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Jeff Victor

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What is your name and your current occupation?
My name is Jeff Victor and I work as an illustrator/designer for Nickelodeon Games. I work as an art lead on a online game called PetPet Park, designing characters, backgrounds, props, and more.

 

What are some of the crazier jobs you had before getting into animation?
I’ve worked many mundane jobs in my life, but one that is really pretty special to me is when I first moved to Los Angeles, I got work as a background performer, or “extra”. As I was unsuccessfully submitting my portfolio to studios, I made my living as a student/doctor/terrified pedestrian/casual onlooker, etc. I appeared in hundreds of TV shows and movies. As a huge film buff, it was incredible being on set watching some of my favorite directors work. You only earn a tiny paycheck, but being on set with Steven Spielberg or Martin Scorsese was a priceless experience. My other craziest job was working a few years at Universal Studios Hollywood. I was a show tech, which basically meant I had to set the stage explosives, hook the actors to their flying rigs, move set pieces around on stage, and in the case of Fear Factor Live, handle giant scorpions. All in a day’s work.

 

What are some of your favorite projects you’re proud to have been a part of?
I am extremely proud of the work I’ve been doing for Nickelodeon. I enjoy that people all over the world have seen my work. I also really enjoyed some of the stints I had as a character designer at Warner Bros animation, and at East/West DVD, where I got to draw DVD covers for classic cartoons. It was my first real job in animation, and I am really proud of the work, even though it looks incredibly dated to my eyes today. (Of course, things I drew 3 weeks ago look dated to me, but that’s another story…)

 

Where are you from and how did you get into the animation business?
I’m from the Chicago suburbs, and after receiving the “Art of Star Wars” book as a youngster, I knew I wanted to be an artist. I was obsessed with comic books and cartoons as a kid, especially Batman the Animated Series. I filled my grade school notebooks with Continue reading

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Tony Craig

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What is your name?
Tony Craig
What are some of your favorite projects you’re proud to have been a part of?
“The animation project I’m most proud of is the DVD video Bobs Gannaway, Jess Winfield and I did to wrap up the Lilo and Stitch tv series.  I know that it is relatively unknown, and I won’t get into the reasons for why I think the release of it was handled inappropriately, but the name of it is “”Leroy and Stitch””.  The reason I am proudest of it has to do with how it all turned out.  Usually, as a director, you have in your head what you think it should look like, and then when your show comes back from being animated overseas, it is not even close.  Then you get used to what you do have, and start molding it into the final show.  This project was the closest to what I had in my head.  I know that it is not feature quality, but when you consider the time and the budget we were given to do it (1/4 the time the Disneytoons folks got for Stitch has a glitch, and probably 1/8 or less of what they spent), well, I’m proud of what we pulled off.
The storyline is good too.  Bobs and Jess did a great job with the script and the transitions of emotion from scene to scene, action sequence to quiet sequence, musical parts, score…all of it came together.
House of Mouse was another fun one, because we were able to utilize any character from the history of Disney animation.  We were pulling the most obscure characters from old Silly Symphony cartoons and sticking them in the show, just for fun.
A personal project that I enjoyed doing was photographing old country and general stores across the state of North Carolina and compiling them into a book, “”Country Stores in North Carolina”.
How did you become interested in animation?
“I remember an evening at my grandparents’ house with my parents. I was still in a high chair, and I know this memory wasn’t based on photos or anything like that.  We went to see Disney’s “Pinocchio” that evening.  I fell asleep through most of it, but what I saw must have made an impression, or clicked in at that developmental stage of my infant mind. There was a copy of Christopher Finch’s book, “The Art of Walt Disney” in the reference section of our library.  Every family trip to the library, I would be at the end of that row, poring over the artwork.  I worked in the yard, saved my nickels, dimes, and quarters, until I had the $35 to buy my very own copy of that book, and I copied the pictures out of it regularly.