Squidward's Suicide

During the year in 2005, I was interned at Nickelodeon Studio to get a degree in animation. It was not paid for, like most internships, but gave some advantages after training. This does not seem to be anything significant for adults, but at that time most children would be crapped with joy from it. Since I worked directly with editors and animators, I had access to new episodes a few days before they were aired. I'll go straight to the topic, without any unnecessary details. They only recently made a full-length Sponge Bob, and the whole staff seemed to be stuck in a lack of ideas, so it took them a long time to launch the next season. But the delay lasted longer for more serious reasons. There was a problem with the first series of the fourth season, which threw the process back several months ago. I and two other trainees were in the studio with animators and sound editors for the final processing. We got a copy that was supposed to be "Fear of a Krabby Patty" and gathered at the screen to watch the series. Inside the studio there was something like a local joke and often the name of the series on the card changed to obscene, but only on the non-final version of the series, for example "How Sex Does not Work" instead of "Farewell, Bivalve" when Patrick and Spongebob adopted a scallop. Nothing particularly funny, but the work was filled with giggles. And so, when we saw the card with the name "Squidward's Suicide", we thought that it was just someone's crazy joke. One of the trainees burst out laughing at the name. The initial music began to play, as usual. The series begins with the fact that Squidward plays the clarinet, will fall into the wrong notes, in general as always. We hear SpongeBob laughing, Squidward stops and screams for SpongeBob to calm down, as Squidward needs to train because he has a gig this evening. SpongeBob says that there is no problem and goes to Patrick and Sandy. Bubbles fill the screen and we see the end of the Squidward concert. From this moment, the event has ceased to be normal. During the game, some frames are repeated and the sound is not (in this case the sound is synchronized with the animation, yes, but it's not common), but when it stops playing, the sound ends as if there was no skip. There was a slight whisper in the crowd before the audience booed him. Booing is quite popular in cartoons, but in this series one could clearly hear anger. Close-up of Squidward, he looks very frightened. The following frames show the crowd, in the center of which SpongeBob, and he also screamed with the crowd at Squidward, which is very unlike him. But this is not the strangest thing. What is really strange is that these are super realistic eyes. Very detailed. Of course not human eyes, but for sure, something is more real than a computer picture. The pupils were red. Some of us looked at each other puzzled, but since we were not the authors, we did not ask questions until the children appeared. The frame shows Squidward sitting on the edge of his bed, he looked very unhappy. From his window you can see the night sky, which means that not much time passed after the concert. The most pressing of all this is the absence of any sound. Literally no sound. As if the speakers in the studio suddenly turned off, although the light bulb showed that they worked perfectly. He sat and just blinked in silence for about 30 seconds, then began to sob softly. He put his hands (tentacles) on his eyes and cried, so passed a whole minute or more, at this time the sound grew from nothing to barely discernible. It was like a light forest breeze. Further the screen smoothly increases the face of Squidward. By smoothly I mean that it is noticeable only when the frames are divided among themselves every ten seconds. His sobs grow louder, filled with anger and pain. Then the screen twitched, as if trying to obvit himself, only a split second, then returned to the previous state. The wind-through-trees grew louder and sharper, as if a storm was brewing somewhere. This sound was creepy, and the sobbing of Squidward seemed real, as if the sound was not from the speakers, and the speakers themselves were holes through which it penetrated from the other side. Against the background of wind and sobbing, laughter was very weak. It was audible at random intervals, and it did not last more than a second, so you would have had a hard time if you were attaching it to the animation. We watched this series twice, excuse me if my specifications seem too narrowly professional, but I had enough time to think it all over. After 30 seconds the screen became cloudy and twitched very strongly, something was displayed on the screen, as if a single frame was being replaced. The editor-in-chief paused and rewound the frame-by-frame. What we saw was nightmarish. It was a still frame of a dead child. He was no more than 6. His face was disfigured and bloodied. One eye hung over his upturned face, scraped from his eye socket. He was undressed.