Picturing: Friday the 13th TV Series VFX Crew

In October of 1988 I worked on a few episodes of the television series titled, simply enough, and not with any nod to accuracy, Friday the 13th: The Series.

Two episodes I remember working on:

"13 O'Clock"  —

A stopwatch can stop time, allowing its owner to move about in an otherwise frozen-still world. I was one of a few artists who painted mattes. To start the whole process, a rotoscope artist took a roll of film that had been shot of a actor that needed to be popped in over a specific scene. With an image projected onto a sheet of animation paper, he carefully drew a black outline of the actor, making sure to follow the contours very closely. This painstaking procedure was done frame by frame. It was then a matter of taking the animation papers — there could be many hundreds of them — and, with brush in hand, filling inside the outlined area with black paint. A silhouette of a travelling lady. A holdout matte! One sheet of hole-punched paper for each frame of film. This sequence of artwork would be photographed on 35mm motion picture film to produce a 'travelling matte', which would then be transferred to (analogue) video — these shows were shot on 35mm film but post-produced electronically (in order to save money). The matte would then be run in over the background scene with the positive image, that of the person, fitting inside and filling the matte.

"The Sweetest Sting"  —

Bees. Lots and lots of bees. An animator plotted out movements of bees, black blobs on white animation paper. With black paint we filled in the outlined bee shapes. Hour after hour. It was laborious work, but it was the only way to do it back then.

The show's visual effects supervisor was John Gajdecki, one of the more talented film-artist/technicians to have worked in this town (Toronto), and also one of the most congenial. He went on to set up his own company, GVFX (Gajdecki Visual Effects).

When I worked at Film Effects - Toronto in the early to mid 1990s, I again met up with John when my employer and GVFX got the 'opticals' contract for the television series Kung Fu: The Legend Continues. John, and his team, produced original FX elements on a Quantel "Harry" system at his facility; elements which he then outputted to 35mm film, which were then turned over to Film Effects. I took these film rolls and composited them with the appropriate live-action photography on the optical printer/camera. (We'd get a new episode to 'process' every week and a half or so.)

Back to the photo.

Friends of mine would spot me in a second. I've already gotten: "You look the same!" Think: a tall British-looking guy standing at the back in a brown jacket. My boss is sitting at the front of the youthful multi-talented gang.

Seeing my overall look now, I don't think I fit the image of an "inker" as much as I do a director from LWT or Thames Television. That or a used-car salesman from Sheffield.

Postscript: I remember most of the people in that photo. Gudrun Heinze is at the very left; to my left, Claude Theriault; and Dan Turner is to my right. A few months after this photo session, Dan flew off to Ireland to work for Don Bluth's outfit. Gudrun and Claude were still with John during my Film Effects years. Fun times, even with the hard work and sometimes long hours.