"Rajnar Vajra - His Hands Pass Like Clouds" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vajra Rajnar)

On October 8, 2008, the very night "Team Champ" found the big artifact under
Lake Champlain, I was under the gun again. I'd been tweaking this toothbrush
commercial scheduled to be unveiled for the client the next day and had run
into a problem I couldn't put my finger on. I suspected it had something to do
with the voiceover; we'd originally hired David Hyde Pierce for the role, but
he'd had to cancel at the last minute and his replacement lacked David's
flawless timing.
I liked the commercial's basic concept. The opening was set at ground
level in a grand, but alien forest. Suddenly the point of view flies upwards
into a pink sky. The "camera" pans downward. The forest is receding through
perspective and shiny white patches appear around its edges. Our intention
here was for the viewer, for an instant, to think the entire forest is growing
in a vast crack in some gargantuan iceberg. But then, as the camera moves even
higher, the truth is revealed: the impressive foliage is merely some salad
remnants stuck in someone's molar. A dry voice asks, "Ever get the feeling
your brush is leaving a little something behind?"
Clever, and creepy enough to grip the attention. Yet, as I said,
something subtle was wrong. I put the first ten seconds of the piece on
"autoloop" and watched and listened to it at least fifty times, feeling more
and more uncomfortable and increasingly unsure why. This is the kind of thing
that drives ad people nuts. Finally, I ignored the visuals and studied my
editing program's virtual VU meters.
For no good reason, the Hyde Pierce sound-alike had put a tiny extra
stress on the word "behind." Odd, but so what?
So I watched the commercial again and froze the picture at the exact
moment "behind" was uttered. And then I saw it. If you looked at it the wrong
way, the damn molar looked very much like a stylized bare ass. Somewhat
jarring in a toothbrush commercial.
I used my software's automated mixdown to soft-pedal "behind" and used
the graphics editor to redact the tooth (luckily this section of the animation
was a "cloned" sequence so that redrawing the tooth in one cell changed all
three hundred images). Then I watched the ad a few dozen more times before
reluctantly e-mailing it to my agency. The file was vast and needed to be sent
with redundant "shake" demands to confirm that no information was getting lost
in transmission. You don't dare compress any file with so much visual detail.
Even by broadband it was going to take at least twenty minutes before the
transfer was complete. And I couldn't go to sleep until the baby was safely in
bed.
With nothing to do for the moment, I leaned back in my chair and caught
up with how tense I'd become. My left hand was misbehaving, clenched tightly
enough to break a pencil, and my legs were numb.
I forced myself to stand up and went for a long walk, all the way to
the back door, partly to stretch and partly to find out how cold the night had
gotten. But when I saw the clouds glowing faintly from the gibbous moon ... I
remembered Uncle Joe and wondered if he was watching the same clouds from his
usual haunt at the beach.
The idea was ridiculous; it was ten past eleven and surely the man
slept _sometime_. Assuming, that is, he was still _alive_ -- no one had
mentioned Joe since I'd been back; but then, people tended to take him for
granted...