EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Morgan Williams: I've been a professional character animator for almost 25 years now which means I've been a character animator for almost half of my life. Certainly, the vast majority of my adult life, I have been a character animator. Those 25 years have been years of tremendous change in our industry. In the industry of animation in general, character animations certainly has obviously undergone a massive shift during that time and I feel very privileged to have had my career span that time so in a certain sense I was able to have my foot in both worlds.

I started drawing on paper and painting cells and shooting on film and now I work with the latest computers and the latest software. All the time, I have been focusing on this art form, the art form of character animation that I love so much. I thought and maybe indulgently but because I saw that shift and because I went through that change that our industry went through, I thought you might enjoy hearing about that history a little bit and tell you a little bit about my background in the process.

Hopefully, I don't just bore you with all old war stories but hopefully, you also get a chance to see how things changed and how things shifted during those volatile years from the late ‘80s through the ‘90s and into our new century. I was a really artsy kid. Both my parents and my stepfather were all fine artists and had done some commercial artwork as well. My mother did a lot of illustration work. Art was just always around me so I was just surrounded by it all the time. My whole family, my extended family were also big fans of the entertainment arts and movies and television and music and all that kind of stuff so I feel like I just grew up surrounded by all of that.

Comedy in particular, everyone in my family was a comedy fan. I didn't even realize that there were people that didn't like comedy until I got much older but I certainly identify as a big time comedy nerd and love movies and loved that. I love all of the arts. I love music and entertainment and all of that stuff and grew up surrounded by it. When I was a kid, I did things like made Super 8 movies with my friends. We would record on cassette tapes. We would record fake radio stations and make up characters and try to copy skits from Monty Python and all that kind of stuff.

I was a ham and a showoff and an arty kid right from the beginning pretty much. As I grew up, I became obsessed with basically two things which were cartoons and the Muppets. Cartoons were just so huge for me. I loved them all quite frankly. I used to dress as Underdog which if you younger folks don't remember, you should Google it. Underdog was a ridiculous cartoon from the ‘60s that they used to rerun when I was a kid in the ‘70s and ‘80s and I used to actually dress up as Underdog and I believed I was Underdog when I was about 6 or 7 years old, I think. I loved Warner Brothers, oh my gosh!

Even as a kid, you could tell when they would play those old Warner Brothers cartoons and they were still playing those every Saturday morning in the ‘70s, all the classic Warner Brothers cartoons. They would run them constantly because they had truckloads of them and you could tell, I could tell as a kid even then that the quality was much higher, the humor was more sophisticated, the animation was more real. The characters really lived and breathed unlike a lot of the crude, low-budget, limited animation that was mostly happening at that time, although some of it was fun and well-designed.

There was something about those Warner Brothers cartoons that really grabbed me but I also saw a lot of other amazing stuff. Again in these days, television stations were buying up properties which were considered kind of moldy oldies at that time and putting them on TV at weird hours like Saturday morning. For kids, they would run certainly the modern cartoons of the day, the Scooby Doos and the Hanna-Barbera cartoons that were being made at that time. They were also running things like Warner Brothers. They're running things like Walter Lantz, Jay Ward who made Rocky and Bullwinkle.

Amazing stuff like the early UPA cartoons, Gerald McBoing-Boing and the early Mr. Magoo films, and I want to stress that because the later Mr. Magoo was produced later on by another studio. Name escapes me right now but they're not worth mentioning because the early original Mr. Magoo cartoons made by UPA were genius, brilliant cartoons but they were remade later at an extremely low quality as a way to capitalize on the popularity of the early cartoon.

If you look any of this stuff up, be very careful that you're looking for the original UPA Mr. Magoo and Gerald McBoing-Boing cartoons which are just beautiful and really fun. I also loved DePatie–Freleng which was the company that Friz Freleng from Warner Brothers formed after Warner Brothers closed their animation studio, they made the wonderful Pink Panther title sequences for the Pink Panther films but they also made a cartoon, Saturday morning cartoons which I really loved. All of this stuff you can probably find by doing some Googling and snooping around on YouTube a little bit.

