The annual Siggraph convention was this past week, and as I saw posts from lots of friends and former co-workers who were there I realized it has been 10 years since I last attended...
I'm often asked about how I got the job at DreamWorks. Well it starts at Siggraph 2007 with one of my worst interviews ever. I had just graduated from the Academy of Art University that summer (literally turning in our thesis mere weeks before). Heather stayed behind to keep working for a gig at Matte World Digital. A bunch of us from the graduating class all planned to head down to San Diego and hit the convention floor - schmoozing with every recruiting booth we could manage.
Look at us - freshly graduated, slightly desperate, excited folks venturing forth into the "real world" for the first time. They recruiting booths were busy and the convention floor hectic. Luckily, I had a friend in Adam Ely who was already at PDI/DreamWorks in Redwood City. He talked to one of the head recruiters, Debra O'Keefe, about me and I was able to get an interview during Siggraph. DreamWorks wasn't officially taking reels/applications, but they had a giant interview suite built up on a balcony of the convention hall.
Excited and nervous I walk up to the interview suite and sign in - I even get a swag bag (with a shrek journal and Flushed Away dvd). I was trying to become an effects artist at the time, so I interviewed with the FX Supe of Madagascar 2 along with one of the fx leads. It was...a disaster. The FX Supe - who would eventually turn out to sit behind me for about a year - liked to be blunt and kept asking about all the problems with my student reel. For about half their questions I had no answer and admitted as much. By the time I left (swag bag in hand) I called up Heather and just had to laugh. "It was horrible" I told her on my cell phone from the second floor balcony, "There's no way I'm getting hired there"
About a month after Siggraph, I get a call that DreamWorks would like to do a followup interview at their PDI campus. I'm beyond excited and terrified at the same time - I stayed up late the night before googling the answers (level-sets!) to everything I failed to answer in my first interview about effects work. But I wasn't that nervous - I figured the interview couldn't go any worse than the first one. So they day comes and I drive the hour south to Redwood City and arrive at the very silicon-valley style campus.
I sit down for my interviews with Justin Onstine, Jono Gibbs, and Kevin Vassey (all who would eventually become my boss). The first question comes from Justin who asks "So, why do you want to be a Crowds Artist?"
Crowds? At no point did I realize this was an interview for crowds - I thought I was still going for an effects TD role. Now crowds...I didn't even know there was a job just creating digital crowds. And crowds work I knew - I had lucked into doing some crowds work for element fx, which led me to implementing crowds into our thesis. I even wrote a MEL crowd script. So I had a LOT of ideas and insight into crowds work. It was a fantastic interview and within a week I was accepting a contract at PDI/DreamWorks.
So you never know where life will take you.
