Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1529871
D E PA R T M E N T 13 KEYFRAME T H E C L I M B T H E C L I M B In 2009 he joined the graduate program at Purdue, where he made a fun discovery. During the last year of his master's program, a company he'd never heard of called DreamWorks Animation SKG was holding a recruitment fair on campus. He went home and researched the organization, a move that paid off. With his years of experience as a Software Engineer and Technology Consultant, he was the only one of his classmates selected to join the company as a Technical Director at that time. Joseph was at DreamWorks for nearly two years, serving as a Technical Director for the surfacing department on The Croods. "A Technical Director is the liaison for the pipeline," he explains of why this work interests him. "We make sure that data is getting passed from one department to the other, making sure that the departments have all the tools to build or do their art. We are basically in between the artist and technology teams to help coordinate." It's a job that is evolving quickly because of the rapid advancements in computer and graphic programming. He says this means he and his team must always be ready to create "inventive solutions to problems that arise in production [and be] the rst line of support for technical production issues." Joseph has to be the rst to know about all of this so that he can be the one to explain it to his staff and co-workers. Joseph left DreamWorks for Walt Disney Animation Studios in 2013, working rst as an Assistant Technical Director on the Oscar-winning feature lm Big Hero 6 and eventually becoming a Technical Director known for his expertise in overseeing and organizing pipeline development among Animators, VFX Artists, Production Supervisors, and Production Engineers. WINTER 2024 15 "It may feel impossible, but sometimes you just have to take the first step, even before you're ready." —SISU, RAYA AND THE LAST DRAGON He says he's also given the freedom to build and suggest new products to bring into the workspace. For Big Hero 6, he developed a virtual window shader, which created an illusion of geometry and light sources inside building windows using only pre-baked textures, which are previously created sets of images that, when used together as textures, can represent 3D geometry. This strategy allowed the production team to render building interiors with reasonable parallax effects and was cheaper than if they individually modeled each room in every building. While Joseph's two young kids haven't followed in their dad's childhood acting footsteps, they can still learn similar lessons from the films he works on—and from his life as well. Being curious and open to new opportunities can take you on a rewarding path you might never have imagined. —Whitney Friedlander