Frame by Frame was my second published short story, coming out in Interzone 138 in 1998. The Jim Burns cover was the BSFA award winner that year. Click here for a PDF of Frame by Frame or here for html.

Steve Davidson is a creature animator working at a Californian digital visual effects house on a mid-budget movie called Vampire:Born of Atlantis. The deadline looms threateningly, but unfortunately the vampire doesn't. Steve is driving himself to exhaustion trying to bring his creature of nurbs and pixels to something approaching real-world plausibility, but it doesn't quite move right, it doesn't catch the light properly, its muscles don't look real and the whole creature seems too light.... Why won't it work? In his dreams Steve can conjure up all-too-solid horrors, and in waking life even the rawest natural history videos invest the animals with an elusive certain something that shows they're real and alive. Even Bugs Bunny has a kind of concreteness. But Steve just cannot imbue his vampire with the magic spark. Where can he find the key?

The idea for this story came in 1996 while working on the film An American Werewolf in Paris, directed by my brother. I helped supervise background plate shots during principal photography, and later I was at the visual effects house in Santa Barbara as a liaison between set and CGI. People do get obsessed with making the creatures look real and integrated with their environment; some of the animators were at their stations for 23 hours in 24 as deadlines approached and shots were being endlessly tweaked. I decided that staying awake that long thinking about turning megabytes into monsters can't be good for you, and I wondered how out of touch with reality it might be possible to get...

The studio was a little as described (though the people are all made up). Digital effects is a visual art, of course, and to see the workstation monitors properly in daytime the studio was kept in a permanent dim twilight with the blinds drawn. At lunchtime you'd throw open the doors and find blistering Californian sunshine and a sparkling ocean and tanned people outside. Indoors we might as well have been working in Manchester.

Tangent Online :
"what if our hero started to really think a virtual environment was real? or vice versa? The answer is a neat reversal on an old cliche, and also involves a nice little reference to a very famous story. It's no masterpiece, but it's surprisingly readable and a nice effort."

Photos: Santa Barbara in about 1989; working on an animation in Somerset in 2002; wildlife in Kenya in 1988; a werewolf model in 1996 turned into a vampire head; and a Kenyan safari minibus.