the ilm years

In those years, I referred to it as the best marriage I ever had, and it was true. Industrial Light and Magic believed in me, believed that I had potential, was willing to trust my judgement, and encouraged me in every way possible. And I in turn, brought all my love to bear on being the very best version of myself I could possibly be. So that is the short of it.

The call that day changed everything. A voice on the other end of the line said," This is ILM, we would like you to come in for an interview". I responded that, indeed, I had heard of ilm, but I had a child and responsibilities, and knew how many hours they put in. I could not possibly consider working for them. He answered," You sound perfect, come on in". So I did.

Hired on the spot, I returned to a husband none too happy, 'That should have been my job', you should sell flowers on one of those carts along College Avenue.

And so it began. At the time, I was one of three women employed in the model shop, women at that time were the receptionists, in production, and other support departments. I was initially hired to work what they considered to be part time, forty hours a week, the standard being closer to seventy hours a week at the height of production. I still had to rush to daycare in Oakland across the Richmond Bridge from Marin County to pick up my son, do all the laundry and grocery shopping, and any other domestic chores considered womens work at that time. It turned into a crazy lifestyle, constantly rushing, maniac, but the work environment, the people incredible, at that time still so nascent in its trajectory, it all felt so new, exciting, and because it was so, challenged all of us to do better than we had ever thought possible.

Originally hired to work on Howard the Duck, I walked into the model shop and my first project was to make the letters for the title. Oh sure, I know how to use an Exacto knife . I gripped it hard as I attempted to cut my first circle. A moment later, the blade was lodged, a bullseye right in the center of my eye. My supervisor drove me to a doctor, who applied a thick viscous substance and covered it with an eye patch. Should be fine, the eye is one of the fastest healing parts of the body, and so it was. I was good as new pretty much within a day or two.

I built the small scale apartment building that Howard the Duck lived in, and the much bigger scale building with another modelmaker, the flyby planets, the rings around saturn done on plexiglass attached to a lathe that I painted while it turned. So many firsts that first year, and the years following. At some point, it was decided that I should be the person painting the large backdrops, twenty feet high and one hundred feet long. The first day I looked at the vast warehouse space, the canvas on the wall, and the cherry picker lift, and I, with a fear of heights, terrorized at the prospect of actually using it to paint skies, well luckily with no one to see me, I sat for a day, gathering courage, going up a little at a time, heart racing, trembling, lying on the floor of the platform. But I did it, and as the days went by my comfort working high up, being able to look over the entire concrete floor, gave me a certain feeling of accomplishment.

Until one day. Up there with the painting, concentrating, I moved ahead. Suddenly the lift came to a standstill. I looked down, there lay the cord, disconnected from the outlet. I, twenty feet in the air, the highest the lift would go, and in that moment I realized why it was called far away bay. Good luck! One could scream for hours, and I did, no one heard or came. It became abundantly clear that my fear of being high up on a lift above concrete ground was well founded, but I pummeled that thought down, and made the decision. I could either stay up in the air and die of hunger, after all, no one was coming to check up on me, or I could ignore that sign, you know the one, 'Do not climb over the sides', and take my chances climbing down the scissors, which I eventually did. Back on the ground, I returned and told my story. Next day I was given my lifeline, a walkie talkie. Today we all have our "walkie talkies" attached to our person at all times, unless of course, it loses its charge.

That first year, every day stretching my knowledge and skills into skeins of neatly bundled yarns, stories to be retold into the future, so many memorable moments, life within a life, part of a life, a whole life consuming that other life, and then there was Julia. I was pregnant through most of Howard the Duck with her and by month six the state of my condition was clearly visible, even to those who had not learned yet where babies come from. All the modelers, most all of the male gender, watched with fascination, eager to watch over my son Ross (now Ethan but that is another story for another time), when I brought him to work. They plied him with models, the cheap models one could buy in toy shops, ilm bought in bulk airplanes, cars, to be broken, stripped apart, and made into entirely new readymades for Star Wars films. They gave him styrofoam, glue, assorted odd pieces, paint and sat by his side, encouraging the budding modelmaker, all in the interest of testing their resolve to settle down and have their own kids.

