Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1512296
DALE MAYEDA Strengthening Ties It's no exaggeration to say that The Lion King changed Dale Mayeda's life. A Computer Science grad from UC Irvine, he entered the job market when the economy was taking a nose-dive, and he wound up working as an assistant manager at Enterprise Rent-a-Car when he went with a group of friends to see the story of Simba. "They had that sequence where the wildebeests come over the cliff—it was so visceral and amazing," he says. "I was like, I don't know how I'm going to do it, but I've got to get into that. I figured they must have used computers because there was so much dimensionality to the movement of the camera." Not long after, he walked into his job and quit. His sister was interning at this time with a company developing software that would eventually become Maya. Call it a perfect storm. He took a class, sent what he calls his "terrible reel" all over Hollywood, got work at some small post- production facilities, and eventually landed at Disney at the turn of the millennium, working in the live-action division. After a few months he was brought over to supervise the effects department on what was to be the studio's first CG film. That film didn't pan out, but not long after, he was hired as Effects Supervisor on 2005's Chicken Little. While this is the movie that would become Disney's CG first, Mayeda says the filmmakers wanted it to have characteristics of a 2D film in areas like style and animation. But around that time many 2D animators were leaving and there was "a lot of weirdness," he says. So they put together a crew that combined both 2D and 3D Effects Animators. "We tried to create an environment where we're all effects animation and it doesn't matter whether you're 2D or 3D. We tried to make it as collaborative as possible. It actually worked. It started fostering an environment within our effects animation department where there wasn't any sort of rivalry—people were really helping each other." Being able to experience both sides of the craft has been meaningful for Mayeda. As a kid he loved to draw, and teachers praised him for being good at art. But when he started high school, "Macs were starting to happen. PCs were starting to happen," he says. "It was exciting and new. Then when I was in college, that first year, I took an art class with some of my other computer science friends … and we were like, we should switch." In the end, he felt the need to be practical. While he wishes he'd studied both art and computers, he says he's lucky because being on the job "feels like [I'm always] taking this master class in design, style, and shape language." The industry leap from 2D to CG had already happened when Mayeda came on board, but there were still big changes to come. He notes the arrival of Pixar as "probably the biggest shift," explaining that before, you worked within your department and didn't get to see much of what everyone else in other departments on a film were working on. But when Disney bought Pixar, that studio's influence permeated the workflow at Disney, opening doors for all of the departments to collaborate together. Mayeda says the first time they tried it was on Bolt. At first it didn't feel comfortable with so many people commenting on his work, but by the end of the show he thought: "Wow, this is amazing. Since then, we've become an extremely collaborative [studio] to where everyone's showing everyone stuff and throwing in ideas and working really tightly together … collaborating not just in our department but across multiple departments, to always take whatever we're creating to the highest level." WINTER 2023 35