HELLO!(WELCOME !!) I AM JEFFREY FADEN (NOT HIS DAD) AND I AM POSTING IN MY HJOURNAL ONLINE!!! I WROET ANOTHDER COlLEgE ESSAy AND I THINK IT IS TOTAlLY RAD! (IT was NOT WRITTEN BY MY DAD!!!) TAKE A LOOK ALl YOU COOL HAXOr PEOPLE!!!
Forty bucks an hour! I proudly headed home to tell Dad that the zillions of hours I’d spent refining my web design had finally paid off. Even more than the Best in County award I received for my website and the First Place blue ribbon for my comic strip at the Marin County fair. A local octogenarian had hired me to animate a video he was producing. It was a simple idea: Rupert, a worm-like line inches forward and retreats, tracing out a map of the world coordinated with a musical score.
Figuring I could knock it out in a couple of weeks, I started working at Mr. Parker’s house and then continued to work on the project at home. My new employer bought me the coolest drawing pad and I was anxious to get to work. Although the video was only supposed to be five minutes long, I had to generate about 7000 frames. After a couple of weeks, I attempted to show Mr. Parker my progress and discovered that the Flash program I was using on my Windows PC did not work on his Macintosh. What a bummer! At that point sweet Mr. Parker morphed into a grouch and accused me of making this a lifetime project. Hey, it was my lifetime and I didn’t want to spend it on a retractable worm.
Luckily there was a Kinko’s down the street, and I spent a day there using a Macintosh to redo the animation. I went back to Kinko’s the next day and found that my file had disappeared without a trace. I wanted to disappear, too, but I decided to stick it out. Moving into Kinko’s, I spent day after day there, bringing my food in from the KFC next door. Over time the Flash file grew too big, even for all the systems at Kinko’s and I had to beg a friend of my Dad’s, who had a graphic design studio, to borrow his “big Mac” to complete the project.
Over the next weeks I made several trips to Mr. Parker’s house to show him what I thought was my final version, only to be sent back for additional changes. Feelings were hurt and eventually I stopped charging him for my time and worked for free. The video production person wanted me to make the worm-line thicker and the musician wanted changes to the tempo. My Dad told me that I should have done the animation programatically instead of by hand, but it was too late for that. This project kept coming back like an Austin Powers sequel.
Months later I received a package in the mail: the Rupert video. It was terrific and my name was right there in the credits, “Animated by Jeffrey Faden.” After surviving Rupert, I’m more careful now about undertaking projects and making commitments. But, I think there will always be a conflict between completing a job on time and doing the best job I can.