| ME |
| Chapter one..
I started my career in this industry in 1996 at PDI DreamWorks (Pacific
Data Images). I worked as a production assistant for most of the production
on Antz. It was the hardest job I have ever held. Luckily for me one
of the managers saw me working in the basement and thought I had done
a detailed job and asked me if I wanted to interview for another position.
At the time I didn't care what I was doing as long as it wasn't another
Production assistant job. Thankfully it was for render wrangler. It
wasn't animation but I felt it was a step up. I wasn't sure where, but
it was up! It turned out that this was a pretty technical job and not
much creative. It certainly wasn't animation but for the time being
I was content to do my job, while coming in early and staying late to
work on my animation. I had made some friends in animation, (Rex Grignon
and Edip Agi) who took to mentoring me. I will always be grateful
to those guys, because they helped me build a foundation. Well I did
the wrangler thing for most of Shrek and then decided it was time to
move on to a small production studio to get my legs, since PDI wasn't
able to give me a job due to my lack of experience. So I left PDI to go to DNA
Production in Los Colinas Texas just outside of Dallas. I worked
on the Jimmy Neutron feature where I learned how to animate from the
ground up using the step curve method from Troy Saliba and Renato Dos Anjos.
I learned tons during production and was lucky enough to be kept on
to work on the television series. It was a very hard work schedule on
the series but it taught me how to be fast. After a year and a half stint on the series I decided to pack up again
and this time move to New York to work at Blue Sky Studios. I was very
fortunate to be able to work on Robots where I animated almost 100 shots!
I have to say that the people at Blue Sky are the best ! After doing
some work on Ice Age 2 I decided it was time to head back to the West
Coast.
Well after two years at Sony
Imageworks as a senior animator on Surf's Up and Open Season we (with the addition of my daughter) realized how much we missed everyone at Blue Sky. So once again we headed back to the east coast to work on Horton Hears a Who.. If you have any questions or comments WallingAnimation@gmail.com |