I Like Doing Everything: An Interview with Jeff Gill

Jeff Gill is an animator, editor, and voice actor (plus a whole bunch of other stuff) who’s worked on South Park and Ask the StoryBots, a children’s educational show currently airing on Netflix for which he’s won Emmys in the Writing and Directing categories.  He’s also worked as the Director of eCards for JibJab and has a hilarious Soundcloud page of songs he’s recorded while stuck in Los Angeles traffic.

I talked to Jeff via Skype to discuss his path to animation success, how to network and get jobs, and what it’s like to work in the industry.

 

I. It Was Really Through Sheer Passion for Learning

 

But I Also Have a Day Job: So what made you want to become an animator?

Jeff Gill: Becoming an animator was something I wanted to do from a very young age.  As a kid, your vision of what an adult job is involves working at a bank or being a lawyer, or doing something where you’re in a suit.  The first time I saw a job that wasn’t that was a behind-the-scenes of either Ren and Stimpy or Rocko’s Modern Life where they showed a Nickelodeon animator at his desk, which was covered with toys, and he was wearing a Hawaiian shirt.  I just remember looking at this guy and thinking “Man, that’s what I want to be when I grow up.”

BIAHADJ: Where did you see the Nicktoons behind-the-scenes?  In the pre-internet age when we were kids that stuff was a whole lot harder to find.

JG: I’m sure it was just between episodes where they threw up a little filler that was like “Hey kids, check out how the cartoons are made!” and there would be some poor guy who accidentally stepped in front of the camera.  It was just one clip, but it made such an impact on my little kid brain that I decided to go that route.

BIAHADJ: Were you interested in art or animation already at that time?

JG: Yeah, I’ve always been interested in art.  I remember as a kid my math teacher would call my mom in for conferences and say “Hey, your kid, he’s great, but he’s drawing Garfield all over his math tests, he’s not focusing, he really needs to apply himself.”  Then flash-forward and now I think my mom runs into her occasionally and she’ll always say, “Guess what my kid’s doing now!”

BIAHADJ: When you got to high school and it came time to decide how to pursue animation, did the path to doing that feel clear, or was it more uncertain?

JG: I remember going to Pixar’s website and thinking Oh, I’ll be a Pixar animator, and their whole thing was that to become an animator you needed to know about physics and math—so those were definitely classes I remember taking because of that.

BIAHADJ: Did it literally say that on the Pixar website?

JG: Yeah, I remember very specifically that physics was on there, and it totally makes sense.  If you want to make a convincing ball bounce you’ve really got to understand how gravity works and how things accelerate.  It especially makes sense from a 3D-animation standpoint, where so much of it is math and numbers and working out that side of things.

BIAHADJ: Stepping up from physics and Garfield doodles, when did you start actually animating?

JG: Well, I made my first flipbooks in the pages of my textbook during my middle-school vocabulary classes.  After that, when I was still in middle school—this was back in the days when warez sites with a Z were a big thing, when you could just download illegal programs.  I remember getting Macromedia Flash because I’d seen a lot of online cartoons and that BLEW me away—that they were running on my machine and I could stream them from the internet, I thought that was insane.  I taught myself how to use Flash basically just to make goofy animations that amused my friends.  Then in high school I got into this class called Morning Show, and all the students would create things that could be shown on the television circuit for the whole school.

BIAHADJ: I’m impressed that a class like that existed at your high school.  Did you go to a regular public school, or a special arts high school?

JG: I grew up in Seminole, Florida, and the public schools there are just fantastic.  The morning show was essentially built for students to film little intros, and those would play before the morning announcements.  So I wanted to get into that class, but to do that I had to take this prerequisite, which was basically Computer 101 and it was so below me at that point, but I had to do it.

