Behind The Pixel: Closing The Animation Communication Gap

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When I was in middle school, we had a career day at our school, and they said, you know, what do you want to be? And I decided that at the time to age myself, I had a bunch of Nintendo Power magazines, and I cut out a bunch of like characters, and I made this like three poster board collage.

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And I was like, I want to be a video game designer. And when I thought more about it, I actually had no idea what that meant. I think in my very first animation class, that was when my professor opened up Autodesk. Maya, as some of you may know, took a cube, moved it across the screen. And I looked at it, and I said, That's what I want to do for the rest of my life.

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It was like that spark magic moment of, like, who? Animation genie.

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So today, we're just going to have a conversation and kind of pick her brain a bit. She'll tell us about her trajectory from her time in college as an animation student to working in the industry to being a studio owner. And then, at the end, we'll leave time for questions. So, Katherine, thank you so much for being here.

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Hi, everyone. Yeah, I'm Katherine. Thank you for having me. I'm really, really appreciative that we get this time to talk. Yeah. So I have been a co-founder of Open Pixel Studios for the last six years now. We currently provide animated marketing content for businesses and organizations so that, on the outside looks like any social media marketing advertising campaign's commercial work.

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On the internal side, we actually work with companies to do, like, internal training videos, working in all sorts of different parts of the industry in terms of, like, yeah, we've worked a little bit in VR, we've worked a little bit in UI UX design, we work a little bit in 3D in 2D and all sorts of different styles.

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So we really enjoy what we're doing. And so my day-to-day kind of looks a little bit all over the place now. I used to start as a character animator where I'm, you know, animating 8 hours a day or more, sometimes depending on the studio. But now I serve as a project manager, I serve as a creative director, and I still serve as a character animator.

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I serve as an executive and a salesperson, and a marketer. So I'm wearing many different hats all day, every day, which is a much different trajectory than I had anticipated that I was going to go initially. But it's been a wonderful experience. So I thought it would be helpful to kind of share a little bit of where it's come from.

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Maybe share like as a character animator, where I started to where I am now. I've been a character animator for the last ten years. I primarily came from the video game space, and so I've worked on anywhere from small indie games all the way up to titles I found over the years. What kind of style do I like to work in, and what kind of animation do I like to work on? Every animation project that I ever worked on gave me some new experience to learn from, and it's led to where I am today.

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So I'm pretty proud overall of how far I've come over the last ten years. And you can tell some of these are my favorite projects that I've gotten to do. Any time you see a ship, by the way, is a demo real thing. That's a work in progress. So things that I was working on in the meantime.

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Yeah. Thank you. Do you mind telling us a little bit more about your transition from undergrad to now? So I went to school. You must Amherst not too far from here. And I went through a program I started as an undergrad, and I kind of just felt my way through to be like, what? What are my options?

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I don't really know. I found out that in art, to be an animation major through the art department, you had to have an art portfolio to get in and to follow that path. I didn't draw. I didn't have a portfolio to go with. So it was like, what am I going to do? I couldn't get in without having some kind of portfolio or some kind of access.

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Thankfully, my school had this program called BDC, which was basically a build-your-own major. So I majored in computer animation, but I got to write my own curriculum, which was kind of awesome. So I took classes in animation, in acting, in sound design, in video production. And what I think that did for me was that I still wasn't sure what I was going to get into exactly, but I was able to learn the entire animation pipeline from start to finish, and that really helped when I went to go look for jobs because I understood what each department needed and I knew how to talk and speak the lingo of each department.

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So that was pretty cool. But so after college, I had the opportunity in between. This was like my last semester in college. I had a professor who was in character animation, and I asked her, and I said, Hey, I'm going to be here between the fall semester and the spring semester. And I know that you work at a small video game studio.

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Do you offer internships? Can I be an intern? And she was like, I don't know. Like, we've never had one, so let me just go see. So she asked, she talked to her boss, her boss interviewed me, and I became the resource intern. A lot of small studios don't realize that they have the ability to actually run an internship.

