A TALE OF TWO PONYTAILS

BY GREG SHEWCHUK 2024.08

Not long after my son was born, the business partnership that supported me in my wandering youth began winding down to a quiet and somewhat anticlimactic end. The pirate-like business efforts of team Sakebomb, an experimental boutique digital creative agency with a penchant for international revelry, did not sync with the ceaseless demands of parenthood, and I began to accept that it was time to evolve in the face of increasing responsibility. Seeking new avenues of income, I teased several different novel endeavors with a host of potential comrades but nothing was quite working out. As the situation became more dire, I found myself reaching out to everyone I knew simply looking for creative gigs to pay for diapers, binkies, rubber giraffes, the increasing rent in the hills of eastside LA, and so on.

The good homie Merritt Davies, of MTV and American Hustle production fame, answered my call of distress, and she soon had me lined up for some PA duties on an ESPN gig. While not glamorous, it was honest work, and if you’ve ever spent time on a set in the role of Production Assistant you will know that there is, if nothing else, an empowering feeling that you can only go up from there. Indeed, on my first day on the job I found myself rapidly climbing in repute and esteem as I procured special items for talent (rare sneakers, weed) that only a fast-moving creative thinker could source. Merritt dubbed me ‘Special Ops’, a nickname that I wore with pride, and when the job came to an end and the parent company Disney required further staffing, I was called in for more skilled labor.

Special Ops, for all of his scrappy can-do attitude, had an enthusiastic creative disposition, and I soon signed on as a designer for a Disney Interactive show featuring the up and coming youtube phenomenon, Christina Grimmie, a genuinely bright light who passed not long afterwards, and whom may the Lord bless eternally. She had recently made the leap from bedroom musician to signed artist, and her love of video games had creatively coalesced into a sketch series called Power Up being filmed in the backlots of Burbank, California. I would supply graphics, motion, game demos, ideas, and whatever else was required by the demands of production.

Led by Merritt, with Director Matt Wyatt at the helm, governed by VP Margie “Hard G” Gilmore, I joined a small team of creative supporting types that had gathered from equally dubious backgrounds, as Disney had absorbed numerous creative entities (ESPN, for example, but also small production companies) and commingled us like so many nuts in a bag of trail mix. It was a riotous experience, a colorful collision of makers and artists, and despite feeling like a caged animal (it was my first full-time job in over a decade, mind you) I learned a tremendous amount and made great friends. My early days there brought me into a new round of professional experiences with digital painting, figure drawing, 3d design, game design, music composition and production, and a few other essential disciplines that I neglected over the years. So affected was I, perhaps psychically anticipating the tragedy that would later befall our host and hero, that I experienced a major emotional crash as I left the studio on our final day of shooting. To say that we had become a family would be too much, more like it was a great party that simply had to end, and when the lights came on my heart dropped and I felt an acute sadness.

But even as my contract came to a close, another opportunity presented itself. Once again Merritt lit the fuse with a modest proposal to me and the core creatives from Power Up: take this (little Mickey Mouse-eared Vinylmation toy from Disney Parks) and see if you can come up with a show idea. $500 and a week later and our small team had produced a short pilot that was used to secure a small budget (via the efforts of producer Zadi Diaz) and all of sudden we found ourselves booked in preparation to create something that none of us had ever done before: a stop-motion film production.

I had composed occasional bouts of frame-by-frame animation over the course of my creative career, dating back as far as 4th grade, but this was something to challenge our ambitions. Supported by a team of producers and assistants, there were 5 of us joined together as creative leads, along with a composer and budget for some animators. We circled together and made some decisions about how we would like to produce our film, a new blast of creative IP under the roof of one of the greatest entertainment conglomerates the world has ever seen. What a onrush of creative forces! Giant screen-sized images of Walt Disney himself loomed over us, haunting our artistic and engineering inclinations. And then something fateful and truly wondrous happened: the massive soundstage that we inhabited in Burbank, filled with various Disney Interactive employees and managers and VPs, suddenly cleared out. It seems that senior management had decided to aggregate workers in a new building in Glendale, and yet: our small skeleton crew were allowed to stay on location until the lease ran out, which wasn’t for another year. This place was MASSIVE, like an aircraft hanger, with a cavernous greenscreen studio, huge open rooms and backlot and rooftop access, ringed by offices built out in modern style.

Thus, 5 amateurs, with very little interference, were given money, protective leadership, unlimited space, and talent resources (including two of the best stop motion animators in the business) to make a film for Disney, with all of the formality of starting a garage band. It just kind of happened, in that magical way, and we were but lucky children, as thrilled to ransack the emptied out building for equipment as we were to tell a powerful and entertaining story. We, the 5, had coalesced from lunch crew, known to some as The Fancy Boys, into a directing team, who shared if nothing else a penchant for gently abusing each other and laughing at our predicament embedded in a legacy media company trying to find footing in a digital world dominated by user generated content.