Anyway, I was in this class one day with my buddy and I nudged him and was like, hey Luke, check this out, and I played this animation that I’d made in Flash, and it was a video of our teacher—her name was Ms. Cameron and she was amazing, but I made this very…inappropriate caricature of her, where she had really saggy boobs and she was all hunched over and she was using a high-pitched squeaky, obnoxious voice.  And we were watching it, very foolishly, in the classroom, and all the other students are leaning over to look at this and they’re all starting to laugh.  Then Ms. Cameron comes up behind me to watch it and my face is turning beet red, and she looks at me and goes, Jeff, did you do this?  And I’m like [whimpering] Yes… and she’s like, What are you doing in this class?  You should be in the higher classes—this is amazing!

She was one of those teachers you always hear about—she definitely took a negative and turned it into a MAJOR positive.

BIAHADJ: That’s an amazing story—did she end up moving you to a different class?

JG: Well, nobody was teaching animation at our school, and I basically talked Ms. Cameron into buying multiple copies of Flash so students could use it and create animations, and then I would show the students what I’d learned.  It was really through this sheer passion for learning and doing that I figured out how to make it work.

BIAHADJ: I think more students would be thrilled to have that kind of chance at leadership in high school.  That’s the kind of thing you never forget.

JG: Oh my gosh, yeah.  And it was also a really amazing time when all of the tools were available.  Yes, I got them illegally, but it was that one point in time where it was kind of a level playing field, where anybody could get access to anything.

 

 

II. College Gives You the Tools to Play

 

BIAHADJ: So what drew you to SCAD [Savannah College of Art and Design]?

JG: When it came time to graduate high school I didn’t know if I wanted to do college or if it was even necessary.  I knew I wanted to do animation, and I only applied to a couple of schools, one of which was SCAD.  After doing some research I saw that they had a sequential art department, and from everything I’d learned up to that point if you wanted to tell a story the best way to do that in animation was by doing storyboards.  Animation wasn’t really being done in the States at the time—you could work on a Disney animated feature film, but you were working on someone else’s story.

BIAHADJ: Why were you debating going to college?

JG: Well, again, if you want to be a lawyer or a lot of other things you have to show you have a degree in that thing, that you’re qualified for that job.  For anything in the arts you don’t need a piece of paper from a school, you need a portfolio that proves you have the skills.  If I look at your portfolio and go “Man, this guy is talented,” I’m going to hire you.  So for me there was definitely a question of whether college was something I needed to do.

BIAHADJ: You’re anticipating my next question—how did possibilities open up once you got to SCAD and started getting more involved with art and animation?

JG: Well, animation was always important, but when I think back to my college experience, just as important as animation was my time spent in student media.  I’ve been a big fan of radio forever.  My dad was a disc jockey, so growing up as a kid he had a studio and I would hear him do commercials, and I would always hear his voice either in the car or on TV, and a part of me always wanted to do more with that.  At SCAD I could take the major in animation and focus on that, but through SCAD radio I got a radio show.  I was their production director so I could make commercials that people would be forced to listen to on the air. [laughs]

BIAHADJ: Were experiences like the radio show more important than experiences in the classroom?

JG: The thing I learned most about college is that it’s not so much about what they teach you, but the tools they give you access to.  A lot of teaching puts the bar in the middle, so if you’re above the bar there’s really nothing to motivate you other than yourself, and if you have that motivation already you’re not going to learn anything from the teachers as much as you are just pushing yourself forward.

BIAHADJ: How did you advance technically by going to SCAD?

JG: The classes I took also exposed me to all sorts of different tools and equipment.  For example, I took an Intro to Film class, which I loved because it was very tactile, which I don’t think you can do anymore.  We were literally shooting with Bolexes and Steinbecks, and I’m sure these are words that nobody even knows or cares about anymore. You ever see those old black and white newsreels where a guy’s cranking his arm?  It was definitely one of those old cameras where you have to thread the film, otherwise it blows out and gets overexposed. [laughs]

Side tangent—one time I was doing a project with two of my friends and I had one shot left but I had just run out of film.  I didn’t have any more on hand, and the assignment was going to be due, and with developing time there was just no way that I could get more film.  So I ended up getting old film, bleaching it so it turned clear, then filming what I needed to with a digital camera, separating each frame and lining it up vertically, and then printing it on 12-inch strips that fit through my printer to get a visual of what I was trying to shoot. [laughs] Then I played it for my professor, and he’s watching the whole film and it’s OK or whatever, and then the last four seconds is this insane, experimental thing, and he’s like, What the hell was that? [laughs]  And that clued me in that what I’d done was a new medium that no one else had tried before, and from that I ended up making a bunch of experimental films on my own using the equipment from the film department, which ended up getting into film festivals and doing all these other things.

