Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1475854
10 KEYFRAME Easy access to Post-it notes and a search for creative freedom resulted in Miranda Tacchia's impressive first book, Unimpressed. COLOR HER UNIMPRESSED Miranda Tacchia remembers her father reading Casper the Friendly Ghost comics aloud to her as a kid. "He would do these voices for the characters, and I always thought that was really funny," she says. This was her first introduction to the art form, and she grew up loving cartoons and drawing. "I was always looking for ways to incorporate it into school projects that didn't require it," she says. "One time I did a science project in fourth grade on botulism and made drawings of the bacteria as characters arguing with each other." After graduating from CalArts' Character Animation department in 2012, Tacchia says, "Right out of school, I had trouble finding [jobs], so I tried to make work that I thought would get me hired by studios, which isn't necessarily true to my own sensibilities." For a decade, she has worked at studios including Disney, Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network, Warner Bros., and Titmouse, but she says that for a time she was all over the place in how she wanted her work to look. "Even though this is a creative field, you still don't get a whole lot of creative freedom," she says. "I'm designing from a storyboard that clearly dictates where the characters are and what it has to look like. It's a skill that you learn over time, [but] you're kind of on autopilot while you do it." Photo credit: Stanley Wong F R A M E X F R A M E