Cartoons were just everything to me for so much of my childhood and probably were surpassed only by the coming of the Muppets and I already mentioned to you on the earlier podcast that the Muppets just blew my little brain apart and I loved them so dearly and I was smart enough and understood enough about the arts and I was old enough to understand that those were performers and that those puppets are crafted out of foam and fabric and I was just mesmerized by how I could simultaneously know that and know that that was just a honk of foam and felt and ping-pong balls but to simultaneously understand that and also believe in those characters 100% just was transformative to me and I did try puppetry. I built puppets. I believed I wanted to go into puppetry and I think that was very significant to leading me towards the work that I have done as an adult.

Once I got to high school, I had to of course, distance myself from Warner Brothers cartoons and the Muppets because I was too busy trying to be cool and trying to meet girls and trying to become a punk rock hero like Paul Westerberg or Bob Mould. I forgot about my love for those characters for a little while and was a little more in love with characters like Johnny Rotten and Joey Ramone. At the same time, I was still pursuing my love of the arts. I took every art class I could possibly take. I got into photography as well. I did journalism and wrote for the school paper and drew a few cartoons for them here and there, not very well I should say but I was an artsy high school student too and I discovered theatre there too. I got into theatre and really enjoyed doing that and even did a little bit of improv with the class where we went around and did improv for lower class students.

I was heading in a music geek, theatre geek, art nerd kind of direction of some kind. My choice for college was pretty clear. I ended up going to the same school my parents went to, mother, father and stepfather and that was the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Now, this was the late ‘80s, so just to give you a little picture of what it was like. These were the late years of punk rock and the early years of grunge. This was a time when the digital revolution was only being talked about as coming and hadn't really come yet. It was percolating and bubbling under the surface but it hadn't really happened. At that time, I think probably MCAD probably had a half a dozen computers on campus total and I think most of those were being used in accounting or in registration and not being used for anything creative at all.

By the time I left college, there was one classroom full of Macintoshes and they had a couple of Targus doing very, very early 3D animation as well. When I first got there, there was almost none. There were almost no computers at all. You have to visualize this rather different time when things were a little bit more organic but there is also a lot of change in the air. Things were changing and we all felt it as young people in that time. I came in as this weirdo art kid and I didn't know what the hell I wanted to do. I liked everything. I wanted to draw and paint but I also wanted to perform and I wanted to make things and build things. I was influenced by the punk rock movement and the avant-garde art world.

I wanted to do crazy, weird performance art, and I wanted to build things out of old television sets and I got fascinated by design and architecture for a while and I was just all over the place. I think I changed my major three times before finally settling on film and film, I had said before, I always loved movies as part of just loving the world of entertainment. I love movies and you have to remember at that time in the ‘80s, there had been some really exciting things happening in film. David Lynch, Spike Lee, Martin Scorsese were all doing some of their most amazing work at that time and those films captivated me and excited me and they had a very strong film program at that time at MCAD although it was very non-commercial, non-narrative driven but it was that they had great equipment and really good faculty and the students were really an interesting group, a kind of an unusual group of students that were interested in that area.

I became what at the time was called a media major which was really film, video and photography was what they called a media major at that time but I was definitely concentrating on film. I was making film my concentration, which was the way that program worked at the time. I ended up there in film and I thought, "Well, this is good because this will allow me to combine a lot of my interest," and it did combine a lot of my different interests but something really significant happened and that was in the end of my sophomore year, I was in Film 2 class, my second level film class, and at the very end of the class in order to just have the experience of doing it, we had to create an animated film.

They had an old animation stand there, beautiful German animation stand but it was quite creaky and old and they had some other equipment that would help with doing basic animation. It was required just to exercise really. It was really just an exercise. Well, I chose to do this kind of abstract hand drawn thing where you’re flying through this weird abstract environment with noodles and things floating around. It was just weird but it absolutely was a transformative moment.

