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Daniel Spencer

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What is your name and your current occupation?
My name is Daniel Spencer ,  I am Producer in Giant Creative and Chair of Pegbar.
What are some of the crazier jobs you had before getting into animation?
During college I worked a lot of hours in a late night petrol station as well as Magner’s photolab. They were busy places to work, but were rich in inspration from the eclectic mix of customers. The petrol station employed loads of art students, 3 of which were animators, so we were constantly taking turns in sketching customers and creating backstories for them. We also transformed the garage into an open air disco & an adventure course, in the early hours of the morning. Fun times.  Previous to that, I worked in a scuba dive centre, as well as a lot of kitchens, prepping food & scrubbing pots.
What are some of your favorite projects you’re proud to have been a part of?
I’ve had many animation and design projects that I have hit milestone’s in my career. However, starting up Pegbar with a few of my college mates, is one project I’m quite proud of. After college, we were finding it hard to communicate or get an ‘in’ with industry. There were 52 film events in Ireland at the time, but few had serious animated content. We were networking as much as possible but could not find the right people to critique our work in order to improve and get jobs. So we created our own animation networking event, and put our generation of animator’s portfolios on showcase, to which industry came to check out this well marketed, mysterious animation event. The event has been growing ever since, and has hosted many talks from a number of prestigious animators.
How did you become interested in animation?
I was always interested in animation, comics, anything related to visual storytelling. I used to draw all the time when I was a kid and for all of the usual reasons. The turning point was when Continue reading

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Frodo Kuipers

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What is your name and your current occupation?
Frodo Kuipers. I’m an animation director (mainly independent films) at my homestudio Studio Mosquito!
Furthermore I’m an animationteacher at the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam (the Netherlands).

What are some of the crazier jobs you had before getting into animation?
Quite a few: I worked as a musician and actor at a Dutch theatrepark called ‘Het Land van Ooit’. It sure was a lot of fun: making music whole day, and we had a few acts and small shows we played and acted out. A lot was on an improvisation-basis, so just interact spontaniously with the audience (mostly children).  I learned a lot over there, about performance, staging, focus, character, timing, in fact this job let me realize that animation is A LOT like theatre!  I also worked as a postman for a while, which gave me some inspiration for a possible future short on postmen and their heroic adventures 🙂  More jobs: selling icecream, serving in a restaurant, baking pancakes, paperboy, even made workingschedules for workers of a company…

What are some of your favorite projects you’re proud to have been a part of?
I’m quite fond of my latest short ‘Fata Morgana’ (http://vimeo.com/34165189). I worked with a screenwriter which really felt succesful. The film was being part of a program called KORT!, which is ‘short’ in Dutch. Usually only live-action films are being financed by the organising broadcastcompany, but my film got financed as well.  What I also find quite fancy is that I animated a few scenes for Paul Driessens latest film ‘Oedipus’. I have always admired Pauls films, so the chance of working together was really great!
And finally, one of my films (Shipwrecked) got included to Ron Diamond’s Animation Show of Shows a few years ago.

How did you become interested in animation?
When I finished high school, I didn’t have a clue of what I wanted to study. I definitelly knew that I did want to do something creative, since I always felt a passion for creating things. I simply love to create, doesn’t really matter what it is, I just need to…
I went to artschool and by coincidence I discoverd Continue reading

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Elyse Hartey

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What is your name and your current occupation?
My name is Elyse Hartey and I am a Lead Texture Artist at Nickelodeon Animation Studios
What are some of the crazier jobs you had before getting into animation?
I was a hotel maid at Disney World. I was also a tennis instructor for a little while.
What are some of your favorite projects you’re proud to have been a part of?
I really enjoyed working on Robot and Monster for Nickelodeon. It hasn’t aired yet but it will be coming out soon and I’m excited for everyone to see it.
How did you become interested in animation?
I’ve always loved cartoons and it had never occurred to me that I could do it as a job. I think the first time I saw Continue reading

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Christina Capozzi-Riley

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What is your name and your current occupation?
Christina Capozzi-Riley Animator/Illustrator/Compositor & Small Business Owner (PetKaboodle, Inc.)