So again, the beauty of college is that it exposes you to other mediums and things that you might not have thought you were really interested in, but it also gives you the tools to play with them.

BIAHADJ: I agree. I remember the best courses I took in college gave students that freedom, as opposed to classes that set the bar too low.  How did you end up getting your work into film festivals?

JG: There was one film festival that would come to our school called the Black Maria, and at the same time I had stumbled upon this idea of using my HP printer to print ink on to 16mm film, and I thought this could be a neat thing to submit.  As an artist you really want people to see your work, but through our mediums, you kind of just make your work and put it out into the world and hope people will review or comment on it, because otherwise you have no idea anyone’s even digesting it.  So there’s something really fun about a film festival, because if something you’ve made is in it you can see everyone’s reactions and make it more of an experience.

 

 

III. You Have to Put Yourself Out There

 

BIAHADJ: Tell me about your internship on SpongeBob SquarePants—how did you get it?

JG: Unlike many colleges, SCAD didn’t require internships, so it was another of those things where nobody was pushing me but I felt like it was an important thing to do.  For SpongeBob I was looking around for any opportunities over the summer to just get a little into the industry and figure out what was going on.  I’d never been to an animation studio, so I didn’t know if it was an actual thing I wanted to do—I mean, it sounded great, but who the hell knows?

BIAHADJ: Very true—I think a lot of people have a kind of naiveté about jobs before they actually start them.  What kind of insight did you get when you were there?

JG: Basically, in the first half of my college experience Disney shut down their feature animation department, so nothing was being drawn 2D in the States.  The closest I could get to actually making the cartoons that I originally wanted to make would be to do storyboards, put them in a box, and send them out to Korea—that’s the closest you could really get to being an animator.  So SpongeBob was something I really wanted to do to see how these shows were being made, and it was exactly that: they had an amazing internal team of background artists, writers, cleanup revisionists for storyboards—everybody was there except the animators.  And at the end of every week or two they would literally ship everything in a box and it was all animated out of house.

BIAHADJ: What was the transition like for you leaving college?

JG: I didn’t think much about the transition because there weren’t a whole lot of options.  Animation was really only happening in New York or California, and I was like, well, winter doesn’t sound fun, I’m going to go to California. [laughs]

BIAHADJ: You moved to LA pretty soon after leaving college—did this feel like a big risk?

JG: It was and it wasn’t—I have a very supportive family, so obviously that makes a world of difference.  When I was doing the internship at SpongeBob I’d stayed with a family friend over the summer because he was the only person I knew in Los Angeles.  After I graduated I asked if I could stay with him while I figured things out and he was like, Yeah, come on back!  So, having all of those amazing support systems in place, I drove out to California because I had an interview with a small animation company.  I think I drove out on a Thursday, I had the interview on Friday, and they asked me if I could start on Monday.

BIAHADJ: Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaat.

JG: And that was nuts. The fact that it just kind of happened was extremely fortuitous and I’m super thankful for it.

BIAHADJ: So when you got the interview you literally packed up all your stuff and moved across the country?

JG: I knew I was going to move to California, but I didn’t know if anything was going to come from this interview—they were a company I’d found online, I liked their stuff, I sent them a demo reel, and they said, Sure, if you want to have an interview, what day works for you?  I think I scheduled it earlier in the week and then jumped in a car and drove with my whole car full of stuff.  My intentions were to just do the interview, and when that fell through to just use my family friend’s place as a home base.  From everything I’d heard, you can’t get a job with an out-of-state address and people are only going to hire you if you’re local.

BIAHADJ: So you were putting the family friend’s address on your resume?

JG: [laughs] I was, actually.

