Toon Talks Podcast

I’ve known James for a few years now, and he really is one of my top five all inspiring people to talk to. His engaging conversation always makes me look at things in a new way. I feel like I level up both as an animator and a human, after I chat with him. Having worked on Open Season and Robots as an animator, Oddbods as co-creator and the originally director, Surfs Up and Ice Age 2 in pre-production James now continues to teach and inspire the next generation of animators at Animation Mentor and Paint masterpieces (they really are, I’ve seen them!). Clearly this was a really fun chat for me, I thoroughly enjoyed it, I hope you do too.

Animated Spirit – Art, Animation and Film Analyis

The legendary Glen Keane. He is the most well known animator alive today… perhaps due to how his characters makes us feel. Ariel, Pocahontas, Beast, Aladdin, Rapunzel… Tarzan. All of these stirring vast amounts of emotion like no other character before. Glen really does animate from the inside out.

The making of Dear Basketball

Duet

Keane Art

Sonaria

Fievel Goes West, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace … these movies create a sense of excitement among most animators… and Glenn got to work on them. In this podcast we talked about his career, what is was like to work with some of the most influential directors of our time as well as what steps up and coming animator can take to make it in this industry. 

As always, thank you for listening. 

https://vimeo.com/35113133

I’ve never worked with such an enthusiastic, supportive crew! It was so much fun to get together again and relive some of the adventures we had making this awesome film!

Check out the guests:

When I was working at Sony, Alan was in LA. Pete was here in Vancouver and Josh was up every other week or so. It was a spot of luck that Alan was down on one of the weeks we had Josh – I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to grab all three for the podcast! Josh is just starting out as a supervisor, Alan has some experience behind him now with Hotel Transylvania 2 (he’s now supervising on Smurfs) and Pete is a veteran animator, who has supervised on a number of movies to date.

Enjoy the podcast folks, feel free to comment. It’s always great to hear your thoughts :)

Bruce’s Piglet Test on the Pencil Test Depot

More pencil tests on the Living Lines blog

We discuss his career and the changes he has seen in the industry, including the change over from the Nine Old Men and the turn of films, from traditional animation to CG animation. For me, this chat was delightful and insightful. I hope it is for you too! Enjoy.

A summer internship at ILM introduced Shawn to another influential mentor, animation director Wayne Gilbert. It was through Wayne that Shawn realized that he wasn’t learning what he needed at school. Shawn left the academy in 1996 for a job as a character animator at former video game and educational company Presage Software, and continued his studies with Gilbert twice a week. They became very close friends and remain so, today.

It took about two years but Shawn fulfilled his lifelong dream and landed a job at ILM in 1998 and since that time, he has worked on numerous films including War of the Worlds, for which he animated tripods and probes; Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, where he helped develop and animate the vulture droids and animated Yoda in a pivotal swordfight; and Rango, where he was the Lead Animator for both the Mayor of Dirt and the Spirit of the West. He also worked as Lead Animator on all three Transformers movies. Kelly’s credits feature 23 films including Hulk, the Star Wars prequels, AI: Artificial Intelligence, and The Avengers.

Not to forget, he’s also co founder of Animation Mentor, the first on line animation school.

So as you can see we had lots to talk about and Shawn was incredibly generous with his time. I’m so grateful to have him on the show.