I was sitting there in my horrible little apartment in South Minneapolis, a few blocks from the college, and I had my stack of paper and I was drawing frame after frame and I had music playing and I was focused and attentive. I'll tell you, I'm one of the most impatient, distractible people you’ve ever met but for some reason, when I began doing that task, when I began building that movement frame by frame and creating that illusion and I would start to flip the  drawings and feel the illusion and get that little thrill of, "Oh, my goodness! It's alive. My drawings are coming alive." It completely changed my life.

I can absolutely say that moment and that dumb little project, which I dearly wish I still have. I lost it years ago in a move, but that little project changed me. I realized then what I wanted to do and somehow it seems so obvious. It seemed like how did I not realize this long, long ago but I realized that not only did I want to be an animator, I was an animator, it was my identity. Animator was what I was. It combined everything that I loved, drawing and theatre and character and cartoons and puppetry, because as I talked about before, the connection between puppetry and character animation is a tight one.

All those things suddenly came together. Film, I was making films. I was making films but I was making films with drawings and with characters and I just lost my mind and I've really done pretty much nothing else since. The only thing that I've done other than being an animator is to teach animation but that moment, that one project, was the pivotal moment for me and has set me forward in my career. I've made a couple animated films there in college. I did one with a combination of cutout and hand-drawn techniques. Then I tried to make a full-blown cell animated film without any idea what I was getting into, nearly killed myself. I didn't even understand about doing pencil test first and it was horrible.

The animation was horrible. Horrible, horrible, horrible and one of the problems was is that there was no animation program. That's another thing about art schools. At that time, it might be hard for you to grasp but at that time, there was I think maybe four animation programs in the northern continent and that was it. My school didn't have an animation program. We had the equipment and we had teachers that were willing to let you experiment with animation but there was no one to teach it to you.

I was learning out of the few books that were available, and that's another thing about the late ‘80s, there were very few books available about animation. Just a couple and most of them were very poor or were very good but painfully short. I was struggling and I was trying to figure it out and I didn't really have any guidance or anybody to really help me. The films were horrible and would be deeply embarrassing for me to see now. I also, right before I left college, I also took what was called computer animation class. Now, that was a very, very early embryonic class with this one classroom they had just put in of Macintosh computers were little tiny, I think they were 10- or 12-inch screens, tiny little screens.

They were using a software called Macromedia Director to make very, very simple, crude, little two-dimensional animated pieces. That program, Macromedia Director, eventually became renamed and was named Macromedia Flash. That was eventually bought by Adobe and became the Adobe Flash that we know today. I did have that early little hint at doing computer animation and guess what, I really liked it. I loved that class and I really enjoyed working with the computer. I thought it was great fun and I think that brings up something, just a little side note here that I'd like to say about animators in general is one thing that I love about us, one thing I love about my fellow animators is that all of us are to some degree a weird combination of arty and techie geek.

We're like techie geeks who are arty or arty geeks. However you want to look at it but all animators and this goes throughout history. The history of animation is filled with people like Winsor McCay who were arty, techie geeks. They were both. They loved fooling around with technology but they also loved art and drawing and performance and character like we all do. I just think that's a fun thing about us and I certainly embrace those early computer experiments and thought they were great fun. Later on, that had some real benefit for me.

While I was finishing up school and what's funny is, I don't even remember exactly how this happened. I was thinking about it really hard for this podcast and I could never quite remember how it actually occurred. I must have seen it in the newspaper maybe or something but somehow I found out that there was a local animation studio in Minneapolis that was looking for people to help with their productions, were hiring for doing traditional animation productions. Of course, back then it was all traditional because that's all there was, really. That's all they had.

Again, the computers were just creeping at the edges at this time. I was a junior in college but quite frankly, I was running out of money and I was looking at having to take out loans, some substantial loans to finish up my schooling and I was a little nervous about that and I saw this job possibility and I sent them my horrible, horrible college animations and one of the things about that time was that it was much more possible to expect the company to train you, to do something. It wasn't as important to just walk into the job already knowing how to do it as it is today. Back then, a company would be willing to train you if they saw you had an interest and some talent toward something.

