Some of you may remember my first post here, where I talked about a visit that former Pixarian Doug Sweetland made to my school. Well, yesterday, Mr. Sweetland came back, and I was lucky enough to meet him a 2nd time! He gave another talk, this one about his life journey to becoming an animator. So, before I forget the details, I’ll write his story here.
Doug grew up watching cartoons every morning. His favorites were Dumbo, which he watched and practiced drawing endlessly, and Chuck Jones cartoons, particularly a Daffy Duck short called “Duck Amuck” (you can look it up on Youtube if you want to see it). He loved drawing and drew many comic strips and cartoons when he was in his teenage years, some of which he showed to us. His drawings of his former school’s lion mascot were used on posters and in the school newspaper in his school days. One particularly memorable comic showed a very cartoony drill sergeant with a distorted scared look, as a dimwitted soldier holding a grenade said “ one…two… duh, sarge, what comes after two?”
They were really good, professional looking drawings, but Doug mentioned that “Going through these drawings, I played this little game called ‘What was I thinking?”
For example, there was a drawing of a boy with his yo-yo, standing next to a skeleton copy of himself. Another was a drawing of a trombone player done with stippling. He pointed out two faces which he’d hidden in the shine of the trombone. “Why are there two faces in there?” he said. “Because I’m the artist, and I said so.” After graduating high school, he knew without a doubt that he wanted to be an animator. Now, at the time (mid to late 80s), there really weren’t any schools for animation students except for one: CalArts. Doug sent in his portfolio, got accepted, and joined CalArts, where he was mentored by some of the best in the business. At this point in his presentation, Doug showed us some of his CalArts projects. His first one was a simple short done on an Amiga called “What Goes Around Goes Around”. It featured a simple character made of circles, using a yo-yo. The character had hands and feet, but no arms or legs (think Rayman). The character walked off-frame, only to reappear on the other side of the frame. By standing in the center of the frame and using his yo-yo, said character was able to hit himself in the back of the head. Eventually he got all tied up in the yo-yo string, and the short ended. The second one was, I think, a collaboration between Sweetland and a few of his classmates, done in 1993. It was called “Blind Spot”, and was only a pencil test, but still very entertaining. The plot is as follows:
A blind man runs his fingers over a piece of paper with Braille on it. We see the Braille transform into words. “Seeing Eye Agency on the corner”, it said. The man arrives at the corner, walks into a building, and comes out with a dog on a leash. He walks out into the street, but the dog sits on the sidewalk and won’t budge, despite the man’s urging. Then, the traffic signal changes and the man is comically hit by a truck as the dog runs off. The man picks himself up, walks back into the building, and comes out with a mountain lion on a leash. The lion does the same thing as the dog, and the man is hit by even more traffic. Once again, the man returns to the building to get another animal. This time, it’s a bat. He swats at it with his cane while standing in the street, and is run over by several cars and buses. He’s even pancaked between two cars in a head-on collision, towed away in the wreckage, and then reappears by exiting a bus which drives by onscreen. After doing some karate poses for some reason, the man throws down his cane and bangs his head on the side of the building in frustration. The camera zooms out, and we can see the reason for the man’s problems. He was walking into the pet store which just happened to be on the other side of the corner from the real seeing eye agency!
“Probably the slowest reveal in animation history.”, Doug joked. He then told us that “Blind Spot” was selected as a part of a temporary CalArts exhibition at New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, which displayed some CalArts student work from Pixar legends. The museum liked “Blind Spot” so much, that it is now on permanent display as part of their collection! “So, I can check that off the list”, said Mr. Sweetland.
What you may or may not know about CalArts is that it helps students connect with producers in the animation industry by hosting “Producer’s Nights”, where they screen some of their best student reels in front of an audience of executives and producers from the big-name studios. Both “What Comes Around Comes Around” and “Blind Spot” were selected, which was a very big deal, especially because Sweetland was still a freshman when he made the first one, and it is uncommon for a freshman’s work to be chosen. Some people from a young upstart studio called Pixar were impressed with Sweetland’s work, and offered him a job at their studio. He turned them down.
You see, Doug was really more interested in 2-D animation at the time, and Pixar was a tiny, virtually unknown studio. But as we know, Mr. Sweetland eventually did end up at Pixar, and the circumstances that brought him there are really amazing. At this point in the presentation, Sweetland asked us if we knew what a deus ex machina is. It means “god out of the machine”, and was a frequently used plot device in Greek myths. When a character is in a situation he has no means of escaping from, the writer would just send one of the Greek gods down to give the character something to solve his problem, or cause a natural disaster, such as an earthquake, to put the odds back in the hero’s favor. Oddly enough, this is basically exactly what happened to Doug Sweetland. One day, there was a huge, cataclysmic earthquake near the CalArts campus, and the building was so damaged that CalArts canceled that semester and refunded the student’s money. Sweetland had nothing to do, so he decided to spend the semester working for Pixar, thinking it would just be a summer job, and he’d quit when CalArts reopened. This “summer job” turned into a 16-year career, where he worked on character animation for all of the main Pixar films except Wall-E, Up, and Ratatouille (he was either taking a break or working on his short film Presto while those movies were in production). And yes, he did work on Toy Story 3 a little bit. Finally, after 16 happy years with Pixar, Doug left the company to direct a full-length feature film at Sony Animation Studios.
“After 16 years, I found I had more opportunities to direct a picture outside of Pixar than in. And I decided to take that opportunity,” Sweetland said. “It was an incredibly hard decision.” (I thought I saw a little tear in his eye when he said this). He is now working on directing The Familiars for Sony, which is based off of a book series. It is about the animal companions of young wizards, and Doug hinted that one of the main characters is an imposter.
Mr. Sweetland finished off his talk with some wise advice. He started with a quote from Ray Bradbury, whom one of his friends had a conversation one day. Bradbury repeated his personal motto, which was “Living at risk is jumping off the cliff and building your wings on the way down.”
“I feel I’m maybe not too far from where you guys are right now,” Sweetland said. “You’re thinking about college. You’re thinking about what you want to do. And even if you know what you want to do, and even if you’re lucky, like me, to be able to go off and do that, trust me: You will get to that cliff for which there is no preparation. I wish you luck. Flap like crazy, and by all means, jump.”
Thanks for sharing, 