Category Archives: Artists Interviews

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Olga Stern

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What is your name and your current occupation?
My name is Olga Stern. I mostly work as a visual development artist. So, sometimes I create visuals for feature films, sometimes for children’s television, and sometimes for illustrated magazines or children’s books.  I love constructing worlds in my mind and translating them into visual images.
What are some of the crazier jobs you had before getting into animation?
Hmmm….I am not sure if I would describe the jobs as crazy. I worked in a sportswear store, I worked in a restaurant as a hostess, I worked a camp counselor teaching swimming, diving, synchronized swimming and arts and crafts, and I taught children art for a few years in a small private art studio during college.

What are some of your favorite projects you’re proud to have been a part of?
I loved working on “Justin Time” with Guru Animation. I think that the message conveyed by the show is great for children, the visuals of the show directed by Brandon Scott and Keith Lee are stunning and I loved working with Brandon Scott, Harold Harris and the rest of the guru crew.

Where are you from and how did you get into the animation business?
I was originally born in Kaliningrad and then lived in Odessa Ukraine, (still part of the Soviet Union at the time) until I was about 8 years old. Our family then moved to Toronto Canada where I grew up. I was lucky enough to audition and get into Claude Watson School for the Arts located in North York Ontario. Claude Watson is an amazing school for young minds. It combines drama, jazz, mime, art, choir, orf, and musical theatre classes with a regular academic curriculum classes. The program spans from grade 4 until grade 13, in grade 9 you choose what subject of the arts you would like to specialize in. I chose art. I was not sure what I wanted to specialize in when I was Continue reading

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Jennifer Adkins

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What is your name and your current occupation?
Jennifer Adkins – Freelance Artist/Animator
What are some of the crazier jobs you had before getting into animation?
I was a junior processor for a mortgage company just before the bubble burst. It was interesting to say the least.

What are some of your favorite projects you’re proud to have been a part of?
I worked on a HTTYD build your own dragon promotion game. It was a fun time of cutting out dragon parts and then putting them back together again to make them fly and breath fire. My current and most ambitious project is a animated interactive computer based training for a non-profit hospital. It has been a trial of endurance but very rewarding.

How did you become interested in animation?
From very early on I loved to draw. I watched Disney and Don Bluth movies repeatedly and note every movement. I had plans to create Continue reading

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Microsoft aims to actually make the “Animate Button”

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There are always companies trying to edge out the animator.  Not sure why exactly but it’s clearly something they strive for. Maybe it’s the Lamborghini’s we all drive and the overflowing money stuffed wallets we have ;living large as animators. Oh wait, that’s the CEOs of the companies not us.

From the Polar Express to Tin Tin to the ever increasing use of Mocap, studios see a brighter future free from the chains of us animators. Of course any animator will tell you Mocap only goes so far but that’s another story. Until recently traditional 2d animation has been pretty much impossible to auto complete simply because computers weren’t smart enough to predict what needs to be inbetweened. Anyone who has ever tried Flash’s Shape Tween tool has a clear idea of how well that goes. Well now Wired.com is reporting that Microsoft Research, along with the University of Hong Kong and the University of Tokyo, just unveiled a proof-of-concept technology that could bring back the charm of older, hand-drawn cartoons, with the speed and fluidity of today’s animation software.

From the site:

“Autocomplete hand-drawn animations” debuted at the Siggraph Asia conference, and it’s an interactive system that watches what the artist draws and then predicts what frame or line might come next. It can also smartly connect the dots between two different drawings, and propagate the motion that should occur between the two sketches. This works for color too: fill in the first frame with certain hues, and the system will replicate them.

You can read the entire article here.

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Paul Thompson

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What is your name and your current occupation?
Paul Thompson and I’m a motion graphics artist.

 

What are some of the crazier jobs you had before getting into animation?
Can’t say I had any jobs you would term as crazy, I was programming before motion graphics and that got a bit boring.