My horrible, horrible animation got me an interview at Mike Jones Film Corporation which was this Minneapolis-based animation studio, and this was around 1992. I was hired based on just the fact that I at least knew something about cell animation based on my horrible student films. They hired as a cell painter and back then, it was still the traditional technique of hand painting, hand drawing and hand painting each drawing and each cell in order to be photographed under camera so it was a completely traditional process and they offered that job. Well, I made the somewhat faithful decision to quit school a year before I graduated. Well, it's about a year and a half. A year and a half before I’ve graduated, I quit school and I went to work at a full-fledged commercial animation studio, Mike Jones Film Corporation in 1992.

Now, when I got to Mike Jones, it was a big bustling place. This place had been running since the late ‘70s and had been extremely popular through the late ‘70s and the early ‘80s in the Midwest doing mostly television commercials, mostly for Midwestern advertising agencies. It was a little bit provincial but it was a big studio with a lot of work going through all the time and it was 100% traditional. There were three real film cameras, 35-millimeter animation cameras, one of them was the huge room-filling animation stand, it was just giant. It was a big professional commercial television production animation stand that had actually been purchased from Bill Cosby's company that he had formed to make Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids.

We were actually shooting on the camera that was used to create the Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids cartoon which was huge for us because we'd all grown up with that cartoon as kids. Our third camera was a motion control animation camera. This was a fairly early one but it was the kind employed in early special effects and was basically a robotic arm controlled by a simple computer to repeat movements frame by frame again and again. This filled an enormous barn-like space at the back of the studio and allowed us to do special effects, practical special effect shots and that kind of thing with stop motion and that kind of animation.

Most of what Mike Jones did was old fashioned, traditional, hand-drawn character animation. I'll tell you guys, I was in heaven. I used to walk around that studio just smelling the cell paint digging through old flat files filled with artwork. I would occasionally find artwork from a very, very famous former employee of Mike Jones Film Corporation, a man you might have heard of. A guy named Pete Docter. Pete Docter was an animator in Mike Jones and created a couple of wonderful short films and we used to be able to dig up and find old backgrounds and cells that have been stuck away from those short films he had created, which I think are pretty hard to find these days but you might be able to find them.

If you don't know who I'm talking about, if you don't know who Pete Docter is, first of all, be very ashamed of yourself. No, no, I'm kidding. You really should know who Pete Docter is. You're very aware of his work. Pete Docter left Mike Jones when he was still very young. He ended up at a little studio. You might have heard of him, a little upstart studio called Pixar. There at Pixar he co-wrote a little movie you also might have heard of called Toy Story. He also co-wrote Toy Story 2. He also wrote Wall-E. He is also the director of Monsters, Inc., Up and the new film Inside Out.

Pete Docter’s magic was sprinkled around Mike Jones Film Corporation and I tried to soak it up through my fingertips. It was such an exciting place for me to work. I was literally doing the thing that I had fallen so deeply in love with and I was getting paid to do it. I could hardly believe it. I mean I probably would have done it for free. I couldn't even believe my stupid luck, and I haven't even graduated college.

I started there painting cells. I painted cells for a few months. Then because of the “strength” of my horrible college films, Mike gave me my very first job assistant animating. He made me an inbetweener. I could hardly stand it. I almost died. I literally almost fell over when Mike basically came into ink and paint room and called me over and said, “Hey, I think you're ready to try doing some inbetweening now. He walked me through the studio and he walked me into the hallway where the offices of the animation directors and the animators were. He brought me to a little desk in a little alcove in the hallway. There were three or four of these little alcoves in the hallway each with an animation desk shoved into it with a little table, with stacks of papers and jars for pencils.

He said, “Here, you go,” and he gave me my very, very first inbetweens to do which I remember so clearly. It was a background character for a commercial using Hagar the Horrible characters, which were licensed for this commercial and it was a background Viking character who simply had to lift a mug of beer and set it back down because they were toasting or cheering or something like that.

