You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy.
Free Lunch.
My sister is one of the lead animators for Dream Works in the San Francisco area.
She has brought characters you know to life from many hit films including Madagascar and Shrek and How to Train your Dragon.
She has always been an artistic free spirit. Like me, she has always known what she would do when she grew up.
When I was a kid, I had an art pad. It was poster sized, and I did a lot of free hand drawings, mostly with magic markers.
My art was ok. Nothing special. I went to college and left the art pad and pens in the living room. When I came home, my sister had picked up where I left off.
The pictures went from OK, to “somebody in this family has talent.”
My sister graduates high school and goes to Cal Arts. That’s the equivalent of wanting to study medicine and going to Harvard or wanting to blow stuff up and going to West Point.
She is now a fixture in the animation industry and I always stay to watch her name roll down the screen when I see one of her films.
She has worked for Dream Works for the last 10 years give or take.
The company has just moved to a shining business park in Redwood City. Not far from this location are other Silicon Valley Giants like Facebook and Google.
We park outside the shimmering tower on Seaport Blvd. There is a colorful banner out front welcoming you to the facility. The logo is one you all know, a little boy sitting on the edge of a crescent moon, fishing.
The symbol would seem to represent dreaming and creating and imagining what can be.
As we walk to the front door, even the hedges reflect this spirit, manicured neatly into that corporate logo.
Even the gardeners are artists here I think to myself.
As I walk into the building I think about where I work. I think about the first thing that I see. It is a dumpster. It is green and has rust. It’s kind of like the boy sitting on the moon fishing, but mostly it is a dumpster. This is what greets me at the employee entrance. Nothing says good morning better than the rotting stench of whatever people ate the day before discarded and fermenting in 100 degree heat. The dumpster doesn’t say dream or be all you can be. The dumpster says, “damn that smell is horrific, how fast can I get into the building and shut the smell out.”
We enter the Dream Works lobby and I feel excitement. Kind of the feeling you get when you walk into an amusement park and the sound of the roller coasters off in the distance gets your blood pumping.
The woman at the front desk is a smiling welcome mat of hello. She has two huge computer terminals in a glass counter before her. The computers are like 42 inch plasmas that she moves her hands over, moving high resolution graphics.
“Sign in over there” she says politely.
“what’s this?” I ask.
“a non disclosure agreement” she says. “you promise that if you see something we are working on here you won’t talk about it to anyone.”
Exclusives. I understand that readily.
We all sign the electronic waiver. The nice lady hands us passes.
The passes are Dream Works characters, stickers, that say Visitor. It’s like going to Magic Mountain and we are all children applying the cool stickers to our shirts.
“I want the hippo,” my son yells. “Aunt Melanie worked on Gloria.”
The lobby is fun and inviting. There are statues of characters from movies you know and love.
There are framed posters of animation that show the process of character development.
My sister comes bouncing into the lobby hugging everyone. She has fire red hair and an artistic twinkle in her eye that sees the world through a cartoon set of glasses.
We pose for pictures in front of the massive Dream Works Art in the front lobby.
She takes us on a brief tour showing us movie posters for films not yet released. She shows us crude etchings of Shrek when he was just a twinkle in some animators eye.
Then she takes us to the cafeteria. But calling this place a cafeteria, is like calling the Louvre a storage shed.
I stare into a sprawling space with a dozen plasma tv’s all broadcasting the olympics.
The front of the room is adorned with an 8 foot Kung Fu Panda figuring that the kids immediately run to and begin posing for iphone pictures in front of.
This cafeteria is like a bistro, with open windows to the bay beyond. Light dances through the atrium mixing elegantly with the ambiance.
There is music wafting down that I can only imagine helps with my digestion.
Chefs work behind a glass lined counter, like the servers at the finest Sunday Brunch buffet. They wear tall white chef hats and they are skilled at their trade.
The array of food is almost embarrassing. There is home made pizza cooked in a brick oven here, sliced roast beef there, a fajita bar across the way.
There is pomegranate juice and a Mojita Mix without the rum and pink lemon aide and chocolate milk.
The coffee and tea station would make Starbucks envious.
There is an ice cream sundae bar with chips and sprinkles and cookie crumbs.
“Wow!” is all I can think.
I look at the employees moving through the line, their trays piled high with food. I think about all the starving children in India. They would love to wear a visitor’s pass to this “cafeteria.”
The environment is so upscale, so positive, so nurturing.
I think about my lunch room at work. There is a refrigerator with a sign reading: “All food left will be thrown out Friday night.”
“What’s that green gloop on the door?” someone once asked me.
There is no green gloop here. Green Glop is the title of the next box office hit at Dream Works. It’s a story about a little germ who wants to be loved but sadly he lives at the CDC.
I think about the stains in the sink at my work. I think about the plastic sporks in the box. SPORKS? Is it such a cost saver?
I think about the bulletin board with the 1980’s graphics and exciting reading material about work place safety and OSHA regulations.
Again: WOW.
I am a little nervous looking at the marinated chicken, the 20 foot long salad bar, the sandwich station.
“Where’s the cashier?” I ask my sister.
“It’s free,” she says with a huge smile.
I shake my head like a cartoon character.
“You’re kidding?”
“Nope. We’re all going to get so fat working here,” she chuckles. “That’s why I’m eating a salad.”
I look around
The employees all appear to be normal size, even though their plates are piled high with calories.
“We just moved in to this space,” she says with a grin.
We sit and eat and laugh.
Then she takes us upstairs into her new work station. She shows us characters she is animating on her huge computer screens. They are figures with lines that she moves ever so slightly.
24 frames per second she says to the kids. That means I have to animate 24 frames to create one second.
The kids don’t get it, but I do.
It means that my sister has the patience to sit at a computer and work on the same project, the same vision, the same few seconds for weeks, maybe months. It means that she is given a scene in a block buster movie and told to bring it to life. She gets to listen to the voice of Jack Black or an AC/DC song over and over and over while she makes that 8 seconds explode off the screen.
And like all our jobs, she has a boss. A boss who can walk by at any time and say, “I don’t like it. Start over.”
It’s fascinating to us, but to her, she uses the word assembly line over and over again.
Like factory workers making Nike shoes in a sweat shop in Indonesia, she means that a team of people create rough story boards of what the scene will look like. Then a group of people add rudimentary motion to them. Then another group puts some details on that flat image moving across the screen. There is stock music that will be changed and dialogue that could be altered.
Then it comes to her group, the animators, and she will take the components of the visual and add texture and smiles and bring life to the Frankenstein monster.
It is alive.
It is cool, but to her it is a job, but a job she loves.
I tell my kids that life is a quest to find many things, including a job that you can love, that you don’t hate doing.
Try and find a job where the stench of yesterday’s trash doesn’t diminish your enthusiasm for the day ahead.
We thank her for our tour and all walk out into the California sunshine enthusiastically.
You guys want to take off your visitor’s badges, I ask the kids.
They all smile and shake their heads no.
Like kids at the amusement park, they want to keep the moment alive.
And that is crazy.