Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1529871
LESSONS LESSONS LESSONS THIS PAGE: Joseph with the Oscars his team won for Big Hero 6; OPPOSITE PAGE: (TOP, L TO R) Joseph with his brother, Noel, and sister, Nurith; A playful moment with the crew of Moana 2. As the Technical Director for numerous big-budget Disney movies including Wish, Strange World, Encanto, Moana, and Frozen II, Norman Joseph has worked on a lot of stories with motivational messaging. He particularly loves the themes from his 2021 lm, Raya and the Last Dragon. As the movie's titular warrior princess struggles with how to x the world, her dragon friend Sisu tells her: "It may feel impossible, but sometimes you just have to take the rst step, even before you're ready." Behind the scenes, Joseph's job also comes with its own opportunities for this kind of encouragement. "Being a Technical Director, you have a lot of power in the pipeline," he explains. "If something is going wrong and artists cannot work on their shot and they are panicking, they look at me to get support and to tell them, 'Don't worry. It will be taken care of.' If they see me panic, then all hell will break loose." But Joseph's history of delivering help and advice started long before he joined Disney. Born and raised in India, he caught the entertainment "bug" early. He and his brother and sister appeared on the children's TV series Phulwari Bachchon Ki, dancing to Bollywood movie songs and teaching valuable life lessons about bullying, interacting with friends, helping around the house, and more. Neither of his siblings parlayed that "stardom" into more jobs in the industry (his brother works for Bank of America, his sister for the Consulate General of Israel in Mumbai), and it didn't necessarily look like Joseph would, either. Joseph has a bachelor's degree in computer engineering from University of Mumbai and a Master of Science in Computer Graphics Technology from the College of Technology, Purdue University. While getting his undergraduate education, Joseph created his own rudimentary computer game as a group project. He noticed a professor using it and realized that even a simple game like that, with no fancy graphics, could entertain people for hours. "That's when I was like, there is something here: I enjoyed making it, and people enjoy using it," he recalls. But after he graduated from Mumbai, he went a different direction, taking a job as a Technology Consultant with Tata Consultancy Services. His years at the international company took him from India, where he worked on projects like a customer interface system for Avis Budget Travel, to the United States, where he developed an online nancial tool for the investment group Vanguard. THROUGHOUT HIS LIFE, TECHNICAL DIRECTOR NORMAN JOSEPH HAS ENJOYED SHARING THE LESSONS HE LEARNS ALONG THE WAY. 12 KEYFRAME T H E C L I M B