 

What are some of your favorite projects you’re proud to have been a part of?
I quite enjoy doing assembly instruction videos and as far as I can find on the web it seems I have done more than anyone in the world. I’m quite proud of the fact that this is obviously the future and I was one of the first to be involved in this kind of thing.

 

How did you become interested in animation?
Since I was a child watching cartoons, especially Spiderman! I got a present for Christmas when I was a child which was a Disney projector that you held to your eye. You turned a handle and it Continue reading
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Luis María Benítez

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What is your name and your current occupation? 
My name is Luis María Benítez and currently I work as a background artist and as a freelance illustrator.
What are some of the crazier jobs you had before getting into animation?
I had the misfortune of working at a call center. I had moved to another city and I didn’t know how to get started. A real nightmare.
What are some of your favorite projects you’re proud to have been a part of? 
I’m relatively new in the business so I wouldn’t be able to say that yet.
Where are you from and how did you get into the animation business? 
I was born in Lobos, Argentina. I got into the animation business after I moved to Buenos Aires, the capital where after a while I recovered my dream of studying animation so I Continue reading
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Chris Cookson

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What is your name and your current occupation?
I’m Chris Cookson and I am currently a freelance animator, I work in Flash mostly but sometimes I get some AfterEffects and Photoshop work.  I’ve been lucky enough where everything I’ve done before animation has been some kind of visual based work. The first job I did out of high school was making animated assets for the LED sign demo room at Trans-Lux (yes, that Trans-Lux of the 1959 Felix the Cat cartoon). It was a uniquely fun experience, they had this old LaserDisc system that would trigger all kinds of signs to light up in cue to music and audio, the audio was very much a product of the ’80s but they wanted me to modernize the visuals and make some colorful stuff for their new centerpiece display.  Apart from that, I’ve done a good amount of web design work in my formative years. One of my clients was a Cuban percussionist who was really into anime and kung-fu movies. He even offered to pay me for making his site with a samurai sword, which to 15-year-old me, was the coolest thing ever. Though, if I were to ever come home with a samurai sword, my parents would probably kill me, likely with that very same samurai sword.

What are some of your favorite projects you’re proud to have been a part of?
In terms of cool projects, a psychedelic TV ad for Linda McCartney’s line of frozen vegan foods has been really satisfying. What I loved was the ad had a different style than the usual aesthetic I get but had a lot of understated weirdness and quite a few distinct shots to work on. I got to meet Paul McCartney’s son-in-law and Rick Astley’s wife while on the project too which made me geek out pretty hard. A couple of months after I finished work on the spot, I started to see posts about it show up on sites like Motionographer, The Huffington Post and was linked by a lot of the sites I follow on Twitter, which made me feel real warm and fuzzy on the inside.  I’m also really proud of a lot of the smaller commercial projects I have worked on at Shoulderhill Creative. For those, it’s great to work with a couple of my classmates from art school and since it’s not a part of a giant team, I feel a lot more creative ownership over what I’m making. It’s absolutely wonderful to have a chance to work more within my own style and have more room to experiment with the colors and see what kind of little visual jokes I can put in to the advertisement.  Other projects like William Caballero’s documentary short film “How You Doin’ Boy? Voicemails from Gran’pa” were really great to be a part of. For that, he wanted me to make a squiggly text treatment based off of his grandfather’s handwriting to go up on screen in sync with actual answering machine messages left from his grandfather. Having the freedom to design the word treatment, as well as play around with text sizes was really fulfilling, the tone of some of the messages allowed me to really go crazy in some spots too, pushing the graphic element of it, trying to get it to match his grandfather’s own personal tone.

Where are you from and how did you get into the animation business?
I’m from Stamford, CT and I’ve always wanted to either be a cartoonist or animator for pretty much my entire life. I taught myself how to use Flash when I was 12-years-old and would constantly look for an excuse to use it any chance I had, whether it be for making buttons or logos on the aforementioned web design projects I got or making short films whenever the opportunity arose. After making more and more stuff, over the years, my skills started to Continue reading