On becoming an animator and getting the "call" from Dreamworks

It was 2002. I was having lunch with a friend on Abbot Kinney Boulevard one sunny day in Venice California. i had my face half submerged in a huge burrito when my phone starts vibrating in my pocket. I usually don't answer my phone when i am eating with company, but since my friend had just gotten up to go to the bathroom, i take advantage of the situation and answer it.

"Hello, is this Zen2?" An unfamiliar voice asks.

"this is him speaking" I reply.

"This is Monty from PDI/Dreamworks. We have reviewed your reel and we would like to fly you up to San Francisco to meet with some of our people, would you be available this friday?"
my jaw dropped and my heart leapt out of my throat. I had gotten the call....and the music starts playing...ooooh child things are gonna be easy, oooh there gonna be alriiiight. i had just made it to the promised land.

Over 6 years before that, in 1996, i went to a very fateful interview for a master's degree at SVA. I ended up applying to an MFA program in "Computer Art", thinking it was to master Photoshop and graphic design, since that was the only thing i had been introduced to through an internship at a fashion magazine. But fortunately for me, i had mistaken that for what was really an Animation program. the woman at the interview listened to my whole shpeel about being a painter and a graff writer and wanting to go digital. she said "i think you have us mistaken for the Illustration department". i was embarrassed and disappointed until she said that she would love to hold onto my application and see what happens. long story short, i ended up getting in, finding out that it was one of the best programs for that kind of work, and also, finding out that i LOVED IT. it's like graphic design on steroids. it's SO complex and technical that it makes my head spin even now. it's also, once you've mastered the unbelievable amount of technical data, completely unlimited in what you can do with it. so suddenly i could visualize the images and dreams in my crazy head, only i had the tools to really make them look real, unlike my shaky painting hand that could never really truly paint what i was imagining. in painting i always looked at the final product and realized that i had only paraphrased what i wanted to see. the images where always a kind of visual compromise. i liked them, but i never admitted that they fell far short of what had originally been in my head. with computers, the limits of my hands were removed. it was up to my imagination, and how much skill i had as a 3D artist.

There are a few defining moments in my career as an animator. These are mostly incidents that can be seen as milestones which were a clear indication that i had chosen the right path in life. One early moment was when i took a job being tech support for an in-house agency animation department a few months after starting grad school at the School of Visual Arts. i got the job and quickly realized that there was one, lone SGI (a unix based special animation computer) box with the 3D program i was learning that nobody in the building knew how to use. since the computer and the software cost over 50,000 dollars and was just collecting dust, the fact that i could use it made me a shoe in. so before i was into my second semester, i was getting limo rides to school from the Ad Agency and back again so i could leave my motorcycle at home and show up to school like Ricky Schroeder in Silver Spoons. I had thousands of dollars worth of computers at my beckon, while students in my classes were fighting over scraps in the lab. giving me a rendering advantage to make my thesis...

please excuse the horrible compression and low volume. it is remastered from a smaller movie i found posted on the internet. when i get a chance i will find the orginal and post that...

Another moment was when I got a call from R/GA in midtown. at the time, R/GA was the best animation and fx studio in the city. they had seen my thesis animation at the North East Regional Animation Showcase (which i hadn't even been told had accepted my work). I knew when i walked down the hedge lined path to the front door of what looked like a star wars glass office that i was well on my way. from then on, i was turning down calls for work regularly. and that was before 2000. i also ended up getting sent out to Tel Aviv and working there. that was an intense and glorious experience in my life. It was scary and strange, but extremely interesting and a real learning experience. both on a cultural level, and just in terms of my ability to go to a far away place and make a life for myself not knowing a single person, or even speaking the language. the ironic thing about that job and how i ended up leaving it, was when they offered me a permanent position i turned them down because my loving father had made me nervous about the escalating Intifada. a week before i was offered the position, a club on the beach near my place had been bombed. i had gone to that club regularly and 17 people died there, so i was in agreement with my father and how i needed to get the fuck out of dodge while i still was alive. Well, i got back just in time for September 11th. but that's another story.

