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Andrew Pearce, former DreamWorks VP, talks to CTV News Achi-News

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When he served as vice president of DreamWorks Animation, Andrew Pearce was the driving force behind many of the most popular films of this century.

This week, Pearce returns to his alma mater, the University of Calgary, to serve as a distinguished graduate speaker during spring convocation.

Pearce, who holds a Bachelor of Science (1984) and Master of Science (1988) from the university, was initially an economics student.

However, he says seeing a raw computer graphics display sparked a passion for the field.

Although he wanted to be a cartoonist, Pearce claims he had no drawing skills. However, he had a strong aptitude for computers.

Pearce’s path took him from university to Alias, a leading computer graphics software company.

His software, Maya, played a key role in creating special effects for films such as The Abyss a Jurassic Park.

Pearce then transitioned to Hollywood, working for the visual effects company behind the Matrix movies.

Combining hard work, timing and a touch of humor, he joined DreamWorks Animation in the early 2000s and quickly rose to lead the company’s research and development team.

Today, Pearce is not only a computer graphics pioneer, but also a prolific patent holder and board member of the Academy Software Foundation.

He credits his well-rounded education, including extracurricular activities such as performing at Calgary’s Loose Moose Theatre, music and volunteering at UCalgary’s Gauntlet newspaper for shaping a diverse skill set.

Reflecting on his career, Pearce compares his time at DreamWorks to his student days at UCalgary, where passion, skills and an uncertain future converged.

He says the jobs he has had didn’t even exist when he was a student, and the job descriptions of the future haven’t been written yet.

This week, Pearce is holding a seminar at the University of Calgary called “How to Make a Blockbuster Animated Movie (Your Results May Vary),” which he promises will offer a behind-the-scenes look at how animated characters and worlds come to life. .

CTV News had the opportunity to meet with Pearce on Tuesday morning before the Assembly.

Here are his answers to 10 questions we asked him:


1. Take us back to the early 80s, and tell us about the “moment of epiphany” that ultimately led to your career.

“I was in economics by default, because my father wanted me to get that degree and then go into law. I didn’t really like economics, I didn’t like the statistical aspect of it. Then I passed this thing in the hallway. It was very early computer graphics. It was like a sphere with the bottom coming out, ‘computers can draw,’ and then I switched majors and found out it’s not that easy.”


2. At the time, there was no CGI film industry. Did you foresee what was to come?

“Oh, nothing, nothing. Nothing. I was doing it for the pure joy of studying the computer graphics algorithms. I was a frustrated cartoonist, all my friends had talent and could actually draw picture. I couldn’t, but the computer can draw. So, I was really interested in making pictures, and then it was, ‘Oh, I have to learn linear algebra.’ And I said, ‘OK, I’ll do that to make pretty pictures.'”


3. When you left UCalgary, you went on to work at Alias ​​and created what was actually the first “film scale” CGI software, “Maya.” How did that come about?

“I moved to Toronto and joined Alias. We started this little project ‘power animator.’ The car industry, in fact, was responsible for industrial design, and some animators saw it and said, ‘Hey, I want to do motion graphics for television with this.’ And the industry took off around me.


4. At what point in your career did you think, “This is really something”? The point where you could kind of see that path.

“That’s when (colleague) Steve Williams moved to ILM and started working on this picture called The Abyss. We went to the theater to see the opening of it in Toronto, and we sat there, and we saw the water snake snake through them. It wasn’t Tron’s horrible graphics, it wasn’t, you know, The Last Star Fighter, it wasn’t these very cheesy graphics. This was integrated inextricably into the film. VFX was working. That was kind of the ‘Ah ha.’ Then, of course, a year or two later, Jurassic Park it came out and that’s it. We knew we had done it.”


5. Your IMDB lists more than 30 movies, many of which are movies that people have a real emotional attachment to. It seems like it must be a very exciting career.

“You know, my job is probably 95 percent like anybody else’s. You’re in an office, you’re working on budgets, you’re managing people, you’re trying to meet with deadlines. Everyone is familiar with that If I told people ‘I work at DreamWorks,’ they were like, ‘Oh my God! Shrek! Or I love toothless! There was an emotional attachment to what we were doing, and I mean, a little sugar on top of the work makes it worthwhile.”


6. Does the animation team sitting at computers feel the same emotional attachment, or does it work?

“Oh, there’s no doubt that everybody who makes those films, everybody who works there works there because they love making animated films. That’s the core. We’re all filmmakers, and everyone contributes to this final project. It was definitely a labor of love, and we care about those characters – even the movies that don’t do so well, we still give much love to those characters.”


7. If you look at your career path, at least on paper, it looks like it’s on a steady upward path right from graduation. Is that how it felt to you?

“Oh, the edited version looks great. That’s not the reality. I moved down to Santa Barbara, Calif., and went up the Maya port for Mac OS 10, which wrapped up the project that, and they closed the whole office. So basically, my first layoff and here I was, I was in my 40s, I was a manager, and I went down to unemployment. Matrix films and some other visual effects films. Then Warner Brothers came in and said, ‘You know what? We have just canceled the Superman sequels, you’re all gone.’ And they shut us down again. And so now I was older and still in a management position, and those are big ones, but there are little ones along the way, there’s no end to tests of your resilience.”


8. You have said that there will come a point in the near future when it will not be possible to distinguish between computer images and real images, and that could be a danger to people’s understanding of reality, or to their acceptance of facts. Is this a real concern?

“You know, just like we see animations now that are quite passable, even not even animations, but like real looking people moving. It’s going to get better and better as these algorithms get better and better, and the processing gets higher.”


9. People who work on films often have different ‘favourite films’ to the viewing public, due to some personal attachment. What are your favorite ones you’ve been involved with?

“Two different from two different perspectives. So one: the second Matrix a film was such a Herculean task, and it was my first film, and so I always have a fondness for it, even though the critics and everyone else didn’t love it. But for me, it was only the first film I worked on directly that I saw pixels on the screen that I had an impact on.”

The second answer is How to Train Your Dragon. I think How to Train Your Dragon just the most beautiful film. It has a main character who is an amputee, and you don’t think of them that way. You don’t realize that’s what that story is. It is the story of a boy and his dog, basically a boy and his dragon, but he and his family have all lost limbs fighting the dragons. He has thought of a big change, of working in partnership with the dragons, but in the process, he also loses a member who becomes part of the society. I think it brings a tear to my eye every time I think about it. I love How to Train Your Dragon.”


10. How did your university education help you get to where you are today?

“You know, a lot of people say, ‘Oh, you don’t need to go to university,’ which doesn’t really get you anything. What it teaches you you are actually how to learn, it teaches you how to learn in an environment where no one has done that thing before. OK? we face in the this world needs people who are accused to do that.”

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