The Idler

The Work of Ants

The worst job I ever had was working on an animated feature in ‘91, a personal project of a critically acclaimed animator who had been a top Soho ad animator for decades. He had been making this thing since the 70’s and had finally got a little Hollywood backing and hired a small, underpaid crew to give birth to his baby. It was going to be like nothing that had gone before, the greatest animation feature of all time.

An Arabian fairy tale, visually based on Persian miniatures and with a basic remit to prove that he was the greatest animator who ever lived. The feature was ludicrously complicated in design and detail. This added a further rich layer of agony to what is already a bad business, for while animation is a wonderful thing to watch, making it is hellish laborious. At 24 frames a second, it takes a crew of hundreds many months to produce the drawings you see on screen. Each animator produces key drawings (the extremes of movement), their assistant draws the principal frames that lie between each key. This set of drawings is then passed to the in-betweener whose job it is to fill in all the remaining frames which when filmed will produce the illusion of fluid movement. At this level the work is unbelievably tedious. You have to turn yourself into a drawing machine. I spent 10 months as an in-betweener, drawing tiny incremental movements for upwards of 54 hours a week. We sat in a huge warren of wooden animator’s desks for up to 16 hours a day, the only sound the rasp of flicked paper and the tsk tsk tsk of personal stereos. The work was repetitive and minute. The lines we traced between were often so close, the width of a pencil tip would barely fit between them. Drawings could take anything up to an hour. When the first breakdown was achieved there were only another 20 breakdowns after that. When those breakdowns were done, there were the in-betweens either side of them. And then the in-betweens either side of them. Then you gave the folder to the production person and that was the last you saw of that. I never managed to identify anything I’d done when we watched the ‘dailies’ from the lab each morning. Boredom was a constant enemy.

We were like battery hens, and the management treated us accordingly. Colleagues chatting for even a few moments were interrupted by glaring production people and the offenders returned to their desks. Which would have been acceptable if they had been paying commercial rates. As it was, this was a low-budget, high-art production and most people were working 14 hours extra a week for free.

I hated the endless repetitive, spirit-crushing work, I hated the endless hours and I disliked the people. Before web design, animators were the geeks of the creative industries. Like train-spotters are said to be, some of my colleagues were strangely autistic - collectors of memorabilia from cartoons and TV science fiction shows, individuals with pictures on their desks not of their loved ones but of themselves, alone. Many were suffering from the symptoms of what we would now call RSI. Some of the older men had a drink problem. Very few were married.

A few months after I was laid off, I was mooching around Colombia trying to feel better about myself when I caught a ride with a rich vacationing Ecuadorian couple. We fell to chatting, as you do, and I explained about the film I had been working on and the laborious nature of animation feature production. The husband came up with the best description of the business, one that evokes the minuteness and accuracy and machine-like tedium, but also the grand collective effort. ‘That’s the work of ants,’ he said.

Steve Handley
steve.handley@hhc.co.uk