I remember so vividly sitting down in that hallway at my first real animation table with a real animation disc on it, real punched paper, and actual drawings and pencils and I was animating. I was making drawings that were going to move and were going to animate. I literally thought I was going to die. My pencil was shaking. I could barely, barely draw. I had had to take several deep breaths before diving in and getting that work done. It was a very, very exciting time.

As the years went by I stayed there for a little over two years. I got better and better. I moved up. I became an actual animator and then started even doing a little bit of early directing or nearly directing. I got my own office. I got pulled out of the hallway and I got my very own office. I got a salary. Again, I was a young guy. I could hardly believe my luck. I was being paid to do the thing that I loved to do the most in the world and boy, did I learn a lot about animation and learned a lot about drawing because I had to draw every day and I had to animate every day. Mike was a great teacher. I learned so much from him being able to work side by side with him and the other animators who came to work for the studio.

Now, one of the things that happened as we were learning and growing, as the technology started changing. Originally, we were actually doing pencil tests on film. We would do our drawings and then we would shoot them on the film camera and we would have to send them away to the lab to be processed. It usually took a day or two to get it back from the lab. You didn’t know if your animation was any good or not for two days and then you could go and revise it and shoot it again. Then you had to wait another two days to find out if it was any good or not.

This made learning how to animate very, very slow and at first my progress and the other young assistants who are working with me at the time, we progressed at a snail's pace but then, things started changing. We got our first video pencil test system and this was a video deck basically, a high quality VHS deck that had been happed basically by a company in California. There was a little controller attached to it and it would allow you to shoot one video frame at a time.

For the first time you can actually create a pencil test on video which means you can shoot it and see it immediately. Now, I’d had no editing capabilities at all, I mean none. If you made a mistake shooting, you had to go back and start again and that meant even if it was a 30-second commercial with five or 600 pieces of artwork you had to shoot. It was tremendously helpful for teaching us. Suddenly, we can do our drawings and go look at them immediately and run right back to our drawing table, revise the drawings, run right back, shoot them again. All of a sudden, our learning accelerated immensely. We got so much better, so much faster.

It was around this time that the computers came in. We started bringing Macintoshes in to help with some of the background painting using the early versions of Photoshop and fractal painter, which is a very popular painting software at the time. Early on, we also became a beta tester for a new software that allowed you to do digital ink and paint. That software was called animation stand. We were a beta tester for that company. That software later became Toon Boom.

As time went on, I began to get itchy to do some other types of things. I left Mike Jones Film Corporation and I spent a few years freelancing. During that time I got back into using computers. I bought my first computer and I did some animations for CD ROMS which were very popular at the time and Minneapolis was a big hotbed for publishing, especially educational publishing. Educational CD ROMS which for about three years were a big deal were a very popular thing. There was a lot of animation work going on for these educational CD ROMS. That was all later completely overtaken by the game industry and the internet basically as the internet became more sophisticated and games became more prevalent.

That was all using macromedia director, again, the early version of Flash. I did some of that work. I also did traditional animation work for companies around the country. Back then it was very common to mail punched drawings back and forth to animate an inbetween.

I started working for another local animation company in Minneapolis called real works. Real works was formed by a former employee of Mike Jones Film Corporation. They knew of me already and I started picking up mostly inbetweening and assisting work but occasionally, animation work for real works. I really loved working for them. They were such a cool studio. They had a beautiful space in downtown Minneapolis. They were really nice friendly people and they were a little more focused on artistry and quality and they did a lot of different styles of animation which was what I was really excited about.

Mike Jones was an awesome experience and a great start for me. One of the things about Mike Jones Film Corporation is the style was all Mike Jones’ style and he had a very distinctive, very personal style that we basically all had to adopt to work at that studio. There were residual effects for me like for example I didn't learn until very late in my career how to actually animate a walk cycle correctly because I'd learned how to animate a walk cycle the Mike Jones’ way. Now, Mike's walk cycles were very fun and charming and he got a ton of life into them. They were based on his style of drawing and his style of movement and they were just one way to animate a walk and I never really learned the proper principles by being in a studio that was so restricted to one style.