BIAHADJ: Honestly, I’ve done the same thing—it’s a good trick, especially if you’re serious about relocating but you don’t want to take the plunge until you have a source of income.

JG: Exactly.  It’s a good tactic, but these days maybe it’s not as important—I mean, we’re going through a whole quarantine right now where everyone’s working from home.  It might not be as important now, but at the time I’m sure it gave me a bit of a leg up.

BIAHADJ: So what was the actual job?

JG: It was working on a 3D animated feature for cable TV. The studio had been around for a little while but they were essentially a Japanese team, and pretty much nobody spoke English, and every time my animation director would come in and give me notes there’d be a translator.  I don’t understand Japanese, but he’d be pantomiming the actions that he wanted out of the animation and then the translator would be like, Ah yes, he wants you to lift the rock so it looks heavier, and I’d be like, Yeah, I got that out of what he just did. [laughs]

BIAHADJ: Did you learn a lot while you were there?

JG: It was a great job—it was an Animation Guild project, so I was suddenly in the Guild, and that’s supposedly a hard thing to get into, but then three months into the job they told everybody to come into the office and they said, OK, the network’s pulling the plug on the project, you are all fired immediately, go back to your desks, collect all of your belongings, you’re not allowed to turn on your computers, and security guards are going to make sure you don’t take anything as you go.

BIAHADJ: Oh man—how many people lost their jobs?

JG: Probably a dozen?  Fifteen?  We were a fairly small team, and still in preproduction, but we were gearing up to make this show that we were all excited about.  I think it was right around 2007, and I don’t know if economy stuff had already hit the fan and the network wanted to pull back.  In any case, as excited as I was to have a gig, suddenly three months later I had nothing, and I was rightfully freaking out at that point.

BIAHADJ: Were you still living at your friend’s place, or had you gotten your own place?

JG: I believe I had moved in with another friend from college at this point and we’d gotten our own place.  I needed to figure out what to do next, so the Rolodex came out and I basically started trying to contact anybody I knew or had seen in the industry prior to moving out.

BIAHADJ: Like, contacts you’d gotten when you were still at school?

JG: Yeah.  One of the other perks of going to college is that you can be introduced to people—you have to put yourself out there to find them, but if recruiters come to the school you can at least shake some hands, leave a demo reel, that kind of thing.  When I was at school I’d had a run in with Evan Spiridellis who’s one of the founders of JibJab, and I showed him my demo reel, which at the time started with this Firefox commercial I’d made for an animation contest.

BIAHADJ: Is that the one where Firefox tells all the other web browsers to shut up?

JG: [laughs] Yeah.  I call it Wheeeeee, but that’s a good way of describing it.  It had been online and was a bit of a viral thing, so I put it in front of the demo reel just to kick things off, and Evan had seen it prior, and he was like, Oh my gosh, you made this, you’re the Wheeeee guy?  And he just started going Wheeeeeeee! Wheeeeeee! in front of me, and the rest of my demo reel’s going by and he’s not paying attention, he’s just going Wheeeeeeeee!, and I’m like, OK, this is not going well….

BIAHADJ: [laughs]

JG: So when my job fell through I called Evan up and was like [pitiful voice] Hey, remember me, the Wheeeeee guy?

BIAHADJ: You’re using a begging and pleading voice for the story, but how did you sound on the actual call?

JG: I mean, I’d only run into him, so I was in no position to be like, Please sir! [laughs] But I could definitely say, Hey, I’m free, and if you have any work available I’d love to work with you.  And he said, Yeah, that’d be fantastic.  At the time he was doing a year in review animation for his company JibJab, and I did a little bit of work for him as a freelance animator, but once that was done he pulled me aside and said, Listen, we don’t have any more work for animation, but I love your editing skills.  What if we hire you as an editor?  And I was like, Yeah, OK, a job?  Yes please. [laughs]

BIAHADJ: How long did you stay at JibJab?