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So you have to go out and ask because they can make it happen. Actually, more easily than you may think. A lot of schools might partner with these with these places so that they can so you can get school credit for it or things of that nature. So I was an intern for a little while, and then I worked at this small video game studio that I was considered an art tech.

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So when you work at small studios, you're very used to like jumping around some project to project and working on different things. So I did animation a little bit, but I also did sound design. I also did coding when I needed to. I also did, you know, exporting Photoshop assets and spreadsheets and all that kind of stuff. So give me again a range of like being able to navigate the entire pipeline.

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From there, I decided that I wanted some extra training, so I actually went back to school for a little bit. I went to Animation Mentor, which is an online character animation school. It's a much more intensive program. It focuses on trying to get you basically feature-ready, like feature film level animation, and that just like solidified the character animation was the thing I was most passionate about and I wanted to do.

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So I pursued that, and that helped me elevate my career a little bit. I had, like many of us in the industry, I, I had spaces in between jobs where it was like, I guess I'll babysit right now or a saw like go work at a, you know, at a summer camp. I did that for a little while.

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I ended up working at another studio in Florence, Massachusetts, called M7 Studio, and that's where I really got to work on the more like commercial advertising, social media marketing campaign kind of side of things, which was a different side of the industry, right? Video games and commercial work and VFX and feature and TV. They all have sort of unique pipelines built within there.

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So there's a lot to take away from everything. I'm trying to like to give you a five-minute summary of my whole life, but it's after ends. Then I decided that I wanted to do what most folks will do coming out of schools here, which is where are the animation jobs? I got to go to California. I got to go see what that's like.

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I get to see if that's for me. And so I ended up getting a job out in California that was at Toys for Bob, which worked on the Skylanders video games. Most recently, they worked on Crash Bandicoot. So there's maybe some games you might be familiar with there. I had a eight-month contract, and that was the first, I think, the first main job that was like 8 to 10 hours a day nonstop.

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I was animating even the same character over and over and over again for different types of animations. In video games, you work even though you're working on the same character; you're ending up doing a lot of different things, attacks, idols, there's, there's tons of different like cycles and things that you do. So I worked there for a bit.

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Then I jumped around again. I worked at a children's museum for a little bit and eventually worked at EA, and I worked on The Sims there, which had its own unique animation style and was a lot of fun, but after my contract ended there, I was in an interesting position because the studio that I had worked for previously was pivoting.

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This was the end of in the studio. They decided that they were going to instead of having a they had two tracks that they were going down. One was this production side that was like, we're working on this commercial advertising piece. But they also had a development side where they were developing tools for animators to make our lives a heck of a lot easier, and they decided to focus on that track.

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So my two current co-founders at the time, they basically got to take the reins of that production side and make it its own entity. And that eventually turned into Open Pixel Studios. So at the time, I was out in California, my friends contacted me, and they said, Hey, we're starting our own studio out here. Do you want to come?

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And I said, okay, sure, why not? Let me give it a try. Let's see what it's like. Let me just say I kind of jumped in with open arms, not knowing what to expect. And it's been quite a journey since there was never any sort of traditional path that I think I took throughout that time. Great. It's it's I think it might be helpful for some students to understand that drawing is really important, and it's very helpful when you're realizing ideas and working through things and pre-production and storyboarding and all that, but that you don't have to be able to make exquisitely rendered environments or, you know, be able to draw up character sheets like they're

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still. And maybe you can do all those things. No, I'm not saying that. But just that there is so much to be said to be able to understand character animation and to make it look not sort of floaty and automatic, but actually to make it like what you know, what we saw in your real-world now you're back in New England, do you mind telling us just what you enjoy about working in New England and living in New England?

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Because it definitely sounds different. Yeah, yeah. It's definitely a different experience. Like all of us. I wanted to. That's why I wanted to experience that California lifestyle. I'm like, Oh, what's it? What's it going to be? It sounds so magical over there. And I found that like I what I really like about living in New England, in particular, is where I am currently in my life.