I will spare you the details of our adventure, and instead offer you this video and article as insight into our process and challenges if you desire. Instead, I wish to share with you an arc of my personal participation as a leader in this motley crew via a select tale as titled, a tale of two ponytails.

For you see, we had entered our own contract together, the 5 of us, to last the duration of production. We had decided, as many on a film crew have, to engage in a competition of dedication and willpower. This took the form of growing a beard, or more specifically, not being allowed to trim your facial hair for the duration of the production. This was not particularly challenging, I suppose, and the results went as such: Whit, Mike, and I, all did as was charged, and did not trim or cut our facial hair for the duration of the production (close to a year.) Gino, being of the Pacific Islands, grew what he considered an unsatisfactory crop of whiskers, and was quick to bow out. Paul, who was handsome and single, did (as did Mike and Whit) already wear a beard, but he was too image-conscious to not groom it. So he and Gino were out, and the rest of us tied.

But there was a second component to our battle of commitment, and truly it distinguished those who accepted the full challenge.

When we were first learning about the art of stop-motion, we thought it best to watch behind the scenes footage from major films. This included classics from Aardman, Tim Burton, and Laika, providing inspiration for our decision to use practical effects entirely- no green screen backgrounds for sky, no comped CGI, etc. But we also realized something important about the craft that might have escaped our attention if not for such deep research: often the directors, and in particular the lead animators, had ponytails. Perhaps it was the fashion of the time, but it seemed more likely that these masters drew some kind of supernatural power from their extended hair configuration. After all, there are few screen disciplines more exacting than stop motion: you literally shoot a single frame at a time, over and over, for months and months. It requires focus, organization, vision, and apparently this power could best be conjured and contained in the coiffure of a ponytail.

So it was decided that the other aspect of our friendly wager would be that not only could we not trim our beards, but that we could not trim our ponytails. Whoever could most completely commit to beard and ponytail would have to be said to be the winner.

Now, to be honest, I’m not sure that Whit, Mike, and Paul even took this part of the charge seriously. I’m not sure that they, like Gino and I, realized that the pony was the power, a talisman of such import that we could not succeed without it. We needed strength, we needed clarity. I mean, can you imagine? Making a film with 5 inexperienced directors? It was a recipe for disaster. I was the oldest, frankly the most muscular and also well trained in martial arts. I was the writer, I was a co-producer, I ran the central storyboard area where we planned out every remaining shot. I was in a position of relative leadership, and I needed to be able to control my team. They say commanders grow beards because it makes their jaw seem more prominent, affecting a sense of strength and power. This I did not doubt. But I must also point out to you that I am a man who is losing his hair. Among my nicknames was the Bald Eagle! Thus I had to walk a fine line. I had to be strong and command attention and respect, and I had to be a leader who could compromise and be taken seriously as an artistic visionary. I had to grow a beard AND a ponytail, and it wasn’t going to look good.

But I did not waver. Gino, my consort, to his credit, did not waver. We grew our ponytails, day after day. My wife, my poor wife and child, had to watch me leave the house each morning, with an ever increasingly scruffy beard, and an ever more scraggly ponytail. I looked like a hobo samurai- I mean I HOPED I looked like a hobo samurai, that was the best I could shoot for. I won’t say what Gino looked like. But it didn’t matter. What mattered was the commitment, the severity with which we pursued the completion of this film and the power that it would contain. Everything I did- from working out shots, directing animators, creating concept art, building props and characters, scoring scenes with our composer Alfred, pitching for more budget to executives- none of it was as emblematic of the artist’s path than the struggle of our ponytails. It was hard to take anything seriously, every time I looked over at Gino I would half laugh and half cringe, and then have a hard discussion about very practical problems that needed to be solved, day after day, month after month, our meager ponies growing inch by inch.

It was worth it, of course. The sacrifice was noted in the higher realm by those in charge of great things. The film was a success. We had excellent viewer reviews, fostered the first partnership between Google and Disney (Google released it as an exclusive for Valentine’s Day, and we had our own dedicated Google doodle that day), there was an app and product releases, we won a bunch of festival awards, and so on. But as production came to a close, we began to realize that our days with Disney were numbered. The interactive division had major layoffs, the Burbank backlot lease expired, and we were all cut loose.

Before the final days, we took a surprisingly sharp Elven sword from our prop closet, and in a grim ritualistic fit, Gino and I sliced off each other’s ponytails. The task was accomplished, and the evidence of our sacrifice lay at our feet. Gruesome, holy, pulsating with a dying power.