So I give up...

I'm not a fan of Apple. Never have been. I hate almost everything they stand for. They spout "Think different", but cater to people who line up for their every new gee-gah like Beetle Bailey in a chow line. More often than not these days, they're late coming out with things that Windows or Android started doing last year, and yet their fans will still shell out a 25-50% premium just to catch up and be seen in public conspicuously consuming a logo that already had a bite out of it when they acquired it. I don't get it. I really don't. Let me explain why I take this personally.

Because Apple let me down on trying to hold onto my youth.

Here's the story. Back in the mid 90s, for about three years, I worked in the animation industry. It seemed like a long time back then, when I was in my mid-to-late 20s. I worked in two places. The first, which was also the last, bookended my animation career; a place called The Animation House where I did traditional in-betweening on TV commercials, mostly for cereal. It was what people now call gig work. They called me in when they needed me, and left me twiddling my thumbs when they didn't. In the midst of all that, though, I landed a job at a placed called Isabel Hoffmann & Associates, where we did digital animation on a series of children's educational CDs.

It was a strange place. Isabel was one of those people who would have fit right in in the upper echelons of Enron. Jobs were constantly under threat. The pay for most of us wasn't great. I couldn't afford to get out on my own on what they were paying us, so I did the long commute from the suburbs downtown everyday. But it was a jog, a real job, full time, and... it was fun. In spite of everything else, I enjoyed the people I was working with and the things we were doing. I got to animate, do voice work, and even assemble a few minor creative efforts of my own. I was there for a little over a year before I got too big for my britches and quit. I was a rat abandoning a ship that was leaky, but didn't quite sink for another couple of years. But, sink it did. My career in animation, back at the A-House, lasted about another six months till work got scarce and sixteen months of unemployment humbled me.

Anyway... Since everything we did at Hoffmann was digital, I have copies of the open files, even after all these years. We were using a program called Macromedia Director, the raster-based precursor of Flash (which I believe was also theirs), eventually acquired by Adobe. We were created cast members in Photoshop, cutting and pasting them in. Weird, clunky way to work, but it got the job done. This being 1996/1997, most of this stuff was still being made for Macs first, and PCs later. I guess it's not surprising, since we'd only just landed Windows 95 at that point. The Windows version of Director, for God knows whatever reason, will only export movies in AVI format, without sound. I mention this because around this time last year, I succumbed to this periodic urge I've had over the years to buckle down for a couple of weeks, go through the old disks, export all the movies, and put them up on YouTube for people to enjoy. Some of them are up there now, but people typically just post the straight read-throughs of the stories... none of the cool, fun, kicky little animations you could enjoy when you clicked on elements on the page. I wanted to share all that. I and my friends put a lot of work into those and I thought they deserved to be appreciated again.

Director has been deprecated for over a decade now. I can find it in various places online. We were working in Director versions 4 and 5. The earliest version of Director that will still run on Windows, and open files from those versions, is Director 6. Same problem, though. You can export the movie, but not the sound. So the magic answer seemed to be get hold of a Mac old enough to run the old software and export the movies right.

Around that time, the up-and-coming Mac was the iMac. I managed to find one reasonably cheaply. But it was so underpowered that it couldn't even manage a USB drive. I had no way to either install Director on it, or transfer my Director files to it. The thing was a lime green boat anchor. Fine. I went looking again and a G6 Mac. The guy had to bump the OS back a few notches for it to run those old versions of Director, but I managed to get them installed. Then I decided to get started.

One of the two projects that dominated most of my time at Hoffmann was something called Nikolai's Mysteries. Colloquially, we referred to it as "Black Windows", because one of the characters in the story supplied windows that were painted black. This was the one that was the most fun, so I decided to start with that one. Director was glitchy, and one of the pages, 11, simply refused to export properly. I never figured out why. I managed to export its individual animations one by one, except for one of them, which was probably the one holding up the show for the whole thing. So, after a couple of weeks of this eating up my spared time, I wanted to transfer them over and assemble them using a modern computer. But most of the portable drives that could handle it were too big for the Mac to recognize. I had to make umpteen partitions on the drive and format them back to formats from the late 90s to get anywhere. Once I finally got them on the drive, I plugged it into Windows, only to find that the MOV files I'd exported were utterly unrecognizable to it. Something the Mac had done in creating them made them useless for any other application. All that work down the tubes.

I suppose the reason I was really upset was that so much time had passed me by. When I moved out on my own, it was just three years after I left Hoffmann. Suddenly I find that, almost without my noticing it, over 20 years have passed. Hoffmann was one of those places that, despite the down sides, I never quite left. I've drifted back to it in dreams. I sometimes yearn to reconnect with the people who worked there, though I imagine beyond half an hour of "remember when?" talk, we'd have nothing to say to each other anymore. I suppose it was all just an attempt to hang onto a moment, pretend it wasn't quite over.

I sold the iMac about a month ago. I have an ad up for G6, but no takers so far. About a week ago I disconnected it and shoved it into the spare room. I highly doubt it'll ever get used again. Odds are I'll get fed up looking at it sometime this summer and just leave it at a Goodwill depot or something.

It's not really over, though. I still have Director 6, which will run on Windows 10. If I really want to, I can export them to soundless AVIs, make notes of which sound files I need to drop in, and resync them all in Premiere. I could make it all live again, if I want to. I might yet. I just might.

Meanwhile, I can share with you the few little things I do still have. I have four things up on YouTube. So, just for fun, here they are.

This first one is a "serious" piece; something I was tasked to animate that actually made it onto the disk in Nikolai's Pirates. On one page, you clicked on the family of jaguars, and this happened...

The next three are all just goofy stuff we did on the side. Screwing around with the elements on the pages. It probably goes without saying that these didn't go out on the disks.

Nikolai's dad (yes, Nikolai was real), Uno, was a big fan of Apocalypse Now, and even had the sound track. I did this in about half an hour screwing around one afternoon. One of the other animators showed it to him, and to my relief, he got a big kick out of it. The elements were from a page on Nikolai's Treats.

This next one was from Nikolai's Pirates. The cats were supposed to toss pepper into the pirate's face to escape, causing him to sneeze. I animated the sneeze. I couldn't help taking it one step further.

Finally, topping them all, there's this one. A couple of the guys came in on the weekend just to do this. It's from a page on Nikolai's Mysteries ("Black Windows"). They shopped it around to us on Monday. Our creative director was pissed that they came in and screwed around all weekend when they could have been getting something serious done (not that they got paid for being in on the weekend, mind you), so the guy who had the file deleted it... but not before I managed to just barely snag a copy. And so, the world still has this hilarious little masterpiece, with cameos by another of the animators and Edgar Rice Burroughs. The voice of Neow Neow (the cat), by the way, was Uno, Isabel's husband and Nikolai's dad.

And that's all she wrote, folks. :)