Caltrops - Still Life

Forum Overview :: Still Life

by Fussbett 06/13/2005, 1:55am PDT

That company loves their Quicktime animations in shows. Fuck Director text when you can have hard-to-edit rendered text in an animated movie. This show featured over 180 Quicktime movies. Gay!!!

One week from the show date, the office I was at had a complete meltdown. The Boss was putting pressure on the freelance project manager, who was then putting pressure on the salaried junior graphics guy. The junior guy was then putting pressure on Adobe After Effects which doesn't like to be pushed around, and mistakes were happening. His patience was frayed from coming in on (free salaried) weekends and early weekday start times. A timebomb. The project manger is wondering why she has to make the same corrections three times with this guy, and the Boss is wondering why this segment of the show is a week overdue (based on my time estimate (frowny)). One week before the show date, a large portion of the Quicktime movie animations were done and had been "proofed" by the project manager, so they could now be "final proofed" by the Boss.

The Boss comes flying down the stairs to say that she found many problems in the "proofed" material, everything is a disaster and there needs to be a meeting upstairs, right away. She specifically told me to join. The meeting was sureal. The Boss asked how can the company be fixed at this point. Do they need to hire more people, need to change the workflow, what? What could be done to fix all the problems? You see, everything is a complete disaster and the company is broken. Help her help us. Of course the logical question comes next, but it's asked with a tone of impatience from the junior graphics guy: "What are the problems you found?" She wouldn't say! Her reasoning is that she didn't want to talk about excuses or specifics, but to address the overall problems with the workflow. The obvious problem with this from our perspective is that it's impossible to fix something you don't know is broken. Finally at the end of the meeting in which I said nothing, the Boss gives up an example of a problem: one of the client screenshots is wrong. The project manager immediately says "Ok that was my fault" but is cut off with "THIS ISN'T ABOUT ASSIGNING BLAME". Problems #2 through #10 are credit bar spacing. Let's bring up the folder again:

So if a credit bar sits at B/L (Bottom Left), the space between the end of the person's name and the right edge of the credit bar must be consistent and currently THEY ARE NOT, LETS BURN THE PLACE DOWN. This makes the junior graphics guy FLIP OUT because he sat with the Boss for half an hour, doing 6 credit bars exactly to her spacing specs, at which point she left, telling him to "just eyeball it" for the remaining 60 bars. Unsurprisingly the eyeballs of the Boss and the juinor guy are not identical, and there is discrenpency. I could see both sides of the argument -- the spacing was definitely inconsistent by sometimes 15 pixels, but on the other hand it doesn't fucking matter. Those 15 pixels don't matter, no one will ever notice, even if they noticed they wouldn't care, and our jobs are almost pointless. I kept both of these viewpoints to myself. Junior graphics guy's stance was that the spacing was PERFECT. To illustrate this he held up his measuring device to the monitor: two lines drawn on a piece of paper. Evidently unaware of the massive curvature of his monitor, parallax error, and human error, he rested his case on this final irrefutable evidence. Faced with someone telling her the sky is not blue, the Boss yells "OH FUCK THIS" and storms back to her office, slamming the door. With the Boss hiding in her ostrich hole, an argument erupts between the project manager and the junior graphics guy, at which point many fucks are yelled, fingers pointed and blames assigned. Both storm out of the office.

Work resumed the next day without problems. I've noticed that about people who fly off the handle easily: they can often repair their relationships easily as well. I'd quit if someone said those things to me, but not these hot heads. What did I think of the show? It was fine. I would've sent it off as-is, not because I've got job malaise, but because it was within acceptable limits. Things were especially fine as there was a week left anyway. I think people like to panic in a effort to make their lives seem more important.

While it seems everyone else was taking a summer vacation I took a vacation from being off work. Now I'm back (to being off work). Did anyone notice I was gone?