Before we get into today's book excerpt, check out our latest Halloween playlist. 7 totally original animated shorts by Animating Kids students. Happy Halloween.

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“WE'RE RUNNING OUT OF CLAY!”

“WHAT?”

“We've got maybe an hour left!”

I looked at my watch. Two hours until closing.

“That's impossible! We brought TEN TUBS!”

“Look around!”

At least one hundred kids were lined up down Verick St. Every animation table was packed. Parents were elbow-deep in clay. And the line kept growing.

We had enough clay for one more hour. We were contracted to stay open for two.

No clay. No movies.

Welcome to Family Day at the Tribeca Film Festival.

An estimated 250,000 people had descended on lower Manhattan for a carnival of stilt walkers, musicians, dancers, filmmakers, street performers, and families.

And right in the middle of this magnificent circus stood the world-famous Animation Chefs. World-famous, at least, among people standing that line.

The festival had hired us to help kids and parents make their own little claymation movies. And business was booming.

This was our first event of anything approaching this magnitude. With no experience to guide us, we'd guessed at how much clay to buy. Ten tubs seemed like plenty.

We'd planned for a few hundred kids. We hadn't planned for Mom, Dad, Grandma, and assorted relatives wanting their own clay creatures.

Somewhere in New York City, there had to be more clay. And someone had to find it before the Animation Chefs had run out of their main ingredient.

We'd already bought out Pearl Arts on Canal Street. Before the festival, we'd purchased their entire inventory of Crayola modeling clay.

It was the only clay we trusted for these activities. We'd used it before, knew how it behaved, and weren't about to experiment with substitutes in the middle of a festival.

I grabbed my phone and started calling art stores, craft stores, big-box stores, pottery suppliers, and anything in Manhattan that might conceivably sell something squishy.

Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

Then, a breakthrough.

A store in the Bronx had FOUR TUBS!

I grabbed one of the Animation Chefs, left the team in charge, and bolted.

Cab to the Number 1 subway. Uptown to Times Square. The 42nd Street Shuttle to Grand Central. Then, as best I remember, the Number 4 train into the Bronx.

Three trains and a cab, we'd map the time there and back. Guessing an hour. Or a tub of clay = same difference.

Meanwhile, my 15-year-old companion was mortified to be traveling through New York in his Animation Chef uniform. "This is New York, you actually look normal on the subway. "What I someone I know sees me?"

After a half hour, and fortunately not seen by any peers, we emerged in the Bronx, three blocks from the store.

After a full sprint, we found the four tubs, bought them and called the tent.

They answered, "ARE YOU ALMOST BACK?”

“No! We're still in the Bronx. We've just checked out!”

Silence.

“WE'VE STILL GOT HUNDREDS OF KIDS IN LINE! AND WE'RE DOWN TO OUR LAST BUCKET!”

There was only one way to buy more time.

Dad made an exectutive decision.

“LOSE THE ANIMALS!”

Until then, kids had been rolling out clay and using animal shaped cookie cutters:turtles, hippos, lions, monkeys, and cows. Adorable. And consuming clay at an industrial rate.

“Give each kid a golf-ball-sized lump and two googly eyes. Clay rationing. Just roll out a plain circle, press two googly eyes into it, and do the recipe.

We'd speed up the line with simplicity, and use less clay. That was the theory.

A moot point, if we could show up on time with four tubs of our main indredient.

I looked at my watch. It's taken us 40 minutes to get to this point.

Forget the subway.

I hailed a cab and we headed south down the West Side Highway toward Tribeca.

The fare was way more than the four tubs of clay. A very expensive solution to a problem caused by our very inexpensive guesswork.

Finally, Tribeca.

After another sprint to the tent, we made it.

By closing time, we'd minted roughly 300 brand-new animators who were traveling home with a link to watch their clay come alive.

Here's the part we noticed and changed how we did Animating Kids, which we were starting to film in a few months.

The kids making movies with simple rolled out balls of clay were just as happy as those who'd taken the extra time to make lions, monkeys, and hippos.

No cookie cutters. No elaborate animals. Just a lump of clay coming to life.

When it came time to shoot Animating Kids, we used what we'd learned.

When it came to storytelling, kids would use their own characters. When it came time to teach the basics of animation: squash and stretch, wind-up and follow through, timing and spacing?

A simple glob of clay with eyes would do. In fact it had a simple elegancy to it.

We'd spent a fortune racing across New York City to rescue our clay animals, only to discover that the kids didn't need them.

Now our clay glob guy, Clay Glob Imp we nicknamed it.

CGI. An industry pun as scary as how it came to be.

CGI is now the backbone of our discovery recipes in the White, Yellow, and Blue hat recipes. All 80+ of them.

A happy accident.

Bon Animate!

Joe