When Julia arrived, a readymade in her own way, she also became part of the ilm family. And following within the year, her father irascible still wishing I had chosen flower seller as my career instead, had made it clear, his work hours started at nine in the morning and by three he was done. He went into his studio and painted. I worked eight to 5, and probably arrived in the Oakland hills twenty minutes later, moving at nearly the speed of light, I could be seen traveling the outer lines of the bridge separated for vehicles in distress, the only lane open for frantic mothers with pedal to the metal needing a siren on top to reach their /my child in time for closing of the after school care program. All the while, my husband, the artiste, calmly sat, studied, probably sighed, smoked some marijuana, and made printing blocks carved out of wood for his art. Only ten minutes from the schools, his work too important, he left the raising to his wife and wanted his supper on the table at six. Well, that did not exactly work now, did it. So there I was, moving the kids to San Anselmo, closer to work, a small ancient hunting cabin on a hill, until about a year later, I moved to Petaluma. with my children, Ross and Julia.

But here I have digressed, as it seems life usually does. The eight years moved along quickly and by 1990 I was handed what looked to be a dreamed of opportunity. The Director of Operations, who had supervised the model shop, approached me with an offer to move to the matte department, where a small group painted the backgrounds on shower doors, beautiful work, photoreal, the work of one artist, truly brilliant, up close looked completely abstract, but move a foot away, and it all became incredibly photoreal. As the computer revolution dawned, the department moved into computers and Jeff, my old supervisor, thought I might thrive in such an environment. That was not quite how the story turned out. The next morning I showed up in the department, he had assured me that I would be handheld through the process, guided personally by one of the artists assigned to me. So I sat, computer in front of me, dark, the big eye shut. I knew nothing about computers, not even how to turn one on, and no matte painter stood holding my hand. I soon realized, that I was on my own. That evening I bought the book on Photoshop, and riveted to the page, skimmed through, lined yellow, and carried it back to work the next morning as a revered classical work. Then I got to work. That was Tuesday. By Friday, I guess the matte department supervisor began wondering what I was doing and drifted over to my side. What have you got there? I showed him. Monday morning I sat down in front of my computer, turned it on, and to my surprise my painting was missing. "What happened", I asked, and he replied, "Oh, I was showing it to someone and erased it by mistake". Oops. In that moment I knew. I called my brother who bought me a computer and I painted the Swiss Alps with my one pixel brush, trying my best at realism. When I returned to work, I brought the disk with me to show a friend. As we were looking and talking, the head of the art department happened to walk through the room, took a double take, did you do that, can I show that to the other head?. He took the disk and later that day came back with an offer. Would you like to work in the art department part time? My answer was no. By now, as a single parent, I could not afford a part time position, which as it turned out was the right decision.

The union liaison hearing what had happened, came to me with a plan. A friend of his was the single viewpaint artist at ilm. Viewpaint, an entirely new program developed at ilm, and still in the birthing stage enabled one to paint in real time. The model moved in the screen as you painted, the painter saw it applied to the model but in reality the paint was actually applied to a sheet of paper which then wrapped to the model. Would I be interested in meeting with Carolyn? Yes. She had just finished painting all the models for Jurassic Park, and felt exhausted, bone tired and mentally unequipped to move on to the next show. Still so early, the company had no concept of how important this department was to become, the only reason a woman had been given such an important creative role. And Carolyn had taken to the position with tremendous focus, an ability to work directly with the research department, creating and developing this state of the art program. It was a number of years before any other company had a program so advanced.

Realizing the need for an additional painter, the visual effects supervisors made a decision to bring a medical illustrator from New York to work alongside Carolyn, but of course they wanted to see the reel of his work first. So there they sat in D screening room as it went dark and the reel started. Of course, as he expected, men ruled the industry, and he was going to give them a show. The illustrator had made an animation of a woman masturbating. According to Carolyn who was there, the only woman, the visual effect supervisors, started making excuses to leave. When the lights finally came up, there was Carolyn, and the by now, embarrassed one would hope, illustrator, put his head down and left. The next day, I walked in the door and Carolyn would have hired me even if I only knew how to draw stick figures.

