15 April 2024 - 12:20am

The Rest of 2016 (Part 3):

On my first day at Scala I recognized two people who'd worked at the Sister School back in 2001-2002. They were friendly, didn't remember me, but remembered The 3D School and the (former) U-Boss, who had in the intervening years acquired a somewhat rosily-burnished character in their memories.

There was one other new hire in Layout, a fellow named Dwight. He'd somehow negotiated an agreement w/ the acting Team Lead to make all his layouts in Lilienthal. I tried not to let my envy show.

Here's how life went for the next two weeks:

I got up early (for me), rode cross-town bus(es) to Long Beach, rode the Blue Line to DTLA, took the Red Line to North Hollywood, caught the local shuttle to Scala. Built layouts in 3ds Max, imported tracked cameras, added various static (i.e. unrigged) character assets, did some very minor shader stuff in V-Ray that I can no longer recall, then pooped out a preview media file for use by the next department down the assembly line (Animation, usually).

"What's a layout", you ask? In VFX it's a very simple 3d model of the environment that is visible to the camera in any given shot. It could replicate part or all of a set on a soundstage or backlot, or an existing location out in the world, somewhere. Its main purpose is to provide a reasonably accurate spatial volume for the animators to work in. Sometimes the lighting and simulation departments will use a layout as a guide for what they do. Sometimes a layout is just a ground plane. Sometimes it's more complex. It all depends on what the shot requires.

Scala was on the 4th floor of a medium sized-office building. The floor was half empty, possibly because they'd had to find a space in a hurry. Some of the vacant cubicles sported dry marker artwork on the whiteboards, left by the previous tenants. I'd heard they were some Disney-owned subsidiary. Not sure who they were, or where they went.

I don't remember how much overtime I worked or was offered during these first two weeks. Probably not much. Although I do remember getting back to Los Alamitos near midnight once, after having to foot it over a mile because the last connecting bus had stopped running. That might've been my last weeknight staying at Kate's place.

Kate still needed me out by the 28th, and there was no way I was going to be able to come up with first and last month’s rent (plus security deposit) on any place in L.A. in those first two weeks. But I had a temporary landing pad in North Hollywood...

This was due to the kindness and generosity of Everett, an old college friend, and his wife Jillian. During the preceding summer, in the midst of our displacement crisis, they’d made a provisional offer of a 10-day couch stay once I’d found employment. I sent a nervous text my first week at Scala to see if the offer was still available. It was. Their only caveat was that I'd need to keep a low profile so as not to aggravate their overly suspicious and mildly deranged landlady. They told me some stories about her that I'll have to recount later.

So on the last Sunday evening of the month I packed all my stuff together -it fit within a 2x3x3' volume, more or less- and Kate drove me up to North Hollywood. I thanked her profusely and hugged her goodbye when she dropped me off. Ev and Jil got me set up in their guest room, and we stayed up for a while catching up on what had been going on in our lives since the last time we'd all been in the same room (in roughly 2 years).

There’s something I haven’t addressed yet. This would be the nearly imperceptible membrane I passed through sometime during weeks 1 and 3. The deep misery in which I was dwelling didn’t exactly fall away (I still have to resist the urge to metaphorize it as a spent rocket booster dropping during separation), but it did pass out of mind. All of my energy at the time was focused on not fucking up. I’d been through too many promising starts to get complacent (at that point, anyway). I fully expected to get dismissed at any moment. In fact, I was only technically hired through the end of the season in mid-May, with a sort of hanging ”we’ll see how you do by then” suggestion that I might get called back for more work afterwards.

My drug test was in a building kitty corner from the Disney studio lot. Drug tests are one of the only things I feel 100% confident about. I’m such a bore. After the test I went looking for some lunch and found myself near N Hollywood Way & W Alameda. Across the Ventura freeway and down the street was, lo and behold, Warner Brothers studios. This was what I had glimpsed while walking around during my visit to the Step-Dad School back in 2002 . Here I was, only 12 years after I half-jokingly predicted my arrival. Ok, I wasn’t on the lot per se, but WB was Scala’s main client at the time, and it was in the same town. Close enough.

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