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And I'm able to be close to family. I'm able to experience four seasons. That's one thing I always talk to with my friends on the West Coast. The passage of time is really weird because they're like, I don't know if every day is the same weather in the same climate. It's hard to know what year is passing next.

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So I'm happy to have snow and seasons and things of that nature. I'm also happy to have a place that I can afford. I think that's a big one, right? We go out to California. It's something I didn't think about when I moved out there. You know, there's a different tax rate. So like what I had thought I had negotiated into my salary was a lot different than when I actually got my first paycheck.

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And I was like, I'm living in a one-bedroom apartment for like 20 $500 a month. Can I actually afford to live here? And it was like a half hour outside of the city. So there are a lot of things that I didn't consider or didn't think about or wasn't even taught about. When I moved out there. And so when I came back, there was a sense of, like, I'm not competing with other people for jobs.

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That was a big one because out on the West Coast because there's such a pool of talent, a lot of times you're working on short-term contracts. So you're hopping around from studio to studio for quite a long time. A lot of people do that even today. Over the course of the ten years that I've known them, there's still studio hopping.

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And that's not to say that that's right or wrong. I think it's just a different lifestyle. And so I kind of thought about what lifestyle I wanted. For me, I wanted to be able to like to build a community as opposed to going into one where I, I felt like I was, I was competing a little bit. So yeah, it was just a different experience that I wanted to get that I'm, I'm really grateful for it because I think here especially there's a lot of like because we're, we're small but mighty.

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There's a lot of like, how can I support you? As opposed to, like, okay, well, I'm, I'm also applying to the same job you are. And that's going to be a weird feeling of like conflict of interest in a way. There's something to be said about being in New England that ,provides a safe space to explore different types of animation, especially when you go out to the West Coast.

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It's a lot of working on feature film or TV, but here we kind of get a little bit of a mix of things. There's video games, there's commercial work, there's some TV, there's some film. It just might be a little bit harder to find, which is always the challenge there. But it's definitely worth it. Great. Thank you.

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So I have just one more question, and then we'll open it up to questions from the audience. What advice do you have for students, for students in an undergraduate program who would like to enter the industry? Yeah. A network was my main piece of advice going into the industry. So when I was in college, one of my professors had said, you know, in order to go meet and network with people, you have to go out to the West Coast.

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And I was like, Well, that sounds great, but I don't have money, and I don't like, where am I supposed to go? What am I supposed to do? And so she suggested that I go volunteer at conferences. And so that's what I did for about like five years in a row. And it was actually really, really wonderful. There are tons of different information conferences that you can go to.

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There's a ton that also provides opportunities just for students. So I went to this one called SIGGRAPH that as a student volunteer, you got access to one on one portfolio reviews, you got access to the people who work at the studios that you might want to work for, like DreamWorks, like Pixar, like Disney, like they'll do portfolio reviews, they'll do panels and workshops, just for the student volunteers.

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So you get this extra level of access that you might not have had otherwise. So that was always really wonderful. Sometimes you can apply for scholarships, so they can fund both your housing situation while you're there and they pay for meals. I think one conference I went to, they gave us every day a huge $10 gift card to subway.

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So, you know, that was just great. As a 20-year-old, it's really about just, even if it's for the long term, you're trying to find ways to build relationships because you never know who's going to be in a room later that you might not expect. A lot of my peers now work on some of the things that I know and love, like Spider-Man into the Spider-Verse and like Box Monkey Now and all these cool shows, and I'm so supportive of them, but it's nice to know other people in the industry too.

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I think one of the things that I always walked away with was to have some kind of like a backup plan because the industry is such a you're working on temporary jobs and you're kind of jumping around. It's part of the nature of it. I always tried to make sure I had some kind of backup plan for either where I was going to work or what kind of income I was going to get.

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Even if it wasn't in the industry, even if it was like industry adjacent I would go teach animation if I couldn't go work in the industry at that moment in time. All that is to say that networking has been the thing that has really bolstered my industry career further for sure. Yeah, I know. To a lot of them.

