would this complete connectivity with every available form of media entertainment be a good thing for productivity? As the head of the special effects department there in the subsequent years, I certainly found out the hard way how all of that media availability affected the productivity of my crew. Within a week of moving into the new space, the majority of artists had brought in small televisions, as well as DVD players, and of course the standard small stereo systems and ghetto blasters were already at everyone’s desk.

First thing every morning, a substantial number of artists in our crew would watch the morning news on television, as they had their coffee and morning snack. And then, I watched aghast as a surprising number of artists began to watch TV throughout their workday. The television was always on, whether playing network programs, or films on DVD, and I immediately began to see the difference in day-to-day productivity between the artists who had their televisions on all day and the artists who didn’t. A subtle difference at first, but it was undeniable. Being entertained while supposedly working was not good for productivity, and I addressed it with my crew, suggesting that we have a certain amount of time during the workday designated as “no TV” time. There was a little bit of grumbling, but for the most part, it did not seem like a big deal at the time. But then I began to notice an increasing number of artists were spending a great deal of time on the Internet, answering e-mails, checking their stocks, chatting, and/or just plain surfing the Net. Unbelievably, I actually came upon artists who had their music playing, the television on, and were surfing the Internet, all at the same time as they were supposedly drawing and animating, working towards our department’s weekly quota of over 100 feet of beautifully polished, high-end special-effects animation.

Keep in mind that this was still a traditional hand-drawn-effects animation department for the most part, with the exception of two 3D-effects animators and TDs who worked exclusively on computers around the clock. Although we primarily worked on a traditional animation desk with light table and disk, each animator now had a computer as well, in the form of a Disney “Scene Machine” -- a digital pencil test shooting machine, built around a Mac computer. All of these were set up with complete Internet access. It was all the rage to check out the latest web sites, and there was supposedly a lot of “research” that could be done, to assist us in doing our jobs well. It was like having a vast library of resources at your fingertips. Of course the Disney studio actually had a terrific resource library -- you know, the kind with actual books in it -- as well as an incredible collection of movies and cartoons, but the immediacy of the Internet was seductive, and fast, and readily available, without having to take the trek up to the library, or going to the bother of actually cracking open a book.

Today, of course, the vast majority of us in the animation business rarely ever touch a piece of paper. We spend our entire days in front of a computer, and from the moment we log on, we are faced with the infinite digital world of the Internet. This is of course assuming that the studio we are working in permits such a thing. Many studios have decided that enough is enough, and either severely limit their artists’ access to the Internet, or remove it altogether. Then of course there are those of us working from home, as I am at this very moment, who have no restrictions whatsoever. And I can tell you that if my son on the other side of Canada logs on to MSN messenger right now, I probably won’t get this column written in time, because we have a lot to talk about! And if Marilyn logs on, well, forget about it! AWN will just have to wait!

But, on most days, I drive into the city and go up to the eighth floor of a beautiful old office building, where I, and a relatively young crew of animation artists, crank out endless episodes of television animation. And from where I sit in that studio, I can see clearly that this business of “multi-tasking” while on the computer is costing our studio countless hours and dollars of lost productivity, and that the average young animation artist today has almost no conception of what really being focused and getting a job done is all about.