JG: It couldn’t have been more than three or four months. I figured I would keep my eyes peeled for other opportunities in animation while I was there, because editing is nice, but it was never my passion.  I was part of an email thread that blasted out opportunities, and on that email thread South Park came up, which was an incredible opportunity for me.  As a middle schooler I wore shirts with Kenny on them every day of the week, so I had to have at least seven, otherwise I was wearing one more than once. [laughs] So I saw this as being awesome too, because not only was South Park a show I really liked, it was animation that was being done in the States for primetime, and it wasn’t being sent out in a box, it was people doing it, and I could be one of those people.

So I saw this ad and thought Man, this is amazing, but I’d been sort of burned before, and here I was with an amazing opportunity, and I thought, you know what, I’m just going to send them my demo reel, I’m not expecting anything out of this, but when they turn me down maybe the next time I send them my reel they’ll remember my name.  And I got called in for the interview, but then I was like, Well, I’m not going to get the job, but at least the next time they come in they’ll remember my face, and it just kept going like that until they said, OK Jeff, we like you, we like your work, we want you to come in with two other animators for a weeklong trial period, and at the end of that week only one of you is going to get the job.

So then I had to ask myself, do I really take a one in three chance of getting the South Park job and burn a bridge with this other company who’s hiring me, or do I play it safe and keep the job I have now?

BIAHADJ: So what did you do?

JG: I decided to talk to Evan, because this was an opportunity I really wanted, but I was very unsure about, and I explained to him the situation, how editing was great but that I wanted to be an animator, and he said, Jeff listen, go do it.  If you get the job we’ll miss you, but if you don’t, we’ll always have a place for you here.  It was insane—nobody in entertainment talks to you like that or has any [laughs] feelings.  It made a big impact on me, so I ended up doing the animation test for the week, and they ended up liking my stuff the most.

BIAHADJ: And what was it like working for South Park?

JG: I was there for three years, and it was great.  I did a lot of 24-hour animation competitions in college, so I really enjoyed putting all of my time into one thing and staying up all night, and South Park was essentially that.  They’d give you a script or maybe four or five pages of storyboards on Thursday or Friday, and you don’t know what the episode’s about because they’re still writing it, so as the week goes on the pile of storyboards gets bigger and bigger as you’re animating them and you go Ohhhhh, that’s what this is about.  And every Tuesday you’d go in at ten a.m. and you wouldn’t leave until Wednesday morning because you were literally animating stuff that appeared on television the morning of.  Nobody else does that kind of turnaround, and each season was typically a ten-week run, with two seasons per year.  As a guy who loves animation it was perfect for me at the time, especially being in my twenties and wanting to put all of myself into something.

BIAHADJ: What did you do outside of the ten-week periods? Were you just off, or were you doing other work?

JG: There’d be occasional work, but for me there was nothing South Park-related to work on during the hiatus, so I’d always pick up the phone and call Evan back at JibJab and be like, Hey, I don’t need the work, but I like working with you guys, so if there’s anything you need, or that I can just come over and play around with, lemme know.  So every hiatus I would go back to JibJab and at the end of every hiatus before I’d go back to South Park, Evan would say, Listen, what do I have to do to get you back? [laughs]

BIAHADJ: Was that a difficult decision to make?

JG: Well, after three years of going back and forth, Evan was like, Jeff, we get it, you can animate, you can direct, you can do all of these different things—you can go back to South Park but you’re really only going to be animating there—it’s Matt [Stone] and Trey [Parker]’s show, and there’s only so far up you can go on that ladder.  If you really want to explore all of those things and learn how to become a director, you should do that with us, and he offered me the position to be the Director of eCards, which were starting to become a big part of JibJab’s business at the time.  It seemed like a great opportunity—I’d loved my time at South Park, but he made a good point—you can spend a lot of time working on one thing, or you can learn how to direct a lot of people and make a lot more stuff, and I was like, Oh, that’s a smart way of thinking about delegating. [laughs]

BIAHADJ: I love that flexibility, and the idea of finding room for somebody you want to work with.

