We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Sean Nadeau a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Sean thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Did you always know you wanted to pursue a creative or artistic career? When did you first know?

My parents met at Hollywood High. Both my mother’s parents had been contract players for the studios in the 30’s. My grandpa Carlyle Moore Jr. was actually pretty successful in ingenue and ‘kid in trouble’ roles in B movies. His dad had been a Broadway playwright and his mother still had dozens of contacts from their vaudeville days (including Cecil DeMille!). WWII put him on a path to electrical engineering where he stayed, till bone cancer from long term exposure microwave radiation took him in 78. My mother grew up in a beautiful but slightly decrepit house in the hills just across from the old Hanna Barbera studio on Cahuenga, where she painted cells for Scooby Doo while I was in her belly. I often wonder if my forming while she was carefully painting inside the lines for 8 hours a day lead me to finding comfort in that zone in my own life. After my birth at Hollywood Presbyterian, she rejected Hanna Barbera’s offer to return so she could stay home and raise a family. Because that’s what people did in those days. I think my dad should have got on a path to being a teamster because that is exactly the type of man he was. Instead he worked as a studio runner for a few years until he finally gave up and moved his family to Barstow so he could dig ditches for CalTrans. My mom was happy to finally get out of the city. She’d had enough of the Manson family and the other weirdos in LA and she wanted to try a more suburban life.
I’m told I was an articulate conversationalist at 2. As a child I enjoyed reading, I did school plays and puppet shows in the garage with the kids in the neighborhood. I drew cartoon character lineups based on simple shapes during recess because that was more fun that trying to find somebody to throw a ball at. Needless to say I was a rare bird for that area. By the end of high school, any idea of getting anyone there to understand me was over. My grandmother back in the big city said I could come live with her as long as I got a job and signed up to go to college. There was never really any doubt about it. The arts were where I was from and the arts were where I was going. Even knowing already that most people chasing that dream rarely found lasting success was no deterrent. I was going to do something creative somehow. Managing a grocery store might bring money but it wouldn’t bring me happiness.

Sean, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I got into vector graphics in late 2001. I was doing storyboard work with pencil and paper and had just purchased my first iMac, when a friend of a friend said he needed a bunch of celebrity caricatures for his chat startup. He gave me a program called Macromedia Flash 4 to try to figure out by myself. A whole new world of possibilities opened before my eyes. With just my mouse and my imagination I could now make my own content. Not that we were calling it that in those days. Eventually a friend who worked at Warner Bros Records threw a little money at me to see if I could make a music video for the Flaming Lips ‘Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots’. Somehow they liked it and asked for another, then another. I parlayed that success into a gig with Klasky Csupo’s commercial division at the time, called ‘ka-chew!’. My first big shot there was when a producer called to say that one of his directors had just dropped out of a show open for A&E’s new show ‘Growing up Gotti’. The studio didn’t like what he was doing but they had approved the storyboards and could I take over and finish it in the two weeks that were left? Nobody else was really using flash at the time so I was their last cheapest hope. Not only did I finish that job in time and on budget (I even got my own MadTV parody) but I finished the next 10 gigs as well. By 2012 I was feeling good, I was at the top of my game, I could helm a web series for the Kidzbop franchise or do a whole season of 2 minute cooking recipe shorts by myself and help the ‘Noodle and Doodle’ show on Sprout Channel get a Parents Choice award.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

Suddenly the bottom fell out at “ka-chew!. A management uproar had forced the department to close its doors. I was a free agent again and now there were a lot more people who knew digital graphics. Some of them had even had computers in college! I was a lost cause. Too experienced for a lot of jobs, not experienced enough for others. I finally found a gig as a ‘clean up animator’ on a series Adult Swim had just green lit. The task was redrawing and coloring rough motion sketches and finishing shots for broadcast. I’d never worked in a room that crowded before but I tried to keep my head down and my mouth shut and by episode 2 I had somehow been declared lead clean up – meant as a compliment or to balance out the credits page at least. For Season 2 they asked if I’d like to be one of the character designers, and 2 seasons after that I was doing all the characters by myself. Between seasons I would take on smaller jobs to fill in the gaps. By this time, people from every country in the world were adept at computer animation and production companies in LA began shipping all the real hard jobs to places you could get twice as many workers for a fraction of the price. Good for them, bad for us. Of course the union tries forcing companies to keep at least some of the prep and revision work here for their members but even that becomes more difficult to find every season.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

At the beginning of the pandemic we thought we were set. Our profession is one of the few in entertainment that you can actually do at home by yourself. Then the networks started cancelling nearly finished shows for tax write offs, shuttering studios, and removing streaming shows. Our show was one of the first to get a rain check in late 2020. While world was shut down, I took the opportunity put full time work into my own dream project: An animated version of Voltaire’s literary classic “Candide (or Optimism)’. It has no adequate modern version (the Bernstein Musical is beautiful to listen to but the story takes a back seat) and I think the world might like it right now. The theme is: Everyone suffers but the worst thing you can do is complain about it all the time. If you want happiness, work at something meaningful. Put some effort where it counts.
Thinking about where the animation industry in Los Angeles will stand in 10 years. I predict the creators and producers will still be here but the workers will not. Perhaps when everyone working in animation is asking the same money the work will return, but that day is not in the foreseeable future. I hope I’m wrong but now with AI it’s not looking good for artists in general.
The one thing I can bring is my knowledge of story. What makes an inanimate object compelling and relatable.
I’ve watched many people around me achieve great things in this city, some even found actual fame, so I know that amazing things can happen to diligent toilers here. I’m sort of a monk in a monastery illuminating manuscripts for a sense of purpose. For now I’m finding success again with smaller projects I can do alone.
Need a commercial mascot for your business like Instapronounce’s ‘The Name Butcher’? I’m your man.
How about some animated re-enactments for your documentary? Okay!
Maybe you just need fully turned and articulated characters ready to animate overseas? Gimme a call.
In between I’m working to finish a 7 minute short section of Candide tentatively titled “The Old Woman’s Story” to submit to film festivals and try to get the attention of companies like Adult Swim or Netflix or HBO so I can produce the rest of it.
Anyone interested can go and look at the work in progress here:
https://www.behance.net/gallery/142517513/The-Old-Womans-Story
Wish me luck. I’ll need it, but I’m feeling optimistic.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.behance.net/SeanNadeau
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/optimismfilm/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/seannadeau/
• Other: IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0618819/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0

Image Credits
1. photo of me, credit Chris Mock next page 2. photo of me, credit Francis J Cura 3. caricature of me dead from Mr Pickles 4. artwork from my Candide short 5. character designs from ‘The Fabulous Allan Carr’ Automat Pictures 6 Liquid Death commercial image (I designed the characters) 7 Me as a child in Barstow painting the windows at BofA for Xmas 8 Carlyle Moore Jr on set 9 Name Butcher ad campaign