Author's Resume
Rather than the usual resume, since being a storyteller I thought it might be more appropriate to tell you a story. I'm sure you've heard the joke about those who can't do teach. Well, both of my parents were gym teachers. So I think I have teaching in my blood. I grew up on cartoons. I have fond memories of being four years old watching Looney Toons on our black and white television wearing pajamas with the feet in them. It was about this time that I saw Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. I think I went into animation to work out traumas from my experience of this film. Still trying to figure that one out.
When I was thirteen I got my first movie camera. It was a Super 8 with no sound. Film was precious to us. This meant careful planning, inventiveness and learning to tell a story visually. I directed the neighborhood kids in our own versions of Star Trek, The Mummy and Frankenstein. Our motto was, "Necessity is the mother of invention." We created Spock's pointed ears out of liquid latex. Glitter glued on cardboard served as the logos to enhance our pajama space uniforms. Basements transformed with homemade props became the Enterprise's bridge or Frankenstein's Laboratory. The local pond with its large areas of reeds became our isolated outdoor locations.
It was at this time that I also began creating animation. My first problem to overcome was that my camera didn't have a single frame advance, a necessity for animation. I rigged up a lever attached to a string and by giving it a quick jerk, it clicked off exactly one frame—well, it worked most of the time. Later I tried cel animation with a roll of cellophane that an art teacher gave me. It worked, but the cellophane was so thin and wavy that it looked like it was shot underwater. Eventually, I began to use real cels and even built a multi-plane camera. One of my films won honorable mention from the Kodak Teenage Movie Awards.
High school was a time of trying out different kinds of art. I even painted my car. For art class, I built a snow machine in the high school display case. It was the first time that any student display of art ever stopped up the hallways. (Nowadays you can buy a an inflatable snowman which snows inside of him.) One of my summer jobs was teaching filmmaking at a summer camp. I was amazed at what some of the students could create with crayons and cut-out animation. One girl created a story of a UFO landing at a farm, the Martians got out, milked the cows and brought the milk home. It was awesome. I hear she's working at Pixar now. Just kidding?
After one year of college in Florida (so I could surf), I realized that I wanted a better education and transferred to Pratt Institute. I started in their architecture department but switched majors when my dreams of Palo Soleri-type architecture didn't fit the assignment of redesigning playgrounds. My imagination needed a lot more room. I switched to the art department and by chance had one free elective—animation. It was one the best choices I have ever made. I didn't even know one could get a job making animated cartoons.
My first film as a sophomore was kind of an improvisation. It was called Garden Party. It was inspired by a fantasy painting that I did of a house in a garden. I was listening to some Pink Floyd music and imagined the mushrooms dancing on the lawn.
My next sophomore film was called Guardian of the Grin. I was crazy to take on a twenty-two minute epic of Super 8. It was the story of a sad boy who meets guardians who look like they came out of Snow White (although drawn pretty primitively). The boy then goes off on surreal adventures and survives, rejoining the guardians to walk off into the sunset. Later I realized that the film was structured along the lines of the hero’s journey. But at the time I had never even heard of the hero's journey. After watching countless movies and television programs, we internalize an innate sense of what works in stories. Guardian of the Grin was a twenty-two minute, full-color animated film with accompanying tape soundtrack.
I lived with this film for a year, even dreaming about it. When I finished, I had a kind of post-partum depression. It was a relief, but I was also sad that it was over. The next hurdle was that I was the only one who could project it, because it was a Super 8 film with a tape recording soundtrack. Only I knew the sync points between the two machines.
The film won honorable mention at the Sweet Briar Film Festival in Virginia. Later, I would discover I had unconsciously structured my film according to the hero's journey. My senior film won Pratt's cine-graphic award.
Pratt's film department challenged my mind as well. I went in expecting to do animated cartoons but was intellectually challenged with the film theories of Eisenstein, Rudolf Arnheim, Susan Sontag, and particularly Christian Metz. I was inspired by the experimental films of John Whitney, Stan Brackage, and Norman McClaren. My life changed when a painting professor recommended that I read Gregory Bateson's Steps to An Ecology of Mind. It was a book about the patterns that connect diverse subjects such as Balinese art, a theory of play, schizophrenia and dolphin learning. That book still affects me to this day.