JG: The way Evan ran that company was incredible.  We would go intern scouting all over the country—it took a lot of time and energy, but the owner of the company would be sitting at a table talking to twenty-year-olds.  And we’d do all of this not even necessarily with projects in mind—we just wanted to meet talent, because Evan wanted to have great people working on great stuff.  It was never a matter of finding talent for the project, it was finding a project for the talent.

BIAHADJ: How did you like being Director of eCards?

JG: It wasn’t all that different from what I was doing in my freelance time.  I think the thing that convinced Evan was that during those freelances I was animating, I was boarding stuff, writing, voice-acting random things—I was just doing a lot of stuff, so when it came time to be the Director of eCards it was kind of the same thing, but I’d been there for three years, I’d seen the team, and I wasn’t directing new people, I was directing my friends, which can be kind of dicey at times, but it’s also a lot easier when people know who you are. [laughs] Because the Starring You eCards were always the big driver of stuff, we also knew there were other things we wanted to do, like finding another opportunity to make eCards that could tell stories that were a little more expressive.

BIAHADJ: It seems like a medium that could either be very simple and bland, or where you could unlock a lot of hidden potential.

JG: I always looked at it in these terms: What’s the story you want to tell, and how do you trick people into thinking it’s a birthday card?  Say I want to make a Godzilla animation—maybe he’s fighting a birthday cake, fine. [laughs] You can do anything and everything—basically they’re all just short films, and it becomes really fun and satisfying.  I will say that one of the companies that came to the career fair at SCAD was an eCard company, and I was like, Oh man, I don’t want to make greeting cards, what kind of animation is that?  No thanks.  So I definitely poo-pooed that idea as a pretentious art student.  Evan actually had the same thought on eCards because at the time they were just really dumb and lame, but his brother Greg [Spiridellis] said don’t think about what they are, think about what they could be.  It’s an amazing philosophy where if you start to view the world that way, it opens up a lot more potential.

 

 

IV. I’m All for Paying it Forward

 

BIAHADJ: Did StoryBots grow out of that opportunity at JibJab?

JG: Yeah, actually.  Evan and Greg both had children, and as time went on they started looking at the content their kids were watching, and it was the same thought process—we can make something way better than this.  So they decided to put their money where their mouth is and really invest in making children’s content under the brand StoryBots.  It started small—I believe at first there was a single app, and from there it evolved into a YouTube channel where they just made ABC videos and music videos with this idea of a StoryBot.

BIAHADJ: On StoryBots you animate, you play the voice of Bing, you’ve done visual effects, and you’ve directed a few episodes.  Did you have your hand in a little bit of everything from the beginning, or were you more focused on one particular area?

JG: In the beginning I was still the Director of eCards while StoryBots was getting some of its footing, so I would animate something for StoryBots or direct a series of videos, but it took a while before I jumped into StoryBots full-time.  I made the Letter J video [laughs] I think as the first StoryBots project I ever did, but after that I directed the Outer Space series, I animated and boarded some of those, and then I did the same for the Dinosaur Series.  In both of those as well, in the recording sessions I would jump behind the mic and lend voices to the Stegosaurus or Mercury or other characters.

BIAHADJ: When you say “jump behind the mic,” was that because there was no one else to do the voice or because you were excited to record from the get-go?

JG: I’ve always expressed interest in voice acting—I like doing everything.  Even with the eCards, if you’ve ever uploaded your face on to somebody dancing, there’s a really high chance that it’s my body your face is uploaded on.  Evan knew I’d done radio back in the day and that I had an interest in that kind of stuff, and sometimes we had one person doing all of these voices and it sounded too consistent—we needed to sprinkle in other voices for variation, and I just happened to be there.

BIAHADJ: How did it feel to win an Emmy for StoryBots?

JG: When the show wins something, it’s really exciting, because everyone participated in it.  So it’s weird to be holding an Emmy that has your name on it even though you did such a small percentage of it, it’s bizarre.  I can feel like it’s amazing for the whole team, but I feel like I don’t know why I have it.  And that can be said for the writing and the directing too.

BIAHADJ: How about the actual ceremony?

