Never wanted to be an animator. There -- I’ve said it. It was all an accident. Just to be clear, nowadays is a different story, but many years ago I was pretty lost when it came to the question “what do I want to be when I grow up?”.
I actually never stopped being lost. I just learned to embrace it, cherish it and share it with the people I trust, enjoy and respect. It is at the core of what I am. It’s about getting lost, then find an answer; disappear and reappear; dive-in and resurface. Fine, I’m starting to sound artsy-fartsy here but the point is; I was lost, but that’s OK.
Back then I thought I should maybe study architecture. I wasn’t quite sure but it had a nice ring to it and all. I had to wait for nearly a year to sign up to school so I thought: “Hey, maybe I can take one of those 3D courses in the meanwhile; you know?! This 3D business looks useful for architects… and easy!”. I went for it and it wasn’t really easy but I got lucky enough and got hired at the end of a 8 months Maya course as a 3D artist at small studio in Tel-Aviv.
Work was nice. I was actually making art assets for a couple of highly successful architecture firms, and got some interesting projects under my belt; but spending some time in this industry got this whole character animation business on my radar. At first I was just curious, but before I knew it I became madly in love with animation. This whole voodoo of taking a model, set some keyframes and watch it transform into a breathing person, a believable character that thinks and feels -- inch by inch it completely blew me away. Architecture?! Boy, I forgot I even considered that. In animation I saw myself where I belonged; back on the search; back to touching on true emotions and back to stories and characters I felt connect with. Main problem was, I wasn’t connected as often as I wished, not with my own work, and the reason was -- I wasn’t very good. You know the feeling when you realize you’re not good?! Well, it doesn’t feel so good.
So one thing led to another, I left my job, Flew over to San Francisco and got on an animation program at the Academy of Art University. Was there for about 5 years and ever since I only dove deeper and deeper into animation and visual storytelling. Since then I worked in the games industry at EA and 2K, and worked in robotics on Anki’s Cozmo and other projects.
So there it is, still lost, only now I know that’s the best part. That’s exactly the part right before discovering something new and worthwhile; and I find that exciting.