But hands down, the moment that i will never forget was the moment i got called up to go to PDI/Dreamworks. I had been moved out to LA by a place called Blur Studio. It was a fantastic place in Venice, full of really great talent and an owner who was more about the artistic integrity of the work and the cohesive family feeling of the staff then making stupid clients have their way with him. I loved it there, but was hell bent on working at a big movie studio. One studio had always stood out to me since the first time they made a presentation at my grad school about what they work on. At the time, they had already made Shrek and Antz, and from the first time i saw Antz, back when i was just learning how to key-frame for the very first time, i knew i wanted to be there. I rarely set such specific goals in life so this was almost a first for me, besides wanting to be a king graffiti writer, of course.

I had also gone to see A Bug's Life by Pixar and knew instantly that it was PDI/Dreamworks that was really bringing the rich lighting and deeply complex environments. Pixar had great character animation, development, and story. PDI/Dreamworks brought the art of the image to it's highest level at that point in time. I consider myself a visual artist and it was the color, the richness of the backgrounds, and the subtle complexity of lighting that really sealed the deal in making me pick them over Pixar. So, with that in mind, i went about building a reel from commercial work in NYC, since that was the arena i started in and to just jump into film is a huge leap for an animator.

So it was at an animation convention in LA, right after Tel Aviv and a week or two before 9/11 that i dropped my VHS reel into a basket full of reels. it was totally random and i had zero connections to the place. not even an old classmate who i could go through. it was that anonymity that makes the fact that they called me even more gratifying for me. it was solely based on my work. they called me up, flew me to SF and within a week i had an offer on the table. I can't even convey how great that felt. i had made it. not only was i going to live in San Francisco, a city i had always wanted to live dating back to the horrible disappointment of being rejected by UC Berkely when i was applying to college. now i was being moved there free of charge, and was going to get the big movie money at a big movie studio. i remember the conversation i had with my father, who i always keep posted on my career decisions. he would be proud of me no matter what i did in life, but the fact that when he asked me what this meant, that i could and did say "Dad, this is like being a baseball player and getting called up to play for the Yankees...from here on in, i can work on anything, anywhere i want. it's like being a "made" man the second i step foot in there." and this is true. i could here his pride overflowing on the other end of the line. he had worried so much about me when i was growing up, the graffiti, the tough friends, the school trouble. he had worried even after college when i became a bike messenger, as he worries about everything, including getting struck by lighting. but here, it was TRIUMPH. i was doing something incredible and he was filled with joy and relief for his son, the animator.
Here is one of my shots from Shrek the Third. I was a lead lighter, I would light a sequence envrironment and a few key shots, then my team of about 6 lighters would go in and make the rest of that part of the film look like my stuff.

ever since that conversation, my dad always defers to my decisions, he always inserts, "I know you will make the right decision no matter what happens, you always do" well that, my friends, means a LOT to me. my mother has always approved of everything i did, including graffiti, because she is something of an anarchist and a free thinker and would approve of me if i were a ditch digger in scranton. but with my dad, his more "mundane" concerns, and his experiences with his own father, a harsh and disapproving Russian bear of a man. there was much more on the line. not that i chose animation or did any of that for my father specifically, but to get his absolute approval and his amazement at my achievement was a major major part of the success of getting the call from Dreamworks.

I look forward to more of these moments in my career, hopefully, there will be more milestones and goal reaching achievements, but there will never be again, such a huge transition from the unknown to absolutely positively perfect opportunity that came from the random "slip in shit" happen-stance of that first interview at SVA to the moment i walked through the door at Dreamworks. that was when i knew that i had made all the right choices and i had achieved what thousands of animators only dream of.

Here is my reel as it stands right now. the compression on youtube made it a lot darker so some of the stuff is way too dark to look at, but it's mostly viewable.