sent from: London, UK. destination: London, UK

This is my last week working on “Gravity”, and my last week at my current job. This was the leaving email I sent out:

Be kind to the lighters; they don’t know which bake is the correct one to use either.

Be sympathetic to the animators; for they suffer the director’s lashings more than anyone.

Be generous to the riggers; they are our wingmen and wingwomen.

Be friendly to production; they protect you from the fickle clients who don’t understand what it means to turn around fixes by Monday morning.

Be considerate of the runners; they hold the key to the extra portion of dinner and will one day be running the studio.

Be gentle with the modelers; for theirs is the resolution, the normals and the topology.

Be respectful of the compositors; what you could not correct they must paint out. In stereo.

Be nice to all the support teams; without them you could not log in, clear your tmp drive, wrangle your renders, and you’re cursed to work without a pipeline. Therein lies madness.

Most of all be good to each other; when it’s late on a Wednesday night and the bakes slow to a crawl, you will need each others’ help to finish that puzzle.

#2.57 version 2

I realised, very belatedly, that I didn’t have the address of the person I meant to send this to, and that I had, in fact, sent it to some random address – a London restaurant that happened to be on my screen at the time I addressed the postcard. I blame early onset senility for making such a mistake. 

We went to the restaurant (a Korean place where the staff speak little English) to see if they’d received a mysterious postcard addressed to someone they didn’t know. It was the middle of the Friday night dinner rush and they looked at me like I was crazy, as they were asking me how many people we wanted a table for and I was asking them “HAVE YOU RECEIVED A POSTCARD FOR SOMEONE WHO DOESN’T WORK HERE?”. 

Once we got past the initial confusion, they pointed out that their street address also corresponds with the flats in the attached building, so we went to that door and hit a few buttons until someone answered. This person kindly came down and opened the door so we explained the story again and rifled through the stack on unclaimed mail inside the door. Alas the postcard was not there. 

So, I decided to write it anew on a fresh card and send it to the original recipient, correctly addressed this time. I managed to write it much more neatly on a second try, but the first postcard was really nice.