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No, that's great. Thank you so much. I have some questions that I solicited from our students that I got through email, but I'd like to make sure everyone in the audience gets to ask a question if they have one. Does anyone have any questions for Kathryn? If I hear correctly, the question is like, based on the last ten years, what should I give advice on for somebody stepping into the industry now because of things that have changed?

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So in some ways, right, the technology has changed, of course. And I'm sure many of us have probably heard about the debates around AI and what's going on in our fields right now, which is always evolving. It is interesting, though, because I do think that in some ways, usually if you're taught whatever the current industry standard tools are, even if you're taught in something that might seem outdated, the technology still applies like you can basically take all of the skills that you've learned on one platform and transfer it to another.

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It might take a little bit of a learning curve to just know where all the new shortcuts are and all the new buttons and things like that. But they're accomplishing the same goal. So I don't think it's necessarily like if you're learning right now on something like procreate versus like having the Adobe suite, that's totally fine. A lot of the industry is finding ways for all of the platforms to basically export into each other's platforms.

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So there are ways for things to connect. I mean, we do that with the freelancers that we work with. We say as long as you can convert to the tools that we use to basically put everything together, then it doesn't matter what you're using because it's up to you what you're most skilled in. It's good to be aware of what the tools are and what you want to get a grasp of.

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But it's not the end all, be all, if you like, if you're coming out of school and you're like, I don't, I don't know Autodesk, Maya, but I do know Blender really well. That's awesome. There are studios that are converting entirely to Blender. It's just a matter of knowing what skills you have that can be transferable over time.

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When we started as a studio, we were remote for the first two years, and then we decided to get an office space because of me, I'm an extrovert, so I'm like, I need people around. Like I can't work from home all day. But then the pandemic hit, and so then it was like, okay, we're back to remote, we're doing that thing.

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But yeah, I think that what's great about it is that a lot of studios are being more conscious about the fact that we can work remotely. You're clearly seeing also in the news some pushback to that. Some people are like, oh, it's not the same, so let's have everybody work at the office. A lot of studios in the video game space are totally comfortable and fine with being remote.

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So it depends a little bit on the industry, so to speak, like which part of the industry you're in. But yes, it is evolving; it is changing. More people are much more comfortable with going remote now and staying remote. I mean, I had situations where back in the day when I had interviews out in California, it was kind of crazy to think about how much money these companies were spending because they flew me out for the interview and then they would like to give me a hotel, they'd give me food, and I was like, okay, I mean, that's nice.

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It's flattering to have that situation, but, like, you're going to save so much money by just having a phone call. There's a lot of different things that they're doing now. So I think Remote is here to stay. It's just a matter of, like, which companies are thinking that a hybrid approach is the better approach, which companies are saying, Now, screw that, let's go fully remote.

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So it just depends on the studio. But I think I think remote is absolutely here to stay. This is probably one of the best times to get into the animation industry because of how much more open and inclusive it has been. There are schools and programs now that are dedicated to creating equal representation, and equal pay. There are nonprofit organizations like Exceptional Minds, which works with NEURODIVERSE students to get them into the industry.

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So there's a lot more resources and opportunities that are happening as a result. We recently went out to Los Angeles to go to an animation conference, but it was specifically in the space of education and policy building. So it was a conversation around how do we build fair workplace practices. How do we make sure that in an industry that is currently reducing a little bit, you might have heard of things like layoffs happening right in that conversation?

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How do we make sure that, like DEI, doesn't get cut from the conversation or the things that we need to be focusing on? How do we make sure that employees are getting treated fairly throughout this process? So, yes, I want to say that the industry has, over the last ten years, it has gone from being just a very dominant boys club, especially in the video game space.

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And it is becoming much more open to like anybody can work here from any background, from any no matter what your gender is, no matter what your race is, no matter where you are is it's a right, even location-based right. It's a global network. So I find that, at least currently, the industry has been expanding in that way for the better.

