ANIMATION SPOT
By Howard
Beckerman
Remember when showing your sample reel to a client meant screening a 16mm print in a theater-like room with plush seats and a screen? There may even have been a curtain to draw away from the white area, upon which your best efforts would be displayed. Remember how you felt when someone remarked about the quality of the print? Perhaps someone thought the color was off a little. Someone else may have noted a bit of lens flare or even a scratch. Print quality was everyone's concern. All you wanted was to show a sample of the kind of films you had worked on, but even the stenographer reacted like a lab technician.
Today, things are a little different. Your sample reel isn't
even a reel, it's a cassette. Previously, you could slip a 400-foot 16mm print
into an envelope or a slim briefcase, with space to spare for other pertinent
papers or for your lunch. Now, if you wish to bring along more than one
cassette, you have to get one of those shopping bags that retail stores stuff
vegetables or shoes into. In the old days, you approached the receptionist with
an executive air, your Gucci briefcase casually tucked under your arm. Now you
appear as a walking advertisement for Gristedes.
When the client gets around to looking at your cassette, it
is very often in a room that recently stored mops and brooms and instantly
became the site for a cart bearing the weight of newly acquired Sony
electronics. When your prized samples are at last lowered funerally into the
bowels of the video player, the resulting image is nothing like the original
prints you so diligently had duped onto 3/4 inch. Huddled together around the
television monitor are all the important personages you are trying to impress.
Meanwhile, the delicate hues of your original film are now an electronic
display of purple and green. To your surprise, nobody says anything about it.
Just as your best bit of animation or special effects
appears on the screen, the coffee cast arrives and all eyes turn to the source
of its merry bell. No fear, once everyone has completed his transaction and is
gaily sipping his coffee someone with a free finger puts the machine in rewind
to start all over.
Now the image appears minus any color at all, and by the
time the color is reintroduced through a lot of frantic dial twiddling, two
spots have played across the screen "Three Cheers For The White and
Blue," and "The Wonderful World of Flowers."
At the precise point where the delightfully animated
characters say their funniest line, a phone rings and everyone dashes for it.
After the phone has been answered and the call transferred to another
department, the crowd breaks up to attend a scheduled meeting. You are praised
for your work and asked if you can leave your cassette for another showing at a
quieter time. You agree, and descend in the elevator carrying a limp shopping
bag.
A week later, a cassette arrives from the client bearing
your familiar company logo, but upon opening the outer case, you discover that
you have received the sample cassette of your most active competitor.
There are compensations for all of this. Your competitor has
probably been through the same routine and is now just as perplexed at having
received your cassette by the same accidental circumstances. But one day the
phone rings and you find that you've been awarded the job. Suddenly, you
realize all of the previous disconcerting moments were not so bad; it was all
just a small price to pay for what we call the march of progress.
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