Category Archives: Artists Interviews

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Robert Burrows

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What is your name and your current occupation?
My name’s Robert Burrows and I’m a comic illustrator and story artist.

 

What are some of the crazier jobs you had before getting into animation?
I was a courier for a while, being on the road 10 hours a day you tend to develop a pretty zen approach to traffic. You also see a lot of carnage. I also worked at an ahem… adult shop. I call this my “character building” phase.

 

What are some of your favorite projects you’re proud to have been a part of?
The two graphic novels I’ve illustrated:Something Animal, which is a gritty look at a man losing his grip after witnessing a terrible attack on his sister and Beatrice Is Dead which is the first story in a set of short horror/dark fantasy volumes about Beat, a sixteen year-old girl coming of age in the afterlife. Both are fully painted the old fashioned way using acrylic, gouache and gallons of india ink.

 

Where are you from and how did you get into the animation business?
I was born and raised in the southeast of England, then I lived in Detroit for most of my grown up life. I don’t know if you’ve heard, but Continue reading

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Michael Fry

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What is your name and your current occupation?
Michael Fry.  I write the comic strip Over the Hedge.  And I’m President of RingTales LLC.  RingTales animates print comics for all digital media.  We have the exclusive right to animate Dilbert, The New Yorker Animated Cartoons, Pearls Before Swine, Over the Hedge and many other comics.

What are some of the crazier jobs you had before getting into animation?
I was fortunate to become a full time cartoonist a couple years out of college.   Before that I bar-tended, did a lot of freelance work.

What are some of your favorite projects you’re proud to have been a part of?
The DreamWorks Animation version of Over the Hedge. Committed,  a prime time animated series of one of my other comics, produced by Nelvana.

How did you become interested in animation?
I’ve always wanted to see my characters Continue reading
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Sergio Paez

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What is your name and your current occupation?
My name is Sergio Paez, and I’m a director and Story Supervisor working on film and television projects. I cofounded www.StoryboardArt.org, which is an online community for visual storytellers and storyboard artists. In addition to my professional work, I also do many lectures and workshops to help younger artists get into the business.

 

What are some of the crazier jobs you had before getting into animation?
When I was in high school, I used to make fake IDs back when California driver’s licenses didn’t have a hologram. I made a lot of money under the table, and I was such a good student that no one ever suspected that I was making forgeries. One day I was at my friend’s house and we were all watching TV when a commercial for a local art school came on the television. It flashed titles on screen that went something like, “You are the yearbook photographer extraordinaire” or “Drawing caricatures is easy for you”. Finally a title flashed on the screen that said,”You’ve mastered the art of making fake IDs.” All my friends turned me and started calling me out.  The commercial was for the Academy of Art University art school, and ironically I ended up going to that school. The fake ID part had nothing to do with it, but it’s a true story nonetheless.

 

What are some of your favorite projects you’re proud to have been a part of?
Strangely enough, one of my first animation jobs is the one I remember the fondest. I worked on a Spanish /French co-production called The Three Wise Men in Spain. It was the first time I really sunk my teeth into doing animation and storyboards on a big production. It was a small team but the talent level was really high and I had to hustle to keep up. I loved every minute of it. It was the first time I Continue reading

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Luis Zúñiga

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What is your name and your current occupation?
My name is Luis Zúñiga, and I’m an artist at Fair Play Labs, what I do there is concept art, illustration, background art,

What is your name and your current occupation?
My name is Luis Zúñiga, and I’m an artist at Fair Play Labs, what I do there is concept art, illustration, background art, UI design, UI animation, UI integration, 3d animation, modelling, rigging, texturing and unity 3d integration.

What are some of the crazier jobs you had before getting into animation?
Well, I’m not the craziest person, but I’ve done handicraft, I worked at a couple of shops, I’ve been a pizza making/delivery guy, a guitarist for tips, and I’ve done some construction work before going to college at age 18, since I began to study digital animation, all work I’ve done has been in the animation/illustration area.