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So I'm hoping that that trend continues. Right, and it just keeps getting better from there. So there are lots of opportunities. Yes. So we teach a class here called Animation Illustration Workshop, and we work on collaborative projects, and we work for clients both within the Vermont State University system and also outside people like Paramount Arts and a couple of other folks that run nonprofits.

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So I just asked that group of students if they have questions, just send these questions to Katherine to just email me the questions. And so so, one of my students asked, what do game design companies want to see in undergraduate portfolios? Yes. So that is definitely a big question. It really depends on the role that you're trying to go for.

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So like, in the concept of animation, they need to see an animation portfolio, but they also need to see it a little more specifically to games. So if I had a lot of, like acting and voiceover work, that might not be as relevant because usually in games, it's a lot of like action and a lot of body mechanics, so they want to see more of that side of it.

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But again, it really depends if you're having something like if you're a coder, right? If you're an engineer, you have to show some of that coding work or show the outcome of that work. This is the result of the code that I wrote for this game, which is a little more interactive. So I find that most of the time game studios they're always looking for some kind of portfolio.

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It depends both on the role that you're going for and the size of the studio that you're going for. Because if you're going through something like, let's see, you want to go work at a major studio, like if you want to go work for AEA, most of the time, the bigger the studio that you go to, the more niche they're going to be looking for your role.

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So you're going to be just a character animator there, right? But when I worked at Small Studios, I got to dip my toes into lots of different things. So I was an asset designer, I was a 3D modeler, I was a texture, I was an animator, I was an asset exporter. So it just depends on what you're going for.

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If you're going for those smaller studios, it kind of usually helps to say, This is what I want to specialize in, but here's my range of capabilities, so you can kind of frame it a little more like a generalist. So here's another question written in first person from the student who sent it. I feel like since I'm not going to a school which is specifically an art design school or a liberal arts college, here I'm at a disadvantage.

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What advice can you give someone with a liberal arts degree instead of a degree from Cal Arts or someplace like that? I want to say you're not at a disadvantage, which I know sounds strange because when I got out of school, I found that I had the same mentality of like I wanted to go work at a place like Pixar or somewhere, but I felt that I didn't know anybody out there.

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So how could I possibly make connections out there? The industry is very heavily, at least currently, based on who you know. So it's more beneficial to network as much as you possibly can, even if that's like virtually, even if that's just, you know, connecting with somebody on LinkedIn. I've done this a number of times where as a student, I would contact somebody who works on a piece of animation that I really loved.

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And I said, Hey, you know, I really love what you're doing. I'm wondering if you have any advice for a student that's looking to get into the industry. And nine times out of ten, people are really awesome and wonderful and nice and will take the time to, like, give advice as best they can. As long as you're not saying, Hey, I need a job, I always ask for advice and not a job because I think that that is the way to go.

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It can feel really intimidating to be like, Oh, if I'm not at SCAD or I'm not ,it's like I'm not as successful or I won't be able to get into the industry as much as possible. But even with those schools, they're also heavily competitive, right? I mean, if you think about it for Pixar, I know they recently had an internship program for the summer for a single animator, just one animator, and they had 5000 applicants.

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So it's not just competing against like the CalArts of the Worlds, it's competing. It's all the schools that exist, which can be a little intimidating. But I find that you don't need it again; you don't need the best portfolio out there. I think it's more important to learn skills around communication, skills around teamwork, and skills around leadership. That's what's going to get you through the industry rather than just trying to break into that first place.

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Okay. And along those lines, here's another one in first person. I'm more interested in production and direction than making assets for animation or animating. How can I break into those departments? Yeah, production and direction are really interesting because, more often than not, I found the producers that I know in the industry have all worked outside of the industry first.

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So a lot of times, there's always a big need for production in film and TV and film in live action. A lot of times, you can go work as a production assistant or a PR. I'm a board member for Women in Film and Video in New England, and they run across all the states. They run different PR workshops to get women into the industry to sort of break into that first role.