 

What are some of the crazier jobs you had before getting into animation?
 Not sure about crazy. I only held two jobs prior to becoming an animation professional. I started working when I was 14 at a restaurant called The Wander Inn. I was a preparation chef in the kitchen. I prepared salads, desserts, appetizers and helped the waitresses get what they needed in the kitchen for their tables. I was one of the few who had a job working every weekend throughout high-school. I worked there for about 5 years and then began working at PETCO as a grooming assistant. (Bathing, brushing, grooming dogs & cats…the works). Not so much a crazy job..but some of the furry clients as well as their owners can be a bit on the crazy side sometimes. I worked there for another 5 years until I graduated SVA in 2005 and was offered a job at Asterisk Animation, LLC in Manhattan. Then in 2007 my husband and I incorporated PetKaboodle, Inc. and I now own an operate the retail business aside from any animation jobs.

What are some of your favorite projects you’re proud to have been a part of?
 There have been too many to count! Some that stand out to me are a bunch of short segments I did in collaboration with illustrator Steve Brodner called “Naked Campaign” which was lots of fun! It was a challenge to complete each segment in a matter of days in order to air on time. I’ve worked many times with the lovely Gail Levine on a number of documentaries including one on Jeff Bridges and another on Cab Calloway. I enjoyed the many documentaries we did for PBS and National Geographic, as well as the children’s language series Little Pim. I also enjoyed working with off-site animator Doug Compton. I frequently in-betweened his work and have learned so much in doing so. One of the more recent pieces was a documentary on Carol Channing where her intricate dress sure was a tedious challenge to animate and in-between!

How did you become interested in animation?
 Ever since I was two years old I would draw, draw, draw! Some of my very first drawings are of Continue reading

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Jeff Ermoian

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What is your name and your current occupation?
My name is Jeff Ermoian and I teach Digital Media Design at Texas State Technical College in Waco including Character Design, 2D animation, and storyboarding.
What are some of the crazier jobs you had before getting into animation?
Cabinet Power Sander (@ a speaker manufacturing company) and Arcade Tech. (human change machine)
What are some of your favorite projects you’re proud to have been a part of?
When I was in the Air Force I helped develop the congressional briefing to get funding for the C-17. That aircraft has a lot to do with our current airlift capability. I also started a television show called The All You Can Eat Texas Music Cafe with my brothers that featured unsigned singer songwriters. It was aired coast to coast in the U.S. and carried internationally in over a hundred foreign countries.
How did you become interested in animation?
I can’t recall when I wasn’t interested in animation. I remember Wiley Coyote holding up signs I couldn’t read and being angry that I was missing the joke. I remember seeing a cartoon reel before the Continue reading

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Shannon Muir

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What is your name and your current occupation? 
My name is Shannon Muir, and I’ve been a freelance writer since 2000, sometimes in conjunction with other employment and sometimes not. Right now I’m freelancing full-time, and also gone into self-publishing ebooks as well as being hired to format ebooks for other writers. In the past I’ve also been a production coordinator on animated series for studios such as Nickelodeon, SD Entertainment, and Sony. Most recently, I came out of over three and a half years in the childrens’ virtual world space; to be honest, I’m surprised the storytelling and technology elements between animated television and virtual worlds haven’t merged closer together yet. When I got into it back then, I was pretty convinced we were on the verge of most animation moving from television to the Internet. Then again, they thought that a few years ago with Icebox and the like, and we weren’t quite there yet either. I think it would be even harder now for someone without more technical and games experience to break into virtual worlds from an animated television background the way I did.  As to my writing, my animation scriptwriting credits are for the series MIDNIGHT HORROR SCHOOL, which was produced in Japan but never made its way to the United States (though it was dubbed in parts of Europe) because it was just too quirky I think to fit our kinds of programming. Imagine all the cuteness of a preschool show but the characters look a bit Tim Burton-like. I did five scripts for the show, three on my own and two with my co-writer Kevin Paul Shaw Broden Continue reading