Interviews With Creative People

A little while ago I did some work for the Vancouver Film School (VFS). During my contract with them, I had a lot of great conversations with gifted instructors, industry mentors, talented designers, compositors, actors and animators, which were published anonymously on the main blog, and with my byline on the Game Design blog site Arcade and the Digital Design site oomph!. My last interview for VFS was with Yann Tremblay, which I posted a link to in my last post, along with the other two graduates of the Classical Animation program I posted links to in earlier posts, (Trent Noble and Andrew Overtoom), but there were some other memorable interviews with amazing people I'd like to mention, including:

• Compositor Annabelle Kent
• Riot Games' Senior Development Manager Zoe Curnoe
• Actress Emilie Ullerup

Great Game Designers of the following games:

• Luigi's Mansion
• Major Hertz
• Frocket
• Pulse

Plus these star individuals who are all involved in games:

• Technical Level Designer Jeffrie Wu (Sleeping Dogs)
• Mission Designer Cory Hasselbach and Narrative Director Armando Troisi, who both worked on Halo 4
• Game Creative Director Brian Hayes (who was actually a Classical Animation grad, but ended up in Game Design working for Electronic Arts)
• Saint's Row IV designer John Brunkhart (I was uncredited for this one)

I'm very grateful to all of them for their time and I enjoyed interviewing these talented people so much that I plan to keep doing it with other artists and entertainment figures on my own time.

Yann Tremblay — Animator for Triplets of Belleville and The Illusionist

I interviewed the incredible Animation Director Yann Tremblay in May 2013 for the Vancouver Film School's (VFS) main blog. It marked the completion of my VFS Classical Animation Class 10 graduates trifecta (or would it be better called a hat-trick?) — as well as the last interview I would do for VFS. He along with Bardell Animation Supervisor Trent Noble and Animation Director Andrew Overtoom (SpongeBob SquarePants) all graduated from the same Classical Animation program back in 1997.

All three of these guys were great story-tellers and very funny guys. Yann had some crazy stories to tell about his professional career. He has been working in animation since right after he graduated, and two of the films he was involved in (The Triplets of Belleville and The Illusionist) were nominated for Oscars. Which is not bad for a guy who started out wanting to be an actor, and didn't even think it was possible to study animation in Canada.

He moved to Vancouver from a small town in Quebec, barely able to speak English, but with a desire to learn acting. Then one day while checking out the VFS Acting program, he saw a poster for the Classical Animation program and it hit him like a divine 2001: A Space Odyssey Monolith moment, complete with the Gyorgy Legiti music in the background. It was the first thing he did that felt absolutely right to him.

After he graduated, a lot of people said it would next to impossible to get work doing 2D in Canada. But Yann had no problem with that — and he pretty much taught himself how to do 3D, too. The stories Yann told me of his efforts to advance in his career were at times hilarious, but they also evinced a tenacity, a dedication to getting it right, that was inspiring.

Yann's work, like that of his pals Trent and Andrew, speaks of a love for the great masters of 2D animation—the Disney and Warner Bros studios of the 30s, 40s and 50s. It doesn't hurt that he drew constantly (even while cooking!). I loved his work in the Sylvain Chomet films and I can't wait to see what he's going to do next.

Read my full interview with Yann Tremblay here on the VFS Blog.

Andrew Overtoom — Animation Director of SpongeBob SquarePants

I first spoke with the incredible animator and Director of SpongeBob Squarepants and My Life With Morrissey Andrew Overtoom via Skype from his Los Angeles home back in March of 2013. We spoke twice, actually, and each time I was entirely enthralled and entertained by his stories.

Andrew is the second out of three people (Trent Noble, Andrew Overtoom and Yann Tremblay) I spoke with who all graduated from the same class in the Vancouver Film School (VFS) Classical Animation program in 1997. That class turned out some amazing talent.



In what turned out to be an epic and thoroughly enjoyable interview, Andrew told some great stories about how he got into animation, about his first jobs in the industry, how he became the Director of SpongeBob, and about trying to get his crazy idea All In the Bunker made into an animation series for television.

Andrew is also a musician and a very cool photographer. He recently had his show id at The Advocate & Gochis Galleries. I really love his work. You can check it out on his website here. You can also see some of his music videos (along with some other things) on his wife Tricia's Youtube channel here.

Read the full interview with Andrew Overtoom here on the VFS blog.

Trent Noble — 3D Animator

I did an interview with Bardel's Animation Supervisor Trent Noble for the Vancouver Film School's main blog back in October of 2012. Trent is a graduate of both the VFS Classical Animation program, where he was classmates with Andrew Overtoom (SpongeBob SquarePants) and Yann Tremblay (Triplets of Belleville), and the 3D Animation program. I got interested in doing interviews with all three of them, since they're all amazing animators, great story tellers, and very funny guys. And I did. Trent was the first of the three.



At the time I talked with Trent, he was working with the incredible Vancouver artist Stan Douglas at the Vancouver office of the National Film Board (NFB) on a project that he couldn't say too much about because they were right in the midst of creating it, and to do so would require that, as he put it, "everybody reading this signs an NDA." But he did tell me some good stories about going to VFS and what it was like when he was first looking for work, and gave some good advice for young animators coming up. You can read the original piece here on the VFS main blog.

The augmented reality app that Trent was working on the time I first spoke with him is called Circa 1948. You can find out more about it here in this NFB Interactive Team presentation video on Vimeo (starting around 11:52).