Devil’s in the detail — in animation and in journalism
Recently I had an opportunity to visit Triggerfish Animation Studios in Cape Town. It’s an exciting space, producing computer-generated feature films and TV shorts that have received a raft of awards and an Oscar nomination.
After successfully adapting Roald Dahl’s Revolting Rhymes and Julia Donaldson’s The Highway Rat and Stick Man — commissioned for consecutive BBC Christmas specials by Magic Light Pictures in London — Triggerfish is hard at work on another Donaldson screen adaptation, Zog.
There are more features in the pipeline to follow Adventures in Zambezia (2012) and Khumba (2013). These two are among the top five highestgrossing South African films; but as human resources manager Cathy Bradley pointed out while leading our group around the premises, animation is so expensive it will take another two or three international hits to secure the firm’s future.
Making films is generally costly, labour-intensive and painstaking, but animation requires another level of dedication, patience and resourcefulness. It always has, from the earliest days of handdrawn and stop-motion animation. CGI technology has expanded the range of what can be done and the speed at which it can be done, but it has also complicated the process.
This requires a good-faith understanding between the contributors — besides the already complicated mix of scriptwriters, directors, actors, musicians, sound mixers and animators, there are also dozens of artists working independently at various stages of animation. Some craft the 3D models for characters, some plot their movements, some add lighting, some oversee computer rendering into the on-screen image, some add nuances of texture and colour.
These compositors, however, do not have the final say: a lot can change in the final editing choices. I overheard an almost heartbreaking conversation between two members of the 80-strong team at Triggerfish who had spent days finessing in exquisite detail the surfaces of a few paintings hanging in the picture-hall of an ancient castle.
It’s bad enough that these will appear on the screen for just a few seconds when Zog is eventually aired. What’s worse is that, as the animators noted casually, their work is likely to be blurred out by a director or Pondering the giant:
An image from Jack and the Beanstalk by Triggerfish Animation Studios, which has had success abroad with two commissioned films.
editor who has a different interpretation of what’s important in the mise-en-scène and who doesn’t want anything distracting in the background.
I suppose that’s the prerogative of those in charge of making final decisions. But I couldn’t help thinking there is an injustice in deliberately fudging the details to suit a preselected narrative.
Perhaps I was primed to be on the side of detail — let’s call it historical texture — because I’d been annoyed by the sleight of hand through which some powerful individuals in South African politics had smudged a very important bit of background information in their attempt to tell a particular version of the life and death of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela.
It is one thing for EFF leader Julius Malema to take advantage of Madikizela-Mandela’s death in order to fire a few potshots at people he dislikes in the ANC. It is another thing for him to mischaracterise the UDF and its role in the torrid 1980s — an act of revisionist history that doesn’t help to undo the stillpervasive propaganda of the apartheid state. But it is another thing altogether for the EFF, through spokesman Mbuyiseni Ndlozi, to compound its undermining of (indeed, its attack on) journalists through an astonishing distortion of facts.
The EFF, taking its cue from ambiguous comments about the media by Madikizela-Mandela in an interview linked to Pascale Lamche’s documentary, has leapt to endorse an outrageous theory that anti-apartheid journalists Anton Harber and Thandeka Gqubule were “working for” the old regime’s Strategic Communications division, Stratcom.
No doubt there are many apartheid-era dirty tricks, smear campaigns and spies yet to be fully exposed or understood. But false accusations in 2018 are not going to get us anywhere.
Journalists, admittedly, are not artists; their job is to produce the “rough first draft of history”. But like those animators I overheard, they are rightly obsessed with accurate details — and we tarnish or dismiss them at our peril.