What are some of your favorite projects you’re proud to have been a part of?
I loved to be part of Poster Punch’s second and fourth exhibition, The Pin-up Drink and Poster Punch Open MMXIII, I also loved to be part of El Obsequio, my graduation project, I’m glad we were able to get the work done and to create something we felt and still feel very proud of, that graduation project was under my name only, but I am really grateful to the +20 people that was by my side working on it. At Fair Play I’ve been part of +12 video games and I liked the team dynamics in most of them, but there’s one that I totally loved being part of, mostly because it is till now our most ambitious project of them all, Color Guardians, and its almost done, I love to work on my solo and team projects, all of them have been great and have taught me a lot, but those I mentioned are the ones that comes first to my mind.

Where are you from and how did you get into the animation business?
I’m from Costa Rica, and my insertion to the animation/illustration business came naturally, I was Continue reading

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Robertryan Cory

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What is your name and your current occupation?
My name is Robertryan Cory and I’m currently a character designer on Secret  Mountain Fort Awesome at Cartoon Network.What are some of the crazier jobs you had before getting into animation?
Well I started working in animation when I was 15 so it was sort of my first  job, but I did have a weird job when I went to college. (Warning this is not PG) I worked for a porn company doing comics and they had me animating “money shots” for a series called “Pop-up Porn”. It was sort of like a dirty version of Pop-up Videos on VH1. I remember having to work late one night
and thinking “what am I doing with my life?”. I quit the next day even though the money was really great.

What are some of your favorite projects you’re proud to have been a part of?

Well I guess Ren & Stimpy Adult Party Cartoon because working on R&S was the  only goal I had in life at the time. I thought it was impossible since it  had been off the air for nearly a decade. It was one of the worst experiences emotionally, but I met so many talented people and it made me practice harder.  2nd would be Spongebob. I feel like I wasn’t a good artist until that job.
That was another job with an incredible crew that really made me push myself  because I wanted to earn their respect. Also it’s cool to be involved with  something that the entire world knows… it even impresses my niece, which  means a lot to me.
How did you become interested in animation?
There was a program during middle school where students would get to animate  a 30sec spot promoting anti-smoking. I did that 3 years in a row. The 3rd year my short was banned for Continue reading
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James Wood

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What is your name and your current occupation?
My name is James Wood.  I am currently employed as a freelance animator under contract with a major Canadian animation studio creating character animation for a tv show.

 

What are some of the crazier jobs you had before getting into animation?
One summer I got a job working in a hospital as a photographer’s assistant.  One of the duties required me to take photos in the operating room during surgeries – usually done on Fridays.  On the day when I was “indoctrinated” into that task, I was assured the surgeon was doing “just a little operation on someone’s hand.  It shouldn’t be very extensive” he said.  Little did I know, they were doing an elbow reconstruction.  When I walked in, I thought the patient was lying on their stomach with their elbow bent out behind them.  Then I realized the patient was lying on his back, and their elbow was opened up and bent (urp) the wrong way.  I didn’t hurl, but I was mighty shaky – not a good state for taking pictures.  Every Friday for the rest of the summer… I hid out in the darkroom!

What are some of your favorite projects you’re proud to have been a part of?
I was fortunate enough to work with the highly-skilled, very clever, fun, very hard-working people at Weta Workshop animating Dragon and other animals on the tv show “Jane and the Dragon”.  It meant I got to spend a year in New Zealand which was pretty interesting.  The work was quite demanding, but I think the end product was pretty darn good.  Also, in the summer of 2012 I did a  short for an animation contest.  We were given sound tracks and six weeks to animate whatever we wanted.  Just a few weeks before the contest I’d finished programming an autorigger, so I whipped up a character model, rigged it, modeled and rigged props and created a location, animated like crazy, added sound effects to the audio and posted the thing about two and a half weeks after starting it.  Sure the model is crude, and the animation is far from wonderful, and even though I didn’t win the contest (no comment) I feel very proud of my work.  The autorigger worked great (it took about an hour to fully rig the character), the animation is serviceable, and the whole thing tells more story than what was conveyed by the audio.  I realized how do-able it was to create a reasonably good short and it was great to hear how well it was received.  I’m eager to do more.

Where are you from and how did you get into the animation business? 
I’m from London, Ontario in Canada.  When I was a kid, I was always drawing and making Continue reading