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By: Andrew Lyndon
Director of Fine Arts and Professor of Animation at California College of the Arts (campuses in San Francisco and Oakland)

Are you thinking of a career in animation? It’s an excellent idea, for a number of reasons. It is amazing to work at Pixar, Dreamworks, or Blue Sky. It is great to be part of a team making a film full of imagination and color and characters—like WALL-E or Shrek or The Twilight Saga. The good news is that there are a lot of jobs out there. Animation is a growing field, and it needs skilled artists and filmmakers.

Making an animated feature film is a two-year process, a long evolution from sketches on paper to a world full of action, sounds, and light. Each production involves hundreds of people, including character artists, story artists, 3D modelers, animators, technical directors creating effects, and many more. What do these roles mean, exactly?

Animators are actors and observers, artists who create actions. Sometimes these actions are large—such as lifting a chair, or walking—and require careful observation of shifting weight and human anatomy. Then there are the small actions, like an eye blink, that reveal subtle nuances of emotion. The goal is making a character seem truly alive. As Tom Gibbons, animation supervisor at Tippett Studio, puts it: “Animation is the art of breathing life into the lifeless.”
Animation is a craft and requires wide-ranging skills, which could include drawing, acting, or directing; a deep familiarity with cinema; and sharp observations of physical and emotional behavior. Bret Parker, a Pixar animator and a professor at California College of the Arts, uses diverse skills every day “to bring stories to life in a way that’s not possible in other media.”

An animation career provides lifelong prospects of solid employment and deep personal artistic satisfaction. For example, when a script is finished and production begins, there are only words on the page—no imagery, no characters, no voices, no light. But there is an image in the director’s mind, and he or she needs to get it down on paper so everyone on the production can start working to bring it to life. Character artists meet with the director and start drawing out the characters, adjusting height, weight, clothes, hair, everything, until each one looks just right for its actions and the story. This job is as old as animation, and studios will always need the vision of an artist with a pencil and eraser to sketch out details revealing character. I mention this job first because it is part of pre-production, but also because it requires deep knowledge of character animation. It is about being an artist in the most fundamental sense of the word: just pencil and paper.

Next, these drawings need to be turned into 3D digital computermodels, and this is done by 3D modelers working in a program such as Autodesk Maya. The modelers build the 3D characters based on the pre-production character drawings. While 3D modelers don’t animate, they need to understand animation, because they have to think about each character: who they are, how they move, and what they’ll have to do during the movie. Sullivan of Monsters Inc. is heavy and powerful, so the modeler has to construct his body forms and joints in a way that will express his personality.

These are just a few of the many jobs at an animation studio. They all contribute to the final product, but they rely on different combinations of artistic approaches, technical skills, and temperaments. If you are thinking about jumping into an animation career, it’s important to ask yourself how you like to work, and follow the path that allows you to be most satisfied with what you are doing each day. If you like to work fast, to draw and see your results flowing immediately from the pencil, then you should think about becoming a story, character, or scene artist. If you like thinking via the computer, building things digitally, you might be best suited to the career of digital modeler, set dresser, or special effects wizard.

Remember that working for a studio is not the only option for a professional animation artist. You could found a studio of your own, work in an ad agency where you will be the big fish in a smaller pond (and get to make all the animation decisions!), or enter the gaming industry. You can also be an independent artist and undertake freelance projects of your choosing. California College of the Arts graduate Bessie Chui just completed the animation work for a Facebook game, and she enjoyed a kind of freedom in her role that she wouldn’t get at a studio: “As part of a small team, we were allowed quite a bit of creative liberty. We generally got to pick what we wanted to create from a list provided by our team leader.”
How can you get these skills, and one of these careers? You’ve got to go to school for the necessary training and knowledge. If you are thinking about choosing a college to study animation, this is what you should look for:

Strong Faculty:
The faculty should have a lot of practical experience working on major, current animation projects, including feature films and short films for large and small studios; commercial work; 2D and 3D styles; 3D modeling; personal art; films made for galleries or animation festivals; animation for Facebook, cell phones, iPads, and other mobile devices; special effects; and gaming.
The greater the variety of faculty, the more industry contacts you will make while you are still in school. So when it comes time to apply for internships or jobs, these well-placed industry folks can help you get a leg up.

Location:
Think about where you would like to live and work in the long run. Through your school, you will be making connections to local studios.

School-Wide Breadth:
Students often choose schools based only on the technical animation skills they can deliver, but I highly recommend choosing a school that has a long history of art making in a wide variety of media, and a commitment to excellence in general education. Having worked at Pixar, I know that they value employees with a real breadth of visual knowledge rather than a limited, perfected skill set. Familiarity with any visual discipline contributes to the sharpness of your eye and mind. Writing, math, and architecture electives add sophistication and improved communication to your “toolbox” of skills. At California College of the Arts, for example, animation students can take classes in film, and that knowledge of film grammar will absolutely serve them well in their subsequent job search and career. ■

By Lauren Pratt, associateproducer for musicAt the Roy and EdnaDisney/CalArts Theater(Abridged for Creative Outlookmagazine)

From its early, heady days,

California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, Calif., has always stood forprogress, not only creative and conceptual, but also technological — developingnew tools in making new, unprecedented art. Today, The Herb Alpert School ofMusic at CalArts is forging ahead with one of the Institute’s most ambitiousefforts in the field of creative tech — the Program in Music Technology:Intelligence, Interaction and Design (IID). This Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA)program, says Music Dean David Rosenboom, is radically expanding the envelopeof contemporary musicmaking with completely original instruments and ingenioususes for conventional instruments in live performance.