After graduating with a Bachelors of Fine Arts with honors in 1975, I began work at the New York Institute of Technology's Computer Graphics Lab. We were the artist "guinea pigs" for the computer scientists’ forays into the embryonic world of computer graphics. We experimented with programs written by Dr. Ed Catmull (who eventually created Pixar and is now leader at Disney), Dr. Alvy Ray Smith, Dr. Garland Stern, Lance Williams, Ralph Guggenheim and other giants of the computer graphics world. I remember the frustration of trying to use an early 3D program whose interface was a UNIX command line. The frustration came not from having to define circles with formulas involving pi, but rather that the scientists would change things overnight without telling us. You see they worked at night using secret languages like UNIX, C, and Fortran. I think they might have been vampires.
Ed Catmull created an automatic in-betweening program called Tween. "Inbetweens" are those drawings in-between the key frames of animation that smooth out the action. The older animators who had created animation by hand for fifty years didn't know what to do with the system. Being new to the field, I didn't have the same preconceptions of how animation was supposed to be done and I got it to work. We created over a hundred short projects using that system combined with an early ink and paint system. As a result of my getting the system to work, Alexander Schure, the president of the college, requested that I create an animation curriculum for N.Y.I.T. and granted me a presidential scholarship. I did create an animation curriculum as well as a book on animation for my Masters thesis. I graduated at the head of my class with a 4.0 with a Masters of Communication Arts specializing in instructional design.
At N.Y.I.T. I had a chance to teach again with the introductory class in Computer Graphics—this was around 1980. Once again, at N.Y.I.T. I was fortunate to have wonderful teachers. My class entitled "Vocabulary of the Media Critic" opened my eyes to structuralism and semiotics (the study of signs). I continued taking classes part time and began an MBA program. I wanted to know more about the business side of how animation worked. I finished about one-third of it with a 4.0, but left it unfinished when I was offered a job at Disney. I was at N.Y.I.T. for almost 15 years.
In 1990, I proposed to my wife and we moved to California where I worked as a storyboard artist at Walt Disney Feature Animation. At Disney I worked on Aladdin, Pocahontas, The Lion King, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Hercules, Dinosaur, and Treasure Planet as a storyboard and visual development artist. My sequences of "A Whole New World" from Aladdin, and "Colors of the Wind" from Pocahontas both won the Academy Award for best song. I got a chance to direct on Fantasia 2000 with a project that I pitched—the Pomp and Circumstance sequence starring Donald Duck as Noah's assistant. After that, I directed Piglet's Big Movie for Disneytoon Studios. Piglet had a budget of 20 million dollars and I was responsible for directing a crew of about two hundred people in Los Angeles and Disney's Japan Studio. My partial MBA came in very handy. I enjoyed directing in that it used many different skill sets—storytelling, layout, art direction, music, acting, and inspiring leadership. Carly Simon composed and sang the songs for Piglet's Big Movie and she was absolutely wonderful to work with. At Disney I've worked on movies that have grossed more than one billion dollars.
While I was at Disney Feature Animation, I was asked to speak to a group of new artists. This one event led to many talks. It grew into a department that I created, the Walt Disney Department of Storytelling Magic and Narrative Research, which explored various aspects of storytelling. We gave studio-wide presentations on a range of subjects including story and narrative theory, creativity, color design, composition, time, and editing as well as other subjects. I also produced a document for Disney Feature Animation's management entitled, "Strategies of Cinematic Storytelling: A Narrative Approach for Training within the Artistic Development Program." I was also a storyboard mentor to many story trainees. My teaching experience continued to include the Disney Institute in Florida, Walt Disney Imagineering as well as teaching storyboarding and creativity at General Motors and Los Alamos Laboratories. I was asked to join the advisory board at Woodbury University in Burbank, where I gave critiques and inspirational talks about the industry.
