We were lucky to catch up with David M Brown recently and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, David M thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. When did you first know you wanted to pursue a creative/artistic path professionally?
I have always drawn. My mother is a woodcut print artist and painter and my father is a photographer so visual arts were always present and encouraged. Initially I went to school for film and studied live action but towards the end of my second year I met a producer named Mireille Soria who after talking with me and seeing drawings I had made for my live action projects, suggested I look into animation. She had started in live action and had made the transition to animated features when Jeffrey Katzenberg brought her to DreamWorks Animation. I participated in the DreamWorks intern program the next summer when I was on break and fell in love. I was not a working artist. I had daily jobs such as fetching coffee and stocking copy paper but on breaks I would wander the hallways of the studio buildings staring at all the design work for their different projects. The amount of ideas and styles going into each film was overwhelming. I loved how all these people of different backgrounds, minds and talents came together to make something. Sometimes that thing was not well received, or the styles or story didn’t work together on the whole, but I still adored the process and collaboration of essentially a group of people who grew up drawing like me.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
Professionally I am a production artist on the TV show South Park and during hiatus periods I animate my own shorts and am a designer for hire. I have worked on South Park for 15 years and I started as a PA. After falling in love with animation in my internship at DreamWorks I went back to school and started taking courses in the art form. I was not good. I left school with a lot of rushed education and no real portfolio so I took whatever visual art jobs I could get. I worked as a toy artist and a mural painter. A producer named David Crockett gave me a shot at storyboarding on a new film and when he saw the more animated style of the boards passed my name along to his friend and fellow producer Anne Garefino who works on South Park. At the time there were no openings in their art department, but she gave me a job as a production assistant with the encouraging note that they tend to hire from within. The South Park art department storyboards the episodes and designs every aspect of the show: characters, props, logos, and backgrounds. The team is small and unlike a typical animation studio comprised of specialists every member is a generalist able to tackle any assignment. This jack-of-all-trades artist education helped me in my personal work a great deal and is an ability I bring to hired jobs. I storyboarded, animated, and designed all the backgrounds for the short I am currently working on and those are skills I learned working on South Park.
Are there any resources you wish you knew about earlier in your creative journey?
The wealth of education that exists outside of college. It sounds obvious but I wasn’t aware of how many programs at smaller schools or even online that are constantly available to help make you a better artist. When I left NYU and realized how unprepared I was to work in entertainment I had a period of depression thinking school was behind me and I was ashamed that not only did my focus shift late, but I did not take enough advantage of their resources. That on top of paying off school put up this wall that prevented me from seeing how much education was ahead of me and how that is wonderful and not a shameful part of life. There are courses and information everywhere and the people teaching those courses tend to be working entertainment artists so not only are you acquiring or bettering skills but you’re making connections. I try to take classes once a year and I cannot recommend them enough even to the successful artists. I have met a good many professional, famous, and massively talented animators and production artists and they never look at their work as finished or good enough, they always say “time to go back to school.”
Is there mission driving your creative journey?
The next film drives me. I’m always interested in a creative frontier I have yet to explore. Animation is time and labor intensive, so you have a long while to think of the next project and it’s tempting to put down the project you are working on to pick up the next thing. There’s a part of me that constantly feels behind. I always think I should have more accomplished but that fuels a project’s completion. The “next thing” is what drives me creatively because when I discover an exciting new style or effect often times it does not work for the current project, so I am energized to make use of it on something else. Currently I am working on an animated musical short called Lunacy about a werewolf falling in love with the full moon. When I started it, I had never animated singing or dancing or shadows and I am excited to see what challenges the next film brings.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://davidmadbrown.blogspot.com/
- Instagram: @davidmadbrown
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-brown-5034a41a/
Image Credits
Michael Lloyd