Her next project involved painting the dragon for Dragonslayer , and she had spent months meticulously painting the creature. The technical director whose job it was to bring the model to life by using the individual maps, adding the lighting, creating the texture, the look, with one touch of the wrong button, he deleted all her work, The one button that erased all those beautiful maps had no backups just in case. Needless to say that was quickly rectified but too late. For Carolyn, I think in that moment, all her desire to continue with future projects, receded down the rabbit hole of cremated dreams. No one could have been more generous, carefully, methodically, she took me through the steps of creating the maps for viewpaint, and how to see them working all together to create a believable object.

When she left at the end of Dragonslayer, Jean, who had been hired subsequently and myself were the only two painters left and by default we came to head the department and be lead painters for the next twelve years.

Quite an incredible time it was. It seemed overnight, in the special effects world, the paint on models became an incredibly valued skill, and with so few people knowing how to do it, we became important members of "the team". You had the person who built the model, the person who chained the anatomy which made it able to be animated, the painter (me), the match mover, who placed the being into the environment, and the technical director, who lighted the creature, human, vehicle, object, or architecture, and using the many different types of maps, merged them all together to create the believable. There were others involved, the art department of course created the concept art, the visual effects supervisor oversaw all of it, keeping the entire scene matched to the film.

Three events stand out, as being extraordinary , perhaps even in todays terms. I cannot remember which came first, , but probably if I looked back at paychecks I could tell you. Disney called. Would I be willing to work for them. Would I just come down to have a talk with them, and although I expressed surprise, and reluctance to consider any offer, the human resources person was sweet, persistent, and kept calling. So I went down. At the time, at ilm I was probably earning around fifty thousand, which to my mind, I could hardly believe my good fortune, but Disney offered ninety, quickly changing it to one hundred thousand and then one hundred and twenty, all within a week. I resisted. Disney, not being used to someone declining an offer I guess, upped their salary again to one hundred and forty, I said no. The next call they said, we have our lawyer on the phone, and he said," How about one hundred and seventy thousand", and as I demurred, he shot back, "What is it going to take?" My response came back. I am a single parent. I have two children that must go between families. I do not want to be flying back and forth. My children need stability. And although you believe you need me right at this moment to set up your shop, I love ilm and they have been loyal to me for many years now, within a year or two, you will find someone cheaper, someone more ambitious, and you will let me go. It is not worth it. And that was the end of it. But the story gets better.

Somehow ILM learned that Disney had courted me, hoping to lure me away with offers of substantial earnings. And suddenly my paycheck exploded. Now it jumped to ninety thousand, one hundred thousand, one hundred and twenty thousand, and hundred and forty thousand, and finally, in my last year, one hundred and fifty thousand, an unbelievable sum for the time.

One day, I was called into D theater, and as it turned out the team I most often worked with was there as well. We were asked to look at a piece of film and when the lights came up, asked if we could create a believable human. Dennis, our visual effects supervisor looked at me and said, "Susan, can we do this?", I thought for a moment, and said yes. That was all it took. The next day it was announced that we would do The Hulk. Because it was a first human in special effects, even if he was green, we got to go to the oscars that year. Although we did not win, still to be there, something we had only watched on our tv screens at home, and although we sat up high in the balcony, it was quite a thrill.

A project so beyond the capabilities of any effects shop at the time, a two year project to develop a fully animated film, the work to my mind so beautifully articulated and painted, remember, we were the only ones with real time painting capabilities, this was the time during which Toy Story came out, and although they had a very tight wonderful story and great characters with big personalities, still they were limited in their paint. They painted on small sheets, simple patterns or colors, while we could work in meticulous detail and larger sheets to retain the look without stretching as the map, in essence shrink wrapped to the model. The first character you see on the home page is one of those characters. Sadly, it got caught in the transition of power as one company president left, the one who loved the project, replaced by the next who could hardly wait to axe the project, which she did, first day on the job. It remains my very favorite work at ILM.