on the occasional spat of bad luck

so i had a stretch of poopy luck this week, which flies in the face of my previous post, but certainly gives balance to the force. my name, was mysteriously dropped somewhere between the many TPS report paper-pushers at my studio who are responsible for the final movie credits for the film i just finished. it was especially embarassing because i was sitting next to my girlfriend in one of the forward rows in the Zeigfeld theatre at the premiere. the movie was a very good film, and of course, it LOOKS incredible, if i do say so myself.

I do the lighting and color of it, so the look is really what concerns me the most. even if the film sucked, like i thought the last one i made did, i really wouldn't be upset. because the look is really what i was in control of. of course, i did notice that somewhere between my desk and hollywood, some foppish pamper dan had panicked that my lighting was TOO DRAMATIC and maybe a bit too scary for young kids. right before it was put to film, they had brightened it up in such a broad stroke way that it was as if they had shined a flashlight from behind the camera. at that late in the game they would have had to use a general knob for brightness, very much like somebody pushing up the brightness on a CRT tv. but, it wouldn't be the first time i've seen that happen. when these movies finally go up in front of the heads of the studios, quite often, they decide that they know what america wants more then the hundreds of skilled artists before them. i guess they can do what they want, it's their money after all. plus, i suspect, they get to brag about the large creative input they had in what is obviously a work of art.

basically, i am the person who gets the animated and modeled scenes, and then shines sunlight, or whatever the scene calls for so it gets rendered. all on a computer. i then take the render and tweak the colors and blur objects like they would get blurred in a camera, which creates the illusion that the audience is actually seeing something that has been filmed with a conventional camera. i am responsible for color balance and consistency, atmosphere, reflection, refraction, and also shadows. i selected what i do, because from my childhood i have always been a painter. i wrote graffitti in NYC for a decade or so in the late 80's to late 90's, but besides that, i have a large collection of oil paintings that are in one way or another a study of light and urban imagery. i never wanted to try the art world professionally because from what i could tell, that was a social scene more then it was a purely art driven industry, so to be a successful artist didn't insure that i would ever feel truly good about sellling my work. my work was more for myself and the idea of parting with it has never appealed to me. i needed to make something that i could sell, but at the sametime hold onto. plus, my sister is really the true artist in the family. i am the artisan.

i used to do every aspect of animation from building to motion and effects on smaller projects years ago, but had to focus in order to join large studios and help make the big time movies in an assembly line type production with hundreds of other people. but my contribution isn't so easily cut into a 300th of the final product. as an experienced lighter i work on about a 20th of the film, and it turns into more then that, because if i set a look early in production, that look gets copied by other lighters because the film needs to be consistent, and the director liked what i made enough to call that the "look", an example is that i got a water splash shot where water explodes when a character jumps into a pool. i worked out the look of that, from the way light gets reflected and refracted, to how bright the highlights are. from then on, any splash in the movie needed to match the look of mine, so its not so easy to quantify my overall input into the movie.

but clearly, it wasn't enough to warrant my name's appearance in the all important credits.

not that i am saying it was on purpose, that couldn't be true, i have no idea what kind of studio would do that to somebody they want to stay on staff (which i was asked to do despite better offers from a more prime time studio). but it does say that either their way of collecting and filtering the names is very broken, especially since it happened to 7 other artists, but also that it apparently has happened in previous films, or it says that the artists aren't really important enough to triple check. that is to say if a few names get dropped, ehh, it's not like they will sue, quit, or start bashing the studio in an interview with the the new york times.

they are right. i am still here, i don't think i will try to get some money out of it, and i certainly don't feel like going after the studio's reputation. but it fucking sucked to sit there, and scan the credits and find nothing. to turn to my woman who had come with me and sat through the entire film and pronounce that i have been fucked and it was too late to fix. it just looks bad. in her eyes, i might be the most important part of the film's inception. only to be overlooked like the woman who cleans out all the garbage cans at night. meanwhile, at the end of the credits, a list of babies names appear.

the babies born during the movie's making were in the fucking credits. what does that say about me!? now i have the wonderful honor of explaing, to an as of yet unkown amount of people who sit through the credits, that i was one of the shmos that got forgotten in the fog of war. meaning they might not ever sit through credits again to see my name in the future. plus i don't even know how many people who know me only well enough to know my name and what i claimed i worked on, to notice the omission, and then wonder what else i might have lied to them about. it sucks on levels that i haven't even figured out yet, like maybe the film becomes a legendary classic, and hundreds of years later is stil being used in history books. i won't be in those history books. i might not even get into google, so a future employer might be cross checking my reel on the internet, and finds a huge hole in what i claim to have made, and what the internet claims i have made. so, my luck ran out this time.

needless to say, it's the worst humiliation i have felt since the time i slipped in slush while running across the street to catch the broadway bus in 1985. it was on 112th and broadway and every single girl in my jr. high was standing on that corner. my slip was so fantastic, that the actual falling part took the better part of two lanes. the subsequent dive i took ended up taking me and my over-sized backpack directly into, and under, a deep, dirty, wet pile of slush. you know, that sludge that collects on each corner in the city a day after a heavy snow. i think part of my arm even made it into the gutter, which was hidden two feet down, where i ended up. when i managed to pull myself up and shake off the sludge, once it cleared from my eyes and unclogged from my ears, i was face to face with every girl in my school laughing at me, including the one i had a big childhood crush on. plus, i missed the bus. that's the kind of red-faced, shivers across the back of the neck, total annihilation of any trace of ego reality check that i have gotten in recent years. when at the moment i should be the most proud of myself, i was the most shocked and humiliated. i was PWNED.

to top that off, i went to vermont with my family to hopefully forget the experience. being with my family was actually awesome. my immediate family, my sister, father, brother and his kids are basically the best kind of people to spend time with. we really love eachother, and we have a fantastic history together. but as luck would have have it, no less then six things broke on my overly expensive car, the perfect snow that everybody had been bragging about turned to slush, then rain, and then froze at 10 degrees on the last day. it was a stark reminder to me, as someone who grew up thinking that this kind of weather is normal, but then moved to LA, and then San Francisco and learned that the weather, is in fact, unnecesarily horrible.

BLECH