“Music Tech: IID is changing

the very definition of what musical instruments can be, and what it means to‘play’ new ‘intelligent’ instruments, instruments which can actuallyrestructure themselves in response to how they are played,” Rosenboom says. “Amusical instrument can be an interface between one form of intelligence, suchas a human performer, and another, such as an invented intelligent system. Conceivedin such a way, instruments offer much more than a one-to-one response to aplaying action: press a key, get a sound. They can activate compositionalsystems, produce variations on what is being played, re-order the ways theyproduce sound, and even call up entire multimedia, multisensory worlds.”

Bearing out Rosenboom’s words

was a recent performance at the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater (REDCAT) bythe KarmetiK Machine Orchestra led by Ajay Kapur, director of Music Tech: IID.As the house lights dimmed, a crimson wash fell over the stage and black-cladperformers took their places at their stations. Toward the back, an eight-footmotorized “rain stick” turned slowly, hypnotically, generating a drone fromfalling sand, lentils, and BB-gun pellets. The first movement of Digital Sankirna began with the intricate twangs of the sitar, plucked by Kapur; it was then followed by the haunting, microtonalslide of the dilruba bowed by Curtis Bahn. Soon other instruments joined in,building textures, colors and rhythms. Some of these were played by the membersof the orchestra; others played… themselves. They were playing not in the way adrum machine can play itself, but actually playing—responding to andinteracting with the shifts, nuances and complexity of the overall performance.

The KarmetiK (“karma + kinetic

= Energy of Karma”) Machine Orchestra’s program was divided into threecomponents: “Interfaces” (i.e., points of interaction between two systems),“Robots,” and “People.” Each instrument on stage, as much as it might havelooked like its traditional namesake, was either an interface or a robot. Eachwas designed, built and programmed by either students in or mentors to theProgram in Music Technology: Intelligence, Interaction and Design, who includeworld-famous music technology innovators Trimpin, Perry Cook, Curtis Bahn andthe classically trained Kapur.

What can a Music Tech: IID

student expect to achieve in this program? “We teach students engineeringskills; how to do software programming; how to do electrical engineering, howto design their circuits, how to design new instruments for the future,” saysKapur. His colleague Martijn Zwartjes adds, they learn “how to build their ownsynthesizers, build their own way of making computer-generated sound fromscratch, develop their own sound.” For students who come into the program froma classical background, “we teach them how to put sensors on their instruments,how to make their instruments talk to their computers. We teach them how tomake their trumpet, let’s say, sound like it’s from Mars—but only their Mars. They decide what they want to hear.”

Today, career opportunities in

music technology today are ever-growing, ranging from recording to softwaredesign, to multimedia, to the gaming industry, to new instrument design, tomusic and film production. For this reason, says Kapur, CalArts’ music techcurricula have always tried to develop the conceptual and technical foundationson which students can then build in any number of these closely related fields.“Most students are also performers and composers in some significant measure,”he says. “So the most important thing is always the music.”drum set at age 8, Kapur went on to earn an undergraduate degree at PrincetonUniversity and a PhD from University of Victoria. Following his doctorate, TheHerb Alpert School of Music was the perfect place for Kapur to land. TheInstitute already boasted a well-developed Program in Music Technology and arich history of developing new arts technologies — including electronic musicsynthesizers, video synthesizers, software for multimedia performance, softwarefor learning, advanced signal processing, musical interfaces with the humannervous system, and live long-distance tele-presence performance (the Centerfor Experiments in Art, Information and Technology [CEAIT]). CalArts, moreover,was home to two of the great contemporary masters of Indian music, tabla playerSwapan Chaudhuri and sarodist Aashish Khan, with whom Kapur continues hisclassical Indian music practice.

Meason Wiley (BFA 09), Music

Tech: IID’s post-graduate assistant, started studying in the program during itstransition to the current set-up. “Ajay was behind the shift from most MusicTech: IID students using the laptop as their primary instrument to having thembuild instruments to interface with their computers instead. I came to CalArtsto learn more about audio production and sound design, and I am leaving withmany more career skills than I had ever imagined. The students believe thatthey own this program, and it’s not unusual to see them working 18-hour days ontheir instruments.”

The Program in Music

Technology: Intelligence, Interaction and Design has now developed a Master ofFine Arts (MFA) curriculum. Pending approval by the National Association ofSchools of Music (NASM), the MFA program expects to enroll its first studentsin the fall of 2011.

To see a video about the

KarmetiK Machine Orchestra and the making of its instruments, go to http://blog.calarts.edu/2010/01/26/the-karmetik-machine-orchestra-at-redcat.