Updated April 3, 2010

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It is finished…and it is good.

I can’t believe we finished. I mean, I know we finished, but working so hard and so constantly on the film had become such a way of life, it hasn’t really sunk in yet that we finished. Even when I watch the film (which I am doing constantly…I just can’t stop) I still have this anxiety that a storyboard frame is going to pop up at some point, indicating a scene that has yet to be animated. I’ve literally watched the DVD over 20 times now, and that anxious feeling still nags at the back of my mind. It’s like I’ve been running a race so long my mind can’t process the fact that I’ve crossed the finish line.  I guess it will take time to normalize that fact. In the meantime, we have in deed crossed the finish line and it is good!

We screened it for the cast and crew. They’re like me. They can hardly believe we made it. When you’ve been doing something so tenaciously for two years, pulling into the station is a bit surreal. Of course, we’ve only been in principal animation since late June of ’10, and I’ve only been animating full time on it since October of ’10, so the “crunch” period hasn’t been the whole two years—but six months of either animating or compositing and editing 16 to 20 hours a day can feel like two years or even longer. Actually, it can feel like less time, to be honest. Time flies when you’re animating against a deadline. It really does. A whole week would go by and I’d be like, “Really?! It’s been a week already. Geez! How’d that happen?!”  I would pray for God to extend the day like He did for Joshua. Yes, serious production pressure makes time both speed up and slow down. When you sit down some evening to begin animating what you thought was going to be a relatively short scene, the next thing you know the sun is coming up, and it seems like 12 hours went by in ten minutes. But when you’re babysitting a scene render that’s ticking away at about 20 to 30 seconds per frame, time drags like molasses in winter and it’s like watching grass grow. It can be maddening.

But we’re done…and it is good. I did my scene count. Since October 2010 to March of 2011, I animated and composited 534 scenes. It’s a little over a hundred scenes a month. I don’t even want to do the math on how many hours per week I was working…I know it was in the 90 hours a week range—sometimes more. I tried to shield myself from how much work needed to be done as we went along. I preferred to look at my footage in terms of scenes that need to be done, rather than footage.  Footage counts would depress me. I was working at completing seconds per day for a while, but that would get frustrating because the seconds one can complete fluctuates wildly with how many characters are in a scene, and how what the range of action is with those characters, and how much the characters are talking. Some days I was cranking out 30 to 45 seconds per day, and other days it’s was less than 5 seconds for a 12 hour day. It all depends on what was going on and how many characters were doing it. I began to deal exclusively in scenes, and as I would approach a sequence, I would try and group them in easy, medium, and complicated scenes. It was like a food pyramid, in which I was trying to get a balance of each group per day. That way I wouldn’t crank through all the quick and easy scenes first and be left with the excruciatingly long and complicated ones only. And that diversity helped me many a night. When you’ve been languishing away for 12 to 16 hours a day on one scene for three or four days, once you finish it, it really helps to have a couple of short easy scenes to knock out before hitting another long one. The sense of accomplishment helps you along the way, and even though in the end, whether it’s one scene or five scenes that total 900 frames, it’s all 900 frames, the psychological boost that comes from having several scenes in the can as opposed to just one is enormous.

And yes, the long haul of a feature-length animated film certainly comes down to psychology toward the end. Many days I had to sit down in that chair where I had spent the last seven months and talk myself into picking up that stylus and animating more. Many times I had to psych myself up to begin the lip sync of a fourteen second long scene in which the character is talking constantly.  An I’m one of those guys who doesn’t ‘cheat’ lip sync or skimp on the library of mouth shapes. I’ve worked on shows where each character was limited to 12 or 13 mouths—I actually got in trouble for trying to sneak in more to make the lip sync more articulate. My characters have a minimum of 24 to 30 mouths, and I tend to lip sync on 1s (a new mouth shape or transition to another mouth shape every frame, 30 frames per second.) That would mean that in a 14 second scene, I’d have to set 420 mouth positions—per character. Sometimes, stepping up to the plate with that much tedious work ahead of you is something you just have to talk yourself into.  I got through Kasha by talking myself through a lot of footage.

When we finished, I felt like I knew what Ub Iwerks must have felt like at the end of Steamboat Willie.  Ub Iwerks was Walt Disney’s number one animator in the early days—the black and white days. Walt Disney was not a great artist. He was a great storyteller, but knew his limitations, and therefore employed great artist to do what he couldn’t. One story has it that at one point in the early days, the investors were looking for results, and they needed to have the Steamboat Willie Mickey Mouse short done quick fast and in a hurry or else, and Walt literally locked Ub in a room and said don’t come out until it’s finished! Legend has it, Ub cranked out Steamboat Willie in about three days.  I don’t know if that’s completely true, but that’s how I felt. I was metaphorically locked in a room animating for six straight months.  My days consisted of getting up around 9am, spending some time reading my Bible and meditating in prayer, and then animating for 16 to 20 hours, then rolling off the computer onto the couch, catching 4 to 8 hours of sleep, and then doing it again the next day—for six months.  It became my lifestyle. Toward the end, it was quite a few 24 hour sleepless days peppered in every few days or so. I remember the last night of compositing scenes with my editor James we literally had to stop because I had passed out twice due to sleep deprivation.  My body was like, “Dude, if you won’t stop working, I’m going to pull the plug.” And I remember the only reason I told James we had to stop was not because I was abusing my body with no sleep, but because both times I passed out from fatigue, my head hit my drawing tablet, and I was afraid of damaging it because of the down time a busted Cintiq would cause. (I know, I’m a mess!)  Emerging from that room with Steamboat Willie finished in insane amount of time is exactly how I imagined myself at about 5am one morning when I text’d James to tell him the last scene of Kasha was posted to the ftp site, and he could add it to the comp and hit what would be a 7 to 10 hour render. He told me, “Alright, now go get some sleep!” I told him I was already sprawled out on the couch.

I woke up four hours later to check on the render, as well as start printing DVD labels for the approval copies we would be sending to the Network later that evening. Of course, I could have used more sleep, but there was time to crash after the render was successful and the DVD’s were on their way to Los Angeles!  I rose from the couch after that four hour nap feeling groggy, a bit disoriented, and suppressing the instinct to jump in my animating chair and begin working.  I kind of walked around the room feeling the sense of calm and wondering if I were dreaming.  Then I realized, I had been dreaming all my childhood and now…after a lifetime of dreaming, my dream had actually come true. My first feature-length animated film was done…and I was wide awake! I’m still pinching myself and taking reality checks every so often. I keep watching the DVD over and over and, as I said, waiting so see a hole in the reel where a scene still needs to be animated. I guess that feeling will wear off in time. As will my inability to sleep through the night because my circadian rhythm is so mess up and used to being up all day and night working. I also haven’t been able to bring myself to go back to sleeping in my room. I still prefer to sleep on the couch in my studio, close to my drawing tablet. I no longer need to roll out of bed and hit the ground running , but over the past six months I’ve developed a weird comfort  zone sleeping in the studio.  Sleeping on that couch was like sitting in the blocks before a track race, where sleeping down the hall in my bedroom felt like being too removed from the work that needed to be done. Well, now the work is done, and as soon as I shake the journey from my senses, I can slow down and enjoy the success of having finished. I can go back to working modest 8 hour days, sleeping in my bedroom, and I can watch the movie without the haunting anticipation of scenes that aren’t finished, because…it is finished…and it is good!

Jai