From Book to Film

Reference Photo

Original Pencil Drawing

Watercolor Illustration From the Book

Whatever You Dream You Can Do, Begin It

 Whatever you can do or dream you can do begin it. Boldness has Genius Power and Magic in it. Goethe

I’ll begin by telling you about the small breaks. The pinholes of opportunity that allowed me to progress. There are the big ones like being hired at Disney Feature Animation as a computer cleanup person.* My dad thought I was cleaning the machines. Working my way up to Animator then Lead animator at Industrial Light and Magic on shows like Dragonheart and Mars Attacks, and lots of non obvious, smaller ones. 

I’d like to point to the smaller ones especially. These are the ones that meant the world to me when they happened, even though they didn’t necessarily dash me forwards in my career. Or at least I didn’t think so at the time. 

**** thank you Tina!

A Calling

 Part of this memoir is about my time at the larger studios. Eventually trying my hand at creating stories with my own characters. But then there’s the part about the struggle of life. To believe in myself. To choose a path. To find work, the inner doubts of whether or not I could succeed always haunting me. 

Growing up we lived on the corner house right next to the schools I attended. All through high school I would run across the street at lunch time. My mother would make me a grilled cheese sandwich and for 30 minutes I got lost in the voices and Hoyt Curtain rifts of music of the Flintstones. I knew the dialogue by heart.  

I knew the stories by heart. 

The Hot Piano with '88 Fingers Louis'  Dripper about a seal that follows Fred home from an aquarium, and 'the New Neighbors' starring the Gruesomes . Oh and another favorite 'Giggles Flintstones' with Fred and Barney spending the night in a haunted mansion, only to find out it was all a prank. 

I found the characters charming and relatable, because I often saw them dealing with the same issues my mother and father did. Much funnier. Getting a new pet, adjusting to new neighbors, camping disasters, money class structures to name a few.  

The times during my life that I thought “that happened in the Flintstones.”  I loved watching and listening to the charming sincere characters caught in relatable situations every weekday at noon. 

I wanted to do art and I LOVED animation. 

I'd heard about an animation program at Sheridan College, about 30 miles from where I lived in Hamilton Ontario. I’d heard that this program had teachers that had come from Disney. 

The advice I got from the counsellor in high school was that a community College wasn’t going to give me a good career. My grades were too high (they were not high compared to today’s standards) I also love animals and thought about becoming a vet “Look at the vet courses in college, they’re cage cleaning (assistant) courses -  not becoming an actual vet.” Guidance counselor, Westmount high school. 

At the time I wondered, “Who are those lucky people that get to make cartoons for a living?” 

Even so, I decided to leave for Guelph to pursue becoming a vet, and ignore my dream of working in animation.

University of Guelph

Biology and math were not what I had anticipated. Especially biology. I hated the smell of formaldehyde. It was one of the worse smells imaginable. I hated knives. Disecting animals was not for me. I’d done a bit in high school, but this was worse. Still I thought I’d give it a go. By the end of my first year, I knew this wasn’t for me. 

What I had enjoyed was my Biophysics class, where I learned the mechanics of animal movement. It was an ‘online’ class before computers. I sat and listened to a module off a tape machine in the library, then took the test for that module. Then did the next module. By the end I’d scored over 90 per cent. Animal locomotion was definitely something I was passionate about. Oh and calculus. 

Years later I would find myself sitting in the small theater at Disney Feature Animation at 1420 flower street. I was surrounded by the most talented group of individuals that to this day I consider my LA family, listening to a lecture by paleontologist Stuart Sumida. One of the leading experts in Hollywood for animal locomotion on feature films. This was a crazy improbability. The film was the Lion King, and this wouldn't happen for another 10 years. 

Art College

I decided I was going to leave Guelph for Sheridan College. Why I told my calculus teacher this I don’t know. I went to him for help with a Calculus problem. The teacher asked me, ‘if you’re leaving anyways why do you care about this?’

For some reason I told him that I needed to know. It was a challenge. Like a puzzle. Problem solving. Check the box for liking problem solving and math. The teacher showed me how to solve for the derivative and get a nice ‘ease in’ curve that came in very handy later on in technical animation. 

My first day at Sheridan College, my hands were shaking so badly that when I got my coffee at the cafeteria I couldn’t hold it steady enough to drink it. In my home room class I was seated at my own animation table. Peg bar, paper. 

