Film and Video Studies graduate Brendan Gottlieb (‘15) recently worked as an Animator on the feature, Zootopia 2, and as the Animation Supervisor for the animated short, Forevergreen which both projects received Academy Award nominations.
When I spoke with Brendan, he explained that his love of animation started early. When he was in 10th grade, his dad gave him a 3D animation software. “My dad had got my brother and I this really basic 3D program, where you could model characters and environments, and then make them move. I was really into video games at the time, played hours of video games, but then that [software] sort of became like a video game, where I could create my own worlds and stories, and I really just ran with it.” Brendan became increasingly interested in animated film, using the animation software to create short animated films and posting them on YouTube.
When Brendan took an animation course in high school, he learned to use the industry standard Autodesk Maya software, and a whole new world opened up for him. “I could do all these cool and fun things that kind of made the animation look more high production, high budget, and more sophisticated, and it was great. I remember, by the end of that year, I was teaching the teacher, and I was also helping her teach her night class.” Brendan spent hours every day making animations and watching YouTube tutorials to learn as much as possible about the animation process.
Professor Tommy Britt spoke highly of Brendan's work ethic during his years as a Film and Video Studies student. “I enjoyed having Brendan in my feature-length screenwriting class, where he wrote an action/spy script, as well as seeing his dedication to an ambitious animated short film that many would say was impossible to achieve with the time and resources he had.”
Brendan credits his senior project in Film and Video Studies at George Mason for preparing him to work in the industry. He was originally going to make a live-action short film until a classmate saw his designs and suggested he pursue animation. Brendan says that the project helped him animate with timelines, which he had never done before. “The FAVS senior project was fantastic, because we had to make a 5-minute [project] or at least a couple minutes, and a couple minutes is a lot in animation. That's some heavy lifting, especially just for one person.”
Brendan had to ask for special permission from his professor to make his project only 1 minute long since it was animated. He shared updates with the class; frequently, these were stills of the characters in pre-vis. “It wasn't until a few months in the program that I could show an update where characters are acting and performing and moving and then I think people were like, ‘Oh, okay, this is what he's going for.’ So that was pretty interesting. But I do remember liking the whole process of putting it all together.”
Brendan’s first job after graduating from George Mason was at a VFX house just outside of San Francisco. His first task was working on a live action film with a CG character. “It was a terrible movie. It was not good, but the team was fun,” he says, “It was me and a bunch of other animators fresh out of college; we bonded a lot. It was great. And, oftentimes what's more important is who you work with, not necessarily what you work on, so that job will always have a special place in my heart.”
While working for the VFX house, Brendan applied for the Animation Apprenticeship Program at Disney. He was accepted: “After 3 months of training,” he recalls, “We were put on the first Moana movie, and we animated a lot of the background characters, and the little coconut demons, the Kakamora, were super fun.”
Most recently, Brendan served as Animation Supervisor for the animated short film, Forevergreen. He animated a portion of the shots in the film and played a role in giving it the stop-motion style, despite it being a CG animated project. “Every time there's a new pose, you need a whole new wood carving, replacing the other wood carving that was the older pose,” he explains. “With the new pose, the wood grain would be different. Even tiny things, like the scale of certain parts of the character, would be different. Because if it was actually whittled out of wood, there'd be a lot of imperfections. Even with the placement of the character the feet won't be placed in the exact same spot.”
For Brendan, Forevergreen was more than just another film in his resume. He describes it as a fantastic project, fueled by the passion of great filmmakers. “We did the project on our own time. Nobody was paid for it” he says, “People were just extremely generous to be working on it, and it was great to work with the directors on that, and just to see their hard work and commitment and creativity be recognized. It was an honor to be part of the project and to see it get this far.”
Professor Britt is impressed by Brendan’s career path. “As an Ethics professor,” he says, “What most impresses me about Brendan to this day is the way he has maintained his values and convictions while working at a high professional level. He is proof that one doesn't have to occur at the expense of the other.”
Drawing on his success as a FAVS alum, Brendan offers current students one essential piece of advice for thriving in the industry as an animator: find your niche. “I would say to students, figure out what you like, what you want to do the most in the animation sphere. Like, is it modeling, is it rigging, is it character design? Is it storyboarding? Is it animation? What is it? Then find a way to learn that skill really, really well.”