The last three months have been perhaps the most hectic in my entire life, with the vast majority of the activity taking place in the world of animation. Thus my difficulty in actually finding the time to write about animation, as it is consuming my life once again, just like the first time I ever tried to complete an animated film back in my school days.
In my last column, I wrote about how excited I was that there would be a brand new festival in Portland this summer, The Platform Festival. Wouldn't you know it? I had to move into a different house the week that the festival finally happened, and even though Portland is only a stone's throw away from Vancouver, I was far too busy to make it there at all, especially when you factor in the insane deadlines I am working against to create all of the special effects for 4Kids television cartoon Chaotic, together with moving, being a single parent, and, insanely, taking on other freelance work here and there on top of it all! Oh and putting together proposals to try and snag some other big feature animation jobs along the way, and still piecing together the final details of my book, and scrambling to get it published some time before Hell freezes over.
It's crazy, when animation gets us so busy, that we can't get out there and enjoy all the great animation that there is to experience. Instead I had to be content to read And I missed Annecy too, and the FMX Conference in Germany, which I have come to love, and all the festivals all over the world, oh dear! The animation Gods have cruelly set me up with the most brutal animation series schedule in history, to complete 40 half-hour episodes in barely more than 40 weeks, egads! Of course the 40 episodes have taken a wee bit longer than originally scheduled to complete. Let's see, after 58 weeks, we are just squeezing episode 24 out the door, and there are (supposedly) 16 weeks remaining now to finish the last 16 episodes. Hmmm. Might just free myself up in time to make the pilgrimage to Ottawa! Oh please, oh please, oh please! Ottawa, my earliest and some of my best animation festival memories date back to the very first Ottawa festivals in the '70's, when it was brand new, like Platform!
Since I last wrote my column here, back in April, I had to make a quick trip to Florida, to attend an extremely emotional and moving ceremony for a dear, dear friend in the animation business, whose beautiful and very young wife was cruelly beaten by cancer. This was an animation "event" of the most powerful kind I have ever known. Many of my dearest friends were in attendance. It was an incredibly creative group of people, some of the greatest animation talent in the world, gathered to honor the passing of a wonderful woman, a powerful and very loving creative force whose life affected all of us very deeply. We played live music on the beach under the stars for her, until the wee hours of the morning.
And, now that I think of it in retrospect, and in the light of everything I just wrote about all the festivals and animation "events" I am missing, I wouldn't trade that experience for all the festivals in the world. I only wish it hadn't been such an untimely tragedy that brought us together there, on the beach, under the stars.
Just a short couple of weeks later, the first week of June, another interruption to my "chaotic" Chaotic schedule, came in the form of my doing another three-day workshop at the Filmakademie in Ludwigsburg, Germany, which has become a regular annual invitation, and which is always a fantastic experience. Taking my "Organic Approach to Visual Effects" to a school of such high standards, and to students of such high caliber, is exciting, challenging, and incredibly enlightening all at once. I never cease to be amazed at how the mostly German, and other European students I meet there, have such an profound grasp of animation principles and ideas, not to mention a better English-speaking vocabulary than the vast majority of most North American students I have ever worked with.
Once again, I can't say that I would trade that experience for another animation festival, although I couldn't help but sigh sadly when all the students there asked, "Will you be there in Annecy this year?" Of course they all live within reasonable driving distance of Annecy, which makes it easier for them to attend annually. Yeah. Almost precisely the same distance that the Platform festival in Portland, Oregon, is from my home in Vancouver. The one that I couldn't make it to, because I am too busy, dammit!
Well there, I have explained it all for myself, just by writing about it. It turns out in the end, that I traded the festivals that I had been hoping to attend, for animation 'events' of an entirely different, and possibly far higher caliber. Even now, as I work on a freelance job at home late at night, actually drawing some simple animation on a good old fashioned animation disk with pencil and paper, I realize that when animation becomes this much a part of your life, and busy gets really busy, well, one just trades out one animation experience for another, they are quite interchangeable, and given time, there will be a time for every conceivable kind of animation experience imaginable.
Perhaps, one day again, I will work on a project that doesn't have an insane, homicidal/suicidal deadline, a project that plans ahead for adequate research and development time. What a concept! Like the good old days. (Yeah, you know, the good old days...?) and perhaps the time will come to finally squeeze out that film of my own, which has been festering in my imagination for a couple of decades. Oh, and then there's the follow-up book of course. And what if one of those big doozy features we've been pitching for all of a sudden comes to fruition? And what if Chaotic goes for another couple of seasons, or even (shudder) a feature version of the show!?
One thing for sure, and this is a really important point. We've all read stories about, "How to survive in the animation industry when the work is just not there... " Well, for this starving animator, I'm just extremely grateful to be as busy as I can possibly be, and you know what? All those festivals just keep coming around, year after year, and all the wonderful, colorful, creative animation souls just keep on showing up there, and I know, we'll all be together, in animation heaven again, some day.
In his 30-year animation career, Joseph Gilland has worked with studios as diverse as Walt Disney Feature Animation and the National Film Board of Canada. He has worked on all styles of animation, experimental films, television series, commercials, theatrical feature films, stop motion, title sequences, live-action films and documentaries. He is writing a passionate book about the art of animation.
Links:
[1] http://www.awn.com/imagepicker/image/13128