Coming to RealWorks was very exciting because suddenly I was working with a lot of different styles in a lot of different techniques. One day, one of the directors at RealWorks quit and moved out to California and they offered me his job. I was super excited because I already really loved working for them and really loved RealWorks and frankly, I was a little tired of freelancing and was very excited about the prospect of some stability.

RealWorks was such a great home for me both creatively and otherwise, that I stayed there for a decade creating TV commercials and animation for children's television and music videos and all kinds of things. RealWorks was really where I became a real animation artist. I really learned the craft in a deeper way. It was also the place where I started introducing the wonderful After Effects into my work.

I had another great mentor at RealWorks, the owner of RealWorks Bruce McFarland who is amazing animator and animation director. Had one of the most incredible eyes and senses of timing I've ever seen. He can look at a piece of animation and tell you to take one frame out of the anticipation, add two frames to the action pose and hold for three frames at the end and you would go back, make those changes and by gad, that animation would be perfect. He could just nail it. He’d just such a great sense of performance and timing in his work and amazing drawing skills.

Bruce taught me a lot and my work really, really improved a lot more and I got much, much better at doing the job of being a character animator. I started directing more often. I also started using After Effects quite a bit originally just as a compositing tool because at this time because desktop computing had come far enough a lot of us were doing our own compositing by this time and this is now in the mid ‘90s. We're now in about the mid ‘90s. We were doing a lot of our own compositing, relying less on post houses to do that work.

RealWorks was still very traditionally based. For example, we would draw and paint on cell and we would have it shot under camera over green and then we would bring it back and composite it together or sometimes we would bring it to a postproduction house and have them composite it.

It was early mix of digital and traditional but still very traditional. In fact, RealWorks was a holdout. RealkWorks clung to traditional techniques a little bit longer and actually used it as a selling point to say hey, we still do it the old way and we can give you that unique look. Eventually economics got the better of that and the studio went basically full digital with Toon Boom and After Effects mostly.

I began working with After Effects and starting to see its possibilities for character animation. I also just enjoyed it. I just really liked it. Not only was I doing character animation and directing but I also became the go-to motion graphics guys at RealWorks. I got fairly proficient with doing basic motion graphics and effects work with After Effects.

As things went on, as I said, as economics got tighter, we began to shift more and more to a full digital approach. Around that time, some wonderful artists came to the studio who worked freelance there for several years, Todd Hemker and Soyeon Kim who are now known as Yellowshed, an animation collective husband and wife team that do animation and direction out of Los Angeles. Todd and Soyeon came to RealWorks, wonderful, wonderful talents that we were so excited to work for. We use them on many, many projects throughout the years there in the early days of the 2000s.

Todd and I during a lull in production made a short film that for the first time was made entirely using Photoshop and After Effects and by the way, for first time, I mean the first time for us. It was the first time for us. We made a film that was basically entirely digital, Full Throttle, ended up being very successful. We got it into a lot of film festivals and we won some awards for it. It was really a lot of fun. It really started getting me more and more excited about the possibility of using After Effects as a character animation tool.

Now, don't get me wrong. I love old fashion, hand drawn animation. That's where I started from and it's where my heart lies certainly with Warner Brothers and all of that history, with Disney and all of that stuff. At the same time, if you recall, I also love the Muppets. I've always loved puppetry. There's something about starting to learn how to use puppets and After Effects rather than drawings or maybe using the drawings to create the puppet but then using the puppet.

Something there really grabbed me and I think it's part of the reason why I've drifted away from hand drawn animation towards two-dimensional digital puppetry I think because in a sense at the base of it, what I really love is creating characters and bringing characters and stories to life. I also think that there might be a part of me that is also just very, very connected to puppetry because of my long love of the Muppets and other puppetry forms.

I think that's significant and I think that's a telling factor in my career that I drifted in that direction.

