Tomorrow is the Robert Abel event at
the UCLA school of Theatre & Film, which I may or may not be able
to attend. I have taken this occassion to write up a very brief
introduction to the period that Robert Abel & Associates was a
part of. I could write many, many pages about Abel's but I am not
going to do that here. Here I am just going to do a page or so of
very basic background.
Robert Abel & Associates (Abel's)
was a famous visual effects production company mostly in the world of
advertising and commercial production, but not entirely. It employed
some of the most accomplished people in the field of visual effects
and has alumni who are very important in the field as it is today.
I was there only briefly, from 1980 to
1983 or so, working on building what we called the "raster"
computer animation system. What we call computer animation today is
what we would have called "raster" back then, in contrast
to vector animation, and other forms.
It is going to be hard for someone who
only knows the field today, or of the last decade, to relate to what
Abel's was and what it did. Here is some background to try and make
some of it comprehensible.
1. The community of people was small,
much smaller than it is today. Maybe a couple of hundred people,
although maybe its a few more depending on how you define this
community (e.g. visual effects, effects animation, matte painting,
rotoscope, camera, etc).
2. The production companies that did
exist varied in size from 1 - 80 people, and occasionally would grow
larger when they had a project that could support it.
3. The companies were production
companies, financed through the personal wealth of the founders, and
living on a week to week basis depending on what jobs were in house.
If there was no work, everyone would be laid off immediately.
4. There was occasional motion picture
work, but not much and not continuously (e.g. motion picture work was
nice to have but if you wanted to keep people employed you had to do
other things). There was also some television work and intermittent
theme park / special venue projects.
5. But at the end of the day, if you
wanted to pay the rent, people in visual effects and other related
fields often did commercials and such things as "broadcast
graphics".
6. The two 800 lb gorilla's in the
field of visual effects and graphics oriented advertising was
R/Greenberg in NYC and Robert Abel & Associates in Hollywood.
If you worked in this field in NYC, then you are likely to have
worked at R/Greenberg. And if you had done visual effects in one form
or another in Los Angeles, you were likely to have worked at Robert
Abel & Associates, even if only briefly.
7. Abel's and R/Greenberg would compete
for the big, technical advertising projects. Not the cute projects
that had a lot of live action, more like Cliff Robertson AT&T
commercials.
8. The advertising business is director
driven, and at Abel's, in general, the art director was the director
in charge.
9. Generally speaking, the projects
themselves were done, e.g. accomplished by the "technical
director" who was the filmmaker, if you will, for the project,
as directed by the art director.
10. Computers were only a tiny part of
the techniques used in visual effects. And perhaps the least
important of the techniques.
The good news is that there were some
extraordinarily talented people who worked there, and did some of
their best work. The bad news was that Abel's, as a culture,
encouraged people to work to their detriment and damage their health
and in some cases their lives.
I will always be grateful for meeting
some of the people I met at Abel's, but I would not want to work
under such circumstances, if I could avoid it, again. It was the Abel experience that first made me realize that the workplace needed to be regulated or in some way moderated to prevent the kinds of abuse I saw there and elsewhere.
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