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And as a result, because the skills are transferable again, even if you're a producer for live action, once you go into animation, there's a little bit of a learning curve, but it's actually a lot easier. A lot of studios will pull from live-action to go over to animation. All of that is to say that you can start as a producer or as a production assistant in industry-adjacent jobs and then make your way over to animation.

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You don't necessarily have to start in animation, and I think that's the case for almost any part of the industry, really, because you can be a motion graphics artist for live-action work and then make your way over to feature film or TV or wherever you want to go. So it's an industry right now that is very fluctuating and there's no like one standard path that somebody takes, right is, as I've mentioned, even in my career, it was small studios, then school again, then freelancing for a while, then out of the industry for a couple of months, then back in like it's all over the place, which is just a ride that you should kind

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of expect to take. And it doesn't mean that just because you're in and out of it for a little bit that like you're not succeeding, you're absolutely succeeding in whatever you're pursuing there. Great. All right. I think we have time for one more question. What is it like to be a freelance animator in New England? So I honestly want to say that being a freelance animator is the same no matter where you are; you are assuming the same types of roles.

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You're a small business owner in that sentence; you're going to, like somebody will say, Oh, I'm going to freelance, I'm going to do my own thing, I'm going to make my own art. It's going to be awesome. And then you find it's a lot of management; it's a lot of communication. You have to make sure that the client understands that this is what you're delivering and this is the expectation that they're going for.

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It's a lot more conversation. You're serving as a project manager, your own creative director, you're serving as a salesperson. To go get more clients, you have to market yourselves, whether that's through, you know, Instagram or different places that you can go, marketer, freelancer, platforms. There are lots of different ways to go get clients regardless of where you are. I find that the process is pretty much the same.

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The only difference might be if you're in New England is that you might have to make more of an effort to go find specific networking events in the area. You might have to make more of an effort to focus your efforts online versus offline because somewhere in Los Angeles, you might get more opportunities for in-person animation networking events.

00;28;56;28 - 00;29;19;26

But out here it's I find that we know a lot of freelancers in the area, and they're doing great. And I think it's they have the ability to to, like, understand what their rates are for the location that they live in in California. If I was still living at that 20 $500 a month lease, my rates would be very different than where I am right now.

00;29;20;03 - 00;29;42;23

And so because I'm trying to take that cost into account, my cost of living, my cost of like where I want to grow, how I want to build, what tools that I'm I'm paying for on my back end. It's a lot of business management. So I think that's just something. I think the advantage you could have is there are so many local resources to take free business classes here.

00;29;42;23 - 00;30;03;07

There's the Small Business Association; there's SCOR, there's like Western Massachusetts has a bunch of specific programs. You can find these classes to take that are going to give you the advantage of going to get the work that you're looking for. So that's I'll say it is a wonderful thing to do. All right. Well, Catherine, thank you so much.

00;30;03;07 - 00;30;26;12

This was very educational and enlightening. I also recommend checking out Catherine's website. There's even more work than what we were just able to see. It's a great, great resource. And I think Catherine's probably going to be around for a couple more hours and see also. Yeah, we'll read it. Can ask questions. We'll be here. Yeah, great. Thank you.

00;30;26;26 - 00;31;22;20

And we will be gathering back here. As I mentioned that I worked on some triple-A video games, and in that case, I worked on the Skylanders series, and in that one, I got to make 3D animations for a major character in the game. Her name was Type Cool, and she was really cool. She had like these, like she had little squids that were super cute to anime, but they in thinking about the complexity of animation, she that each squid has, I think, six legs, and so I'm trying to animate like these really quick animations with a bunch of different tentacles and legs and things.

00;31;22;20 - 00;31;46;19

But that was a lot of fun to work on. So I got to learn about video game animation, which is a little bit different because as an animator in video games, usually in film or TV, you're animating a character to the camera. So whatever camera is set up, you are animating to make it look good. From that one angle in the camera, when you're working in video games, the player controls the camera.

00;31;46;25 - 00;31;53;10

So now, all of a sudden, your animations have to look good from every angle because they're going to see it from all sides no matter what.