The Animated Scene: A New Journey

In his last "The Animated Scene" column, Joseph Gilland ruminates on the last year, his new book and some big changes.

Well, here I sit at my computer keyboard, truly at a crossroads in my life. This new year started with both triumph and tragedy for me, and there is something in the air that smells like massive change. Not only for me, but also for the whole world, and especially the United States of America. My small world still revolves almost entirely around the art of animation, but I am as touched by world events as anyone, and before I leave my column here at Animation World Network, I would like to weave a tapestry of animation and worldly events, as well as the profound personal journey that we all embark upon, simply by being alive at this time, on this planet.

Late last summer, I began a new journey in my animation career, as I was working around the clock to finish my book about special effects animation. For the first time in almost 30 years, I found myself out of work, with no immediate prospects for a new job in plain sight. It was a perfect time to throw myself into the final difficult stages of finishing my book, an undertaking that proved to be far more complicated and challenging than I had ever imagined. I was completely strapped financially, and there was quite a bit of stress related to that, me being a single parent with a healthy and extremely active teenage boy to provide for. But I applied myself 100 percent to the task at hand. My book, Elemental Magic: The Art of Special Effects Animation, had been in the works for more than four years at that point. Lucky for me, I had a real deadline to meet this time, and that was just the incentive I needed. (My apologies to the editors at AWN for not quite making my column deadlines on multiple occasions) So the book got finished, right around the same time that I found a small independent animation studio in the Vancouver area, looking for a visual effects supervisor with the kind of experience I could bring to the table. Whew! It was a close call. I was still finishing the last touches of the book, working 'till the wee hours of the morning, when I first started designing and planning the special effects elements for the new Thomas the Tank Engine series being produced at Nitrogen Studios.

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