Studio: Digital Domain
School(s):
- University of Virginia '04
B.A., Theatre - Animation Mentor '10
Character Animation - Animation Mentor '11
Animal and Creature Animation
When I was a little girl, I watched the Loony Tunes pretty much nonstop. I loved Daffy and Bugs, and I developed a pretty spot-on impression of Sylvestre the Cat's "thuffering thuccotash!", but my favorite was Wile E. Coyote. I watched those little cinematic desert farces so many times that I had the comedic beats memorized. Wile E.'s creativity and perseverance, his self confidence in his zany plans, and his optimism in the face of adversity all left an indelible mark on 8-year-old me. So, at age 11, after plastering my walls with drawings of my favorite characters, and saving up my allowance money to buy Chuck Jones' autobiography, I announced to my parents that I was going to be an animator. They were not surprised. Both are graphic designers, and they had been feeding my artistic habits with unlimited art supplies from their studio. The local community art centre was offering a Basics of Animation class, and my parents signed me up.
You might think that my path to a career in animation would be pretty direct given my early clarity and focus. But no...
Unlike so many of my peers who found their inspiration to become animators in Pixar's groundbreaking Toy Story, which came out when I was a teenager, I saw CG animation as the beginning of the end of traditional hand drawn animation. This made me very sad, and eventually steered me to try other artistic avenues, including theatrical lighting design, which is what I studied in college. I worked as a lighting designer and technician for several years in a variety of venues (opera, pro wrestling, political events, Shakespeare plays, etc), but found myself losing enthusiasm as the reality of making a living doing theatre sunk in. It was at that point that I was presented with the opportunity to go abroad and work in West Africa for two years. I jumped at the chance, and divided my attention between a part-time job at the Embassy in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, and my photography business. I was self taught, and although I loved the artistic expression photography allowed me, I did not enjoy the constant search for new clients, the self-promotion, or the stress of running my own business. So, when I returned to the USA, I found myself not sure what to do next.
In 2008, adrift and living in Washington DC, I stumbled on the Animation Mentor website...as I researched the school a little more, I realized that maybe my childhood dream wasn't so childish; maybe it was a really great idea! CG animation and visual effects heavy films were exploding in popularity...maybe it wouldn't be so hard to find a job when I was done! Although my drawing skills were rusty, I was pretty quick to pick up computery things, and I knew from years of photo editing and doing complex origami that I had the patience to focus on something as detail oriented as animation. I love cartoons and movies, and have always skewed geeky (Who's got two thumbs and loves Star Trek? This girl!), so it seemed like an excellent fit. I signed up. I worked a full time job at the National Archives, and did my AM assignments on the weekends. It was a grueling schedule, but I think that having so little time each week to complete my homework meant that I became a faster and more efficient animator than I would have become otherwise.
My experience at AM started out kind of rough. I struggled at first and even failed the first time I took the Intro to Acting class. Taking that course a second time was when a lot of things like spacing and overlap really clicked for me. I started seeing beautiful arcs everywhere around me, and found myself totally fascinated by the way the animals moved at the zoo (humans included). I found it easy to lose myself in my animation assignments, spending hours and hours glued to my screen.
I completed my short film in class 6 --it's about a naked guy who accidentally gets locked out of his hotel room-- and then I started looking for work after graduation, but none of the studios I applied to were biting. When AM offered me the chance to pilot test their brand new Animals and Creatures class when it debuted in the winter of 2011, I jumped at the chance. I thought the A&C course was going to give my reel a unique edge, but it did so much more than that: it taught me that my true passion lies in animating animals. I still love to watch slapstick animation, but what I really love to animate myself is animals, the more physical the shot, the better. My final project was animating a 250 frame shot of a big cat taking down a dragon. It was pretty ambitious, but I loved finessing the physical details, adding little imperfections into the finished product. Creature animation, I could tell, was where I wanted to be.
At this point, it was really starting to sink in just how incredibly competitive the industry is. It seemed like the only fellow classmates of mine who were finding work were already experienced animators who had taken AM to improve on their skills. Those of us who had started from scratch were out of luck.
When I was feeling low about my job hunt and the state of the industry, my mentor Nicole Herr gave me some very frank advice. She said that, in addition to a great reel, you need two things in order to find a job as an entry level animator: a) you need to be where the jobs are, and b) you need to have some --any-- paid experience as an animator. Timing is important also...if a given studio isn't hiring, then no matter how good your reel is, you're not going to get a job there.
To fulfill item A, I realized I needed to move; Washington DC isn't exactly an entertainment hub. My boyfriend had recently been accepted to a PhD program at the University of British Columbia, and Vancouver seemed to have a lot of animation work, so in the summer of 2011, he and I took the plunge and moved across the country to BC. We arrived just before SIGGRAPH, and I immediately started applying to all of the studios in the area. I felt optimistic because many of the studios I talked to at SIGGRAPH said they would be hiring, but several months later...crickets. I was feeling pretty low at that point. Mentors and friends assured me that my reel was good and said, "don't take it personally" and I tried not to, but it was starting to feel like Wile E. Coyote...I just couldn't catch a break.
In the meantime, another mentor of mine offered me a remote temporary gig working on the Animal Planet show, "Finding Bigfoot." It was only about 6 seconds of Sasquatch (sorry, folks: spoiler alert) on the small screen, but it was enough for me to put a new line on my resume. Just a month or so after I reapplied to a few studios and let them know that I had landed that remote gig, I started getting nibbles from studios. Suddenly, I had three promising interviews in one week! One of those was with Digital Domain, one of the best studios in the world for realistic visual effects. Digital Domain was up there with ILM and Weta as one of those dream studios that I hoped to work at sometime in the distant future, after I had cut my teeth at a local television or commercial studio for several years first. When they offered me a three month gig on Jack the Giant Slayer, I was over the moon! After over a year and a half of looking, I finally got my big break. Wile E. smiled.
Three months was just the beginning. I am still animating at Digital Domain, having just wrapped up a full year of work on Ender's Game. I started on my fourth feature film this past Monday, Disney's Maleficent. I am very happy at DD, and I still wake up every day excited to go to work. Getting to this point took years of training in which I had hardly any free weekends, and then an incredibly demoralizing period of time desperately trying to land my first break... It wasn't easy, and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone but the most passionate aspiring animators, but now I get to do what I love every day with some of the most awesome people I've ever met, and that is worth all of the lost weekends, the tedium, the exhaustion, all of it. Sometimes I have to work seven days a week, ten to twelve hours a day. Sometimes it's boring, or frustrating, and the last thing I want to do is animate. But seeing a character or creature come to life in my shot is the most gratifying expression of my artistic self that I have ever experienced.
Advice for future animators:
If you are nice to everyone and show enthusiasm for what you do, people will want you to succeed, and will help you do it.
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