The students around me COULD DRAW. Oh my god, could they draw. One of the students that sat near my desk was Andy Knight. He’d go on to open his own 2D animation studio. These were natural talents. 

I quickly realized that I didn’t know anything about structure in drawing. 

In life drawing class Bill Kettlewell would look over my shoulder and say ‘having difficulties today, are we Linda?’ I scored an E in his class. 

I was sunk.

I think the bottom was my 1st year animation exam. It asked to draw an octopus on a trampoline. My teacher’s comment, Vivian Ludlow was “yikes.” 

Years later I asked her why she’d passed me in 1st year. 

She said that she saw a spark in me.

My other life drawing teacher Suzanna taught us gesture drawing. I did well in that, More about quick sketches, locomotion and movement than draftsmanship. 

I had some understanding of movement through the U of G biophysics class. And the hours at the drawing board was sharpening my skills of observation.

Gesture drawing seemed to come more naturally to me. 

I might become a real artist after all.

Omnibus Computer Graphics

I was taking the 1 year post graduate program in Computer Graphics, when I saw an ad for an animator at a commercials house called Omnibus Computer Graphics. The ad said that they were looking for a 'Unix C' programmer. I asked my teacher Dick Friesen if he would write me a letter of recommendation. He said no, and told me to put everything you've got in your portofolio, and "go nail the damn job." 

So I brought everything to my job interview. Drawings, background paintings, 16 mm film, even print outs of PL1 programs from Guelph. I layed it all out on the coffee table in the office we met in.

What do you think they picked up first? The PL1 programs. I wondered, "What was I getting into?

My first week at Omnibus I did photocopying. The receptionist was furious. She pointed out that because I was a woman, that’s why they’d asked me to do it. 

I had to learn unix.

I mv’d everywhere (moved) and rm’d (removed) everything. I wiped out my account. Heads were shaking around me.

Omnibus and Abel were industry leaders, meaning they worked on, or in many cases developed, the highest-end, most specialized graphic workstations available before desktop 3D workstations became common. 

I remember thinking on one of my first days at Omnibus in January 1984 “where is the drawing tablet and the pen?”

I was asked to do a robot walk. We were using PMat and PPoly. A 3D language tool developed at the NYIT Computer Graphics Lab. These tools were pivotal for creating 3D computer animation in the era of early 80s

I made a robot from simple shapes. I cut out the shapes. Put them on graph paper. Measured the angles for the bends in the legs and arms, typed it all in.

We were in the company board meeting. They were going to show my training assignment the robot walk. I’d gotten one of the editors to put music on it, so I thought it looked pretty good.

The music played, the robot walked. A treadmill cycle. The music ended, the robot stopped. The editor used a freeze frame. 

Rick Ballabuck looked around the room with a look on his face - See, she DID IT!!!

Next assignment a logo. Again,  photostat over graph paper write out the coordinates, type them in.

I was sent to the University of Toronto for night classes in Unix C programming, so I could write the animation scripts for the logo commercials. 

I was at Omnibus until it closed its doors in April 1987.

The Ballroom Beauty and the Beast

 The camera needed to follow Belle and the Beast into the Ballroom, follow and swirl around them as they danced, then follow them out of the ballroom.

The entire film was hand drawn, so we had to create 3D stand in guides for Belle and the Beast. We printed every frame out on paper, supplied them to the hand drawn artists, who would draw over our guides. 

When I say supply, I mean we put the stacks of of paper on dollies, and rolling them outside, then down the street to another one of our buildings. (confirm with Tina or Don Hahn)

In the opening shot, I moved the camera too quickly into the room, luckily the characters feet are out of frame at the bottom, otherwise their feet would be sliding along the floor. At the end of the scene, the Beast was meant to open the door for Belle. I did not give enough time for them to walk over there, so instead the door ‘magically’ opens as they walk over to it. A happy accident, that stayed in the film.

 

Once the song ends, and they exit the ballroom, there is no more use of CG.  The shot at the end of the film of the Ballroom is a 2D hand painted background. 

I remember Don Hahn being adamant about that decision, I think his exact words were "don't argue with me on this one." Looking at the film again after all these years, I know that was the right call. He just knew. 

When Don Hahn and others were working on Beauty and the Beast expressed doubts, they mentioned, "I think it's actually going to be a success," to which Howard Ashman simply replied, "Well, I could have told you that". While Ashman passed away in March 1991, before the film's release, his conviction was realized when Beauty and the Beast became a massive commercial success and the first animated film to be nominated for a Best Picture Academy