JG: It’s just weird. [laughs] But it’s nice because everyone’s excited to be there, everyone’s dressed up, and if you’re nominated you’re spending the whole time getting nervous for when your name gets called or not.  Then there’s the red carpet, and there’s paparazzi, and when you get the award they run you through the media cameras where they ask you all these questions and then they have to take the picture of you for their archives.  It’s pretty amazing since animator is just such a non-forward-facing career to be in, so to feel like you’re important for those events is really kind of exciting.

BIAHADJ: I think it’s really important for people who create these essential aspects of entertainment like animation, storyboarding, lighting, and sound to have faces and names that go with their work, because when these people talk about their careers it can be tremendously inspiring for people who want to do them, just like when you were a kid and saw the Nicktoons animator.

JG: You’re totally 100% on the nose.  Anytime there’s a tour through the studio I take the opportunity to talk about what I do—there are so many parts of the production process that people don’t even know exist, and if a kid just happens to stumble upon one of them and finds it really interesting it could change their whole career path.  I’m all in favor of paying it forward and trying to get others aware of those opportunities.

BIAHADJ: Do you still work on other creative projects outside of your work on StoryBots?

JG: I try to—it’s definitely becoming harder as I get older. When I was younger I would enter any contest I could find and just animate anything—but having a wife and kid is a pretty great way to spend your time too, so it’s difficult to try to find balance. I also have a show idea that I’m hoping to pitch around and maybe get developed.  I go into that the same way I went into the South Park interview—I don’t expect anybody to make this show, but if I can at least have some interviews maybe it’ll create a better opportunity for the next one.

BIAHADJ: What do you think people in the industry look for with pitches?

JG: This might not be true for everybody, but I think they’re looking for creators with visions or concepts that resonate with either their current lives or who they were, or a struggle or story that they’ve been through.

BIAHADJ: I also revisited your Soundcloud where you sing hilarious songs you’ve recorded while stuck in traffic—I laughed pretty hard when I was listening to them prepping for this interview.

JG: [laughs] I think you’re only the second person I’ve actually talked to about the songs I’ve uploaded on that thing—I just view it as a black hole, I don’t really promote it, and it’s more for me to host an archive of the dumb things I do in my car on the way to work.

BIAHADJ: And they’re all recorded in your car?

JG: Yeah, it’s totally dangerous and probably illegal [laughs] but I have an app called Loopy, and if I have a random thought I might hit record and see what comes out, and then maybe I’ll build on it for the twenty minutes or so until I get to work, and if I’m really interested maybe I’ll also work on it during lunch. That’s why they all sound so crappy, because I’m driving around in my car and I’ve got the engine going, and it’s probably me on speaker phone.

BIAHADJ: Do you find it hard to juggle your regular work with any kind of side project?

JG: I work so much based on deadlines, and I think that’s why it’s taken me so long to pitch my own things, because if I don’t have a date to finish something by and nobody’s telling me to do it, I won’t.  The thing I loved so much about entering contests is that there was a deadline, there was a potential prize, there was time management—there’s so many things you can learn and ways to build out your skillset by entering contests, but without that kind of external motivation it’s hard to want to do something for yourself.

BIAHADJ: If you could give any advice to younger animators who are looking to get into the business, what would it be?

JG: Don’t be afraid to share your work.  There’s always an inclination to want to perfect something before you get people’s eyeballs on it, and with the internet, since it lasts forever, you kind of want to make sure it meets a certain standard before you share it with the world.  But a lot of times people set the bar at a place where the goal never gets achieved and nothing gets shared, and then you’ve got nothing.  But if you can give yourself a little more leeway and understand that we all grow over time and not hold yourself accountable for the things you did when you were a kid, I think a lot more opportunities will present themselves.

So if you’re interested in being an animator, or if you’re interested in anything really, just share it, because if no one knows it’s out there or no one knows you’re doing it, no one will know how great it potentially is.

And contests, enter contests. [laughs]

 

You can find more of Jeff Gill’s videos on his Vimeo page, check out his Soundcloud of songs recorded in his car, or see his work on the Ask the StoryBots series, currently on Netflix.