After we did Full Throttle, things were a little bit tough in our industry at that time and I was also getting a little bit tired of doing television commercials, which was mostly what we did back at RealWorks at the time. I was looking for some new challenges and I made the decision at that time to go back to school, finish my degree and look into teaching. I was ready to move on. While I was doing that, I started a small freelance operation called Club Cocoanut Animation which is semi-functional still, but that was basically just a little company. It was my wife and I. She would assist me from time to time. Sometimes I would put together virtual teams to do animation. I would continue to do a lot of animation for RealWorks. They were actually Club Cocoanut’s primary client for several years doing animation services of various kinds for RealWorks.

We also got a lot of work with the BBC. We did a lot of limited, low-budget educational projects for the BBC. We did other commercial work, lots of really fun things. Right before I began my teaching career full bore Todd and Soyeon contacted me from California.

Now, by this time Todd and Soyeon had formed their little company Yellowshed and they had been hired by Dock Studios in Los Angeles. Dock Studios is a really terrific commercial. Well, they do all kinds of stuff. They do feature, animation, and they do lots of title sequences and commercials, really great studio out there. They had been hired by Dock and had been awarded the job of directing the end titles for Cloudy with A Chance of Meatballs. This project was going to be done in 2D animation and it was going to be done entirely in After Effects which was something that Todd and Soyeon were also really interested in along with me. We’d all gotten really excited about the possibilities of After Effects and character.

They contacted me to help them with the project and I flew out to Los Angeles for a few weeks to Santa Monica for a couple of weeks to Dock Studios and worked with them there and then came back to Sarasota and continued for about seven weeks working on the Cloudy end credits.

It was such a great project to work on. We had fantastic storyboards that Todd and Soyeon had created. Beautiful design work from Soyeon as well as other designers like Justin Thompson and Paul Rudish who worked on Power Puff Girls and Samurai Jack and we actually got to work like one on one with Justine and Paul which was really, really great, fun.

It was a very exciting project to work on. It was obviously very high profile, really in many ways kind of the peak moment of my career as a character animator. I did, I would say, maybe about 80% of the character animation for those end titles along with Todd and Soyeon and a couple of the assistants who did some of the side characters and some of the other work.

It was a great moment and I'm very, very proud of Cloudy. I continue to be really, really proud of that project. I was super excited to have been brought into it by Todd and Soyeon.

That brings us to today. Now, I am teaching full time at Ringling in the motion design department, which is a fantastic program. I teach character there sometimes in part but I also teach just basic After Affects and basic motion design, basic animation. I also teach traditional animation skills like stop motion and hand drawn, that kind of stuff as well. I absolutely love it. It's really a dream for me to be able to share something that I love so much with young emerging animation artists.

When I see a young animator get that little sparkle when they see their character or their logo or their typography come to life and I see that look on their face, it brings me right back to that moment in Film 2 sitting and making those drawings frame by frame and bringing that little animation to life. It brings me right back to that moment and that excitement about this beautiful and remarkable art form.

It's a real privilege for me to be able to do that. I'm so excited to have been asked by Joey to begin creating courses for School of Motion and to hopefully reach even more young animators excited about the possibilities for the future.

Aside from teaching, well, I actually also as part of my teaching I've also gotten very, very involved with character rigging in the last few years. I've became really fascinated with 2D rigging in After Effects. I also learned how to rig in Maya when I went back to school and have recently been also doing some character rigging in cinema 4D.

Rigging has become a new fascination for me and it's something I'm putting a lot of time and energy into lately. I will say that it's still rooted in my original love of animation and bringing characters to life, telling stories and bringing characters to life. It's still at the root of it. It's just another aspect of it that I am getting really excited and fascinated by.

I think one of the coolest things about being a character animator or being an animator in general is that we’re always learning. There's always something new to learn, there's always a new level we can bring our work to. We can always be challenged and run into situations we've never run into before and will be new technology that will challenge us and excite us and drive us forward as well.

I hope you’ve enjoyed hearing a little bit about my background with it. I hope it hasn't been too much like just listening to an old dude yammer. I hope it helps inspire you to be the next generation of amazing animators who are going to challenge things and change things and push the art form forward.