One of my strengths is in analysis, whether it be analysis of why a narrative doesn't work or more general questions such as "Why do we watch?" I like answers that can provide specific procedures and filmmaking tactics rather than circular definitions that don't really tell you anything. For example, when I ask my students "Why do we watch?" I always get someone answering, "to be entertained." While this is true, the information that we wish to be entertained doesn't help us become better filmmakers. I like to dig deeper to find useful answers. Because of this approach, my students often tell me that I'm teaching them things they've never heard before. I have taught storyboarding at the UCLA extension and Gnomon School of Visual Effects.
Gnomon gave me a chance to direct my first CGI project, which was a tribute to John Lasseter for the Visual Effects Society's 2006 awards. I am proficient (to varying degrees) in a range of software including, Photoshop, Flash, Toon Boom Studio, Final Cut Studio, DVD Studio Pro, Logic Pro Audio Software, Motion, AfterEffects, LiveType, Sketchup, Animation Master 3D, and TV Paint. I have also worked with Jane Kagon, the director of UCLA's Department of Entertainment Studies on several international projects. I was an instructor in their Korean Culture and Contents Agency Summer Program 2002, The Hollywood Approach: Creating, Branding and Marketing in a Multi-Platformed Global Entertainment Marketplace. I also evaluated entertainment training programs for Screen-training Ireland, a project that was a partnership between the UCLA Extension and the Irish Government.
I feel honored to be a member of the Motion Picture Academy, Visual Effect Society, ASIFA, Animation Guild and the Creative Talent Network. I have continued my love of learning with interests in technology, semiotics, and all types of art and music and film theory, particularly theory informed by Lacanian psychoanalysis. I have very eclectic tastes in movies from the big blockbusters, to independent work like Spirited Away and The Triplets of Bellview, Waking Life and, of course, those great directors—Tex Avery, Chuck Jones, Alfred Hitchcock, and David Lynch. I equally enjoy computer graphic animation and traditional two-dimensional animation as long as the story's good.
I worked at Disney for sixteen years. Then I worked for other studios such as Warner Bros. Animation, Universal Studios Animation, Sprite Animation, and Mike Young Productions. I lived in Vancouver, Canada, for a year working on Space Chimps, a CGI feature for Vanguard Animation. While there, I continued work that I had begun on an educational DVD that teaches filmmaking to teens and completed a first draft on a book on storyboarding. It is in the form of a graphic novel that actually demonstrates the various concepts of storyboarding. It's based upon the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments. It covers a variety of topics with an emphasis on telling stories clearly and dramatically. When I returned home I finished the book and it was published in 2008 by Focal Press. It's called Directing the Story: Professional Storytelling and Storyboarding Techniques for Live Action and Animation. It contains over 1,900 illustrations that demonstrate the principles of storytelling discussed in the book.
Additionally I have recorded foley for projects, directed voice talent, composed music, and made maquettes (sculptures of characters). I also have the record for the most accepted ideas at Walt Disney's infamous gong show. This was an in-house forum where employees could pitch ideas to executives such as Roy Disney, Michael Eisner, and Jeffrey Katzenberg. After an experience like that, it's easy to pitch ideas to anyone.
My role model is Scheherazade, the great storyteller of the Arabian Nights. If she didn't tell a good story, she would be killed. Instead, she wove wondrous tales and transformed the life of the Sultan King as well as her whole kingdom. That's the power of storytelling. We moved our family back to the East coast where I've storyboarded on Rio, Ice Age 4 and Leafmen for Blue Sky Studios. Currently, I'm storyboarding on a new secret project. I have over thirty years of professional filmmaking experience to draw from and hope to have thirty more. When I'm not drawing or writing, I love taking walks with my wife and skateboarding with my son. My latest adventure is teaching him to drive. I wish to thank you for allowing me to share this glimpse of my life experiences in the world of animation with you. I have an online portfolio where you can look at examples of my work at http://francisglebas.weebly.com, and a blog at http://francisglebas.blogspot.com. There are more video tutorials at www.youtube.com/user/frankiegeniustein.