I became an animator with one single “Ah-Ha” moment. I was watching an animated film with my Dad (I think it was Toy Story 2). After the movie I was smiling ear to ear, as I often did after seeing animated movies as a child, and my Dad leaned over to me and said
“You know, it’s someone’s job to animate those characters.”
In that moment my mind was blown. 🤯
Every single version of Pokémon that I played on my Gameboy, every single episode of SpongeBob, or anytime I re-watched Kiki’s Delivery Service, I thought about the animators who brought those characters to life, and I imagined myself as one of them.
My determination to be an animator got me accepted to one of the top colleges for animation. (*For the record, I don’t think anyone needs to go to art school to be an animator or an artist for video games, but that’s a topic for another blog post.)
Originally, I thought I wanted to work in TV animation or movies. I thought you had to study game art to get into video games. I’m so glad I was wrong!
I landed an internship at Nickelodeon the summer before my senior year in college and I LOVED it! That internship was an experience I will never forget. It made me think I really was destined to work in TV.
(This is where the story gets a little sad, but stick it out to hear the happy ending!)
When I graduated, I applied for a job working on the show I had interned for! I waited, and waited, and waited, and followed up, and waited, and kept getting a whole lot of tumbleweeds blowing through my inbox. I was heartbroken. I instead has to take an unpaid internship at a tiny indie animation studio, hoping that might turn into a job that paid me someday. The internship was a month long. I treated every day like a job interview, wearing nice office clothes every day and pouring my heart into every unpaid assignment that came to me. The month went by very slowly, and I was quickly running out of money.
Around the end of the month, I got an email from my favorite professor (shout out to Heather if you’re reading this!) The email said there was a game studio in Colorado with an entry level position available for an animator. I looked up the studio and noticed that they made a game I had been playing for ages called “Dragonvale”. It was a mobile game where you collect and breed dragons. No freaking way.
I hurriedly replied that I was interested in the job and was soon sent an animation test to be completed at my earliest convenience. Only problem was I only had one laptop, and it was a loaner from the internship company. Would it be wrong of me to apply for another job on their computer?? After stressing over this for far too long, I had an idea.
I remembered there was a university near where I was living, and I could totally pass as a student and sneak into the computer labs! I got into the building and passed the admin without an issue and even made it up to the computers! I felt like I was in a heist movie 😂
I sat at the computer, logged in as a guest, then started installing maya, before a security guard came in and started asking questions. Damn my fear of authority! I made up an excuse and quickly left.
Finally, I bit the bullet and the next day asked the studio I was interning at to please hire me.
They said NO! The audacity! Apparently they didn’t have the money to hire someone new at the moment, but said I could keep working there for free until they had more funding! Yeahhhh no….🙄
On the plus side, I no longer felt bad using the laptop they had loaned me to apply for another job! I got to work right away. The application was due on Monday and I had blown Thursday and Friday already dealing with my internship and the college computer heist. Needless to say, two full all-nighters later I turned in the most extra animation test I could possibly think of. Not only did I give the character a whole personality, get feedback from several peers until the animation was perfect, and learn to moonwalk just so I could animate it properly. I also wrote and illustrated an entire backstory for the character!
And it worked!!! I got the call that they wanted to fly me into Boulder for my in-person interview with the team! They paid for my flight, my hotel, and my rental car. (Thinking about it now, I wonder if this even happens anymore? Wow, crazy.) This interview was the first time I had ever been to Colorado. If you’ve ever driven from the Denver airport into Boulder, you’ll know there is this one hill. The moment you crest it, you’re slapped in the face with mountains. I cried so much I had to pull over. It was SO beautiful. I knew at that moment that I NEEDED to get this job. I HAD TO live here.
I spent the whole night pacing around my hotel room muttering the answers to every possible interview question I could think of. The next day I was so nervous I felt like I was going to throw up.
I was let into the Backflip studios building, and spent the whole day meeting some of my closest friends for the first time ever. I still work with some of them seven years later, and a few are coming to my birthday party next weekend!
That job changed my entire life. I have no idea where I would be today if Backflip Studios had not hired me. I still remember how I used to cry tears of joy and gratitude in my car in the parking lot because I knew I was about to go in this building and get paid real American dollars to draw and animate dragons all day with some of the coolest people I’d ever met.
This was how I knew I was meant to work in games, and I still feel this way all the time.
Awesome article!