Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/990677
18 KEYFRAME P E R S P E C T I V E S It's Friday—shipping day—and I'm opening Photoshop files 10 at a time to approve final background color for another episode of the show I'm art directing, trying to get everything finished and finalized so that it can be shipped off to Seoul at the end of the day. My computer is supposed to be fast, but I manage to pop an antacid from the depths of the desk drawer and solve my Rubik's Cube in the time it takes for all those files to open. And, believe me, I'm rusty with that cube. I zip through a few of the files, tweaking the darkness of shadows and noodling with opacity levels, throwing out hidden layers and obsolete notes from the last approvals pass, organizing overlays into separate groups and carefully naming and highlighting those groups. I skip an image with a neon sign because I can see it isn't right and dread having to fix it myself after it has already gone back to the painter three times. Two files need adjusting because I spy some discrepancies between them and the stock BG reference. Whew! No amateur continuity mistakes like a couch changing color on this show! Ugh, there's that neon sign again—LATER! Three more files need just a little housekeeping and another pair needs no tweaks at all, and now we're back to the neon. Man, it's hard to make something look like neon when the style of the backgrounds on your show requires a graphite pencil outline and watercolor textures. Every episode seems more complicated than the last and every location seems stacked with a level of detail that is not sustainable and damn it, this neon just isn't working. It doesn't help that this scene takes place during the day! I search for reference images online to cheat something that doesn't make sense in reality. I paint a hot core on the neon tube, create an unbelievable glow around the lettering and subtly darken the area around the glow, just hoping to get the IDEA of a neon sign. I think I may have gotten it and suddenly it's 4 o'clock: time for approvals with the showrunner and his second-in-command. I preview a bunch of backgrounds for the pair and all receive quick approval. We really do have a team of great designers and painters on our show—hard working and with a great team spirit and positive attitude. More backgrounds get positive responses, and then the dreaded scene with the neon sign opens up. There is barely time to gird for the expected comments before "Aw, YEAH! That looks awesome!" flits like a bird on the wing, over my shoulder and up into the sunny sky that just opened over my cluttered desk. It's approved. I'm about to move on when I hear: "Can you fix the tree next to the neon sign?" Darkness descends. I look over my shoulder: "What?" The color of the tree trunk looks wrong, he says, so I adjust the color and now the foliage looks even more wrong. A few more tweaks and the tree looks better, but now it doesn't stand out from the building behind it. Since I'm adjusting the value of the building, the second voice over my shoulder would like to see a different hue, something warmer, and suddenly the sidewalk looks off. They check their phones while I add adjustment layers and in a few minutes the background looks perfect again, including the neon sign that gave me so much trouble half an hour ago. "Can you just zoom in close on that tree trunk?" I zoom. "Closer. The texture doesn't look right." I zoom in again. "Is it supposed to look like that?" I zoom in one more time and all of a sudden, I realize that we're doing what most creative artists dread: we're pixel f&%*ing (rhymes with "sucking" but we can't print the word in this family magazine). For a good laugh, look it up on your favorite search engine, only spell it out properly for the best results. There are lots of definitions for it, many sardonic and most of them funny for the people who have found themselves in the same situation: focusing on pixel-level changes in a much bigger picture. In the worst cases an entire production can get bogged down by an obsession with minute details, and many artists with experience will tell you that pixel f&%*ing is a symptom of a bigger problem with the overall vision for a project. In not-such-terrible cases, it may just be that everything is looking good—thanks to talented artists, technical directors and creative supervisors—and the bosses don't see anything on the surface to criticize or correct. I zoom out again and say, "That tree looks fine, just like the rest of the trees in this show." And it does look fine. The neon sign, in fact, looks better than it really should. The backgrounds for this episode are all done and we've gone over them with a fine-toothed comb to make sure that everything looks right. At this point, any changes would be arbitrary and subjective, and since we're about 30 minutes away from shipping time it is best to approve and move on to more important things that are crucial to the story we're trying to tell. Let's thank the artists who did this work, consider it all a good day's labor done well, and go home to our families. – Paula Spence