“Thanks.” I can’t help tilting my head back again, casting a look around the vast, round lobby. The Imagine headquarters, near Broadway in downtown Nashville, is a giant, gold dome that looks like something right out of a children’s film. The ceiling is peppered with windows, streaming light into the lobby. Which is a good thing, because in the middle of the lobby, there’s a tiny grove of willow trees.
“As you can see, we have a geodesic building,” Carrie says. “The elevators are back this way,” she says, sticking her thumb back over her shoulder, so it points toward a set of elevator shafts. “There are a couple of financial offices on this floor, supplies on floor two, marketing on three, screening on four, and pre-and post-production on floors five and six, with executive suites on seven and eight.”
I blink. There is no way I’m going to remember that, so I just nod.
“Oh wait, I forgot, there’s a cafeteria behind the elevators. Do you see it?” She takes a few steps to her left, so we can see around the elevators. I spot a couple of awnings set up like a mall food court, with metallic-looking picnic tables scattered in the middle.
“They’re open at all times, and there are two little rooms off every studio with cots and everything. It’s weird, the way we work here. It’s really immersive. You’ll see.”
She waves me toward the elevators, and we walk under an array of sparkling, colored metal butterflies, strung from the ceiling.
“The layout here is kind of weird,” she tells me as we step onto the elevator. “Every floor is one big circle, as you can see. We’ll be getting off on five, where a lot of the studios are. There’s a vending area up there, plus two exercise areas, plus a butterfly exhibit. It’s for the animators working on Herald, the one that’s coming out in August—about the butterfly. It’s beautiful.”
I make a face. “Butterflies are kind of awful. Have you seen those things up close?”
She smiles, but I swear, I think her eyes bug out. “I’ll have to look.”
Perfect. So I’m going to be the weird one. Why am I not shocked?
“Anyway,” she continues, brushing a palm over her short, spiky hair, “I think you’ll like the team they’ve thrown together. Pairing summer writing interns with permanent staffer animators, and intern animators with staff writers, is something Imagine has been doing for a while now—way before the Disney merger last year. Our team’s lead animator is from Disney, actually. He’s here from Burbank, just for this. They take the interns seriously because, obviously, in just another…”
“Year,” I offer.
“In just another year, you could be working here fulltime. I’ve gotta be honest with you, too, I think our top dog, Sara Blaise, kind of likes to make the permanent staff submit to the whims of an intern. Keeps us humble.”
“So how does it work?” I ask as we step off on floor five. I blink at the brilliant purple carpet, which forms a ring around the elevators and spreads across a bridge that leads to the circular hallway Carrie mentioned.
“You’re technically the lead writer—story artist—yes, and hot guy from Disney is our lead animator.” She snaps her fingers. “I’ll remember his name. He is hot as hell. All muscle-y and tan, and I just love a guy with glasses.”
“Ooooh.”
“Oh yeah.” I follow her toward the circular hallway, which is done in various textures of sharp white, so that the floors and walls gleam in the sunlight coming from the windows at the top of the dome. “So yeah, we work as a unit. Four writers, three animators, one or two assistants… I forgot the rest. We’re a small unit, since we’re only producing a single reel of film. Eleven minutes, if you didn’t know.”
“I worked at Dreamworks last summer.”
“Fancy pants.” She smiles, and I decide she’s trying to be nice rather than condescending.
“Oh, totally. I spent two hours once with my foot in a toilet bowl, serving as a computer model for a monkey.”
Her hand goes up to her mouth. “In that movie The Jungle Train?” She laughs.
“Actually, yeah. I was the model for Alicia, the little sister monkey.”
“Sweet.”
I laugh, too. “Right? It’s very glamorous, this line of work.”
“Oh yes. Especially when we have to be here at all hours, eat downstairs and sleep on the cots. You might say,” she quips, “it’s a barrel of monkeys.”
Okay, so this girl is just plain cheesy. I can roll with that. God knows, some of my lame jokes are no better.
I follow Carrie around the circular hallway of floor five, trying to pay attention as she points out the exercise rooms, a tiny hall of vending machines, a room for pets to poop in, and a row of super tiny thinking rooms, “Where you go if everyone else on our team is driving you nuts, and you need to think in silence,” she explains.
I’m more intrigued by the pet poop rooms.
“You can bring a pet to work, yeah. But only if you’re working in one of the bigger production rooms. We’re in a tiny room.”
“Oh, pooh.”
“What kind of pet do you have?” she asks.
“I don’t actually have one.”
She gives me a weird look, and I can’t help laughing. “It’s the possibility,” I tell her.
“Yeah, yeah. No, I get it.” She lowers her voice. “Just wait until you see our lead animator. Possibility,” she whispers, winking.
“Mmm, I could use some good eye candy. Having a bit of a dry spell,” I confess, also in a whisper.
She grins. “Good, because here we are.” She nods to her right, where there’s a sleek, white door and a thin, vertical window done in pebbled glass—for privacy, I guess.
She gives two swift knocks, then pushes the door open, holding it so I can get a look inside. The room is rectangular, with light boards—lit-up desks—lining three walls and a giant screen stretched across a fourth. In the middle of the room, there is a giant, circular work station, kind of like a cubicle city. Wide, sometimes multi-stacked computer monitors rise up over the little semi-walls that divide work spaces. My eyes fly around the studio, taking in several new faces: three girls and two guys. I step inside and hold a hand up in greeting.
Then, from behind the circle of desks, an office chair turns slowly to face us.
And Dash is in it.