We’re in the kitchen, discussing the early days of Lizzie’s career as an artist.
‘After uni,’ she tells me, ‘I moved back into Mum and Dad’s. For four days. I couldn’t bear it any longer than that, so I moved to London without a job.’
Lizzie’s told me about her career origins before, but I’m always interested to hear the story again – especially as some new detail always pops out.
She reminds me that her first proper job was working at the BBC painting backdrops – the traditional way. But then she realised that there was no real future in that, the world was going digital, so she applied for – and got – a job at a visual effects company in central London.
‘I was a runner,’ she says. ‘And I felt so cross about it! Here I was, with a degree from Oxford and all full of myself, thinking… why am I having to make these people lattes?!’
I laugh. ‘That’s the problem about working in visual effects. People really don’t give a monkeys if you’ve got a fancy arts degree from Oxford. And fair enough. Why should they?’
Lizzie nods.
‘You’d have been better off telling them you had a background in anything else. Like being a butcher.’
‘I should have told them I’d previously been a prostitute!’ Lizzie adds, gamely.
‘They would definitely have been more interested that,’ I say.
Lizzie now tells me how she got offered a job at DreamWorks Animation. Basically, she explains, she overheard someone at work talking about a job at Amblimation (Spielberg’s pre-DreamWorks animation company) and Lizzie applied for then got the job herself.
Lizzie went to work as an ‘inbetweener’ at the fledgling DreamWorks Animation studio in LA. No, that doesn’t mean she went to work there as a horny adolescent boy from a Channel 4 sitcom. It means she drew the ‘inbetweens’ in animated sequences, for movies like The Prince of Egypt. In other words, whilst the main artist would draw all the characters’ main poses (a.k.a. the ‘key frames’) a junior artist like Lizzie would draw all the transitionary poses in-between (the ‘inbetweens’, spelt without the hyphen).
At DreamWorks, Lizzie was offered a life-changing opportunity. Jump ship from hand-drawn animation… and get trained up in whole new shiny discipline: CG animation.
The warning signs were already there that hand-drawn animation was on its last (cute and cartoony) legs. Toy Story – the first big CG-animated movie – had already been a massive critical and commercial success. All the studios were muttering about going fully CG. It really was a no-brainer that Lizzie should seize, with both hands, the opportunity to become a fully-fledged CG animator.
Lizzie however – being Lizzie – decided to stick with hand-drawn animation. Go figure.
Soon all of her hand-drawn animation friends, who were refusing to make the shift too, were either working on The Simpsons (well, that was just one of Lizzie’s friends actually) or weren’t working at all.
By the late 90s, Lizzie found herself back in the UK… jobless and with outdated hand-drawn animation skills… and debating with herself whether to retrain as a nurse… something her parents thought sounded like a pretty good idea.
Instead, Lizzie retrained as a ‘a digital matte painter.’ That’s an artist who ‘paints’ the backdrops in movies and TV shows – of castles, valleys, dramatic skies, ancient cities, moonscapes, you name it – anything the director can’t or can’t be bothered to film. In the old days, these backdrops would be painted for real on huge canvases placed in the background of a shot. And that’s exactly what Lizzie did at the start of her career, at the BBC. But now she was doing it on a computer instead. Full circle. Sort of.
She also sometimes does ‘concepts’ on big movies or TV shows. That means she actually imagines and visualises what the sets will look like – and then the movie people go and build them, following Lizzie’s concept.
Sounds pretty cool, huh? You bet! There’ve been plenty of times when I’ve thought – I wish I could do the stuff!
And the rest, as they say, is history. Well, not quite. Because actually… whilst Lizzie is clearly brilliant at her job and seems to enjoy doing the concept stuff in particular… she has a huge passion for something outside her work.
No. It’s not for me (obviously). It’s for painting. Flowers. In the last few years, she’s become obsessed with this.
When Lizzie studied Art at Oxford (where I first met her – I was studying English), she wasn’t really allowed to paint or draw anything. The course there was all about ‘conceptual’ art. For Lizzie’s final piece, she built a replica of a church font – the kind of thing they do baptisms in – and then she threw up in it. As part of her art ‘performance.’ I kid you not. This was the sort of nutty thing she was encouraged to do.
Anyway, after leaving Oxford, she put all that conceptual shite (I mean puke) behind her, studied proper painting at places like the Slade School of Art in London, and now all she wants to do is paint pretty pictures of flowers – using brushes and oils.
And she’s actually doing a steady trade of selling them. Check out her Instagram page if you don’t believe me! (Btw – please don’t think this whole blog is an elaborate ruse to help Lizzie flog some more pictures. To be honest, I’m just too self-centred for anything like that!).
A couple of weeks after Lizzie was diagnosed with cancer, I remember a particular occasion when she was talking about the possibility of her dying from it.
Obviously, in general, the idea of having your life prematurely cut short is going to be pretty horrendous and traumatic for anyone.
‘But,’ said Lizzie, ‘on the plus side, at least I’ve had the chance to paint – loads and loads – for the last couple of years. That’s something I can feel glad about, whatever happens.’
I totally got what she was saying. I feel the same about writing. If I don’t do it, regardless of how good my efforts are, I begin to think… what’s the point of me even being here? (Other than to continue the reproduction of our biological line – which, thankfully, I’ve done now). It’s why doing film production – which is all about boring numbers in boring Excel spreadsheets (the kind of film production I’ve been doing, anyway) – makes me so bad-tempered!
So I understood what Lizzie was saying.
And even though Lizzie’s obsession with painting sometimes, frankly, gets on my nerves (like yesterday, when she booted me out of the kitchen because she was painting in the adjoining conservatory and apparently I was disturbing her)… I have to remind myself to keep on encouraging her, because of how important it is to her. Especially now.
P. D. Clifton 
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