We were lucky to catch up with Jabari Brown recently and have shared our conversation below.

Jabari, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.

One of the facts about me that synergises the best with my creative industry career is that I get bored very easily. Animation and I started quite by accident. I was 10 years old and bored one afternoon. My parents are academics and had a study with a logitech webcam for their clunky CRT computer. It was 2005 so the webcam naturally came with it’s own photobooth-esque software so that you could get more use out of it. Ours came with 3 functions: Photo Capture, Video Capture, and Stop Motion Capture. I had played around with the photo and video capture functions enough times but I had no idea what to do with the stop motion one, like none at all.

I was bored enough one day to have the time to go back to it on a whim, and something just clicked that day. I took some play doh and made my first couple of animations. Very short, no point to it, no extravagant story told, just moving play doh- very cool for 10 year old me. I remember showing my family and getting lots of support for what I made and how proud it made me feel. I distinctly remember my father’s approving laughter when he came home from work and I showed him what I did.

That put me on a little animation bender where I spent a lot of my time seeing what else I could do with the stop motion capture function on the webcam. How else could I make things move? I didn’t know how to draw, I certainly didn’t know what fps meant or what animation principles were, I just spent a lot of time enjoying the fact that I could make things that shouldn’t move do things. It was the illusion that fascinated me.

It hasn’t stopped fascinating me to this day but the next couple of years saw me doing more with animation. Still not knowing how to draw or anything that made me feel like an *artist* artist but loving animation. I didn’t have youtube as a resource, I still didn’t know what animation principles were, I was just prolifically making animations and taking note of what was effective to do or not. I started an animation club at my school where, looking back as a professional animator, I still had no idea what I was doing really but I showed people how to animate themselves.

This was all just a hobby that I was very invested in until it was time for me to go to college and I applied for an animation bfa off the merits of the depths of my hobby. I got accepted, taught myself how to draw during a gap year (more bored energy vibes) and then started to actually get trained as an animator. Essentially, I kept on learning my hobby that I loved so much but in a different capacity. It’s the same thing I’m doing today. Same thing I don’t think I’ll ever stop doing.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I’m a Jamaican/Guyanse animator who grew up in Trinidad and Tobago. I discovered stop-motion playing with a webcam in my parents’ office when I was 10 years old and caught a fascination with animation that I’ve yet to put down. Today I mostly do character and effects animation (anything that lets me animate traditionally) and all of my illustrations are drawn on Photoshop anD more recently Procreate. My animations are split between being made in Photoshop, After Effects, ToonBoom, and Blender. Apart from traditional animation I’m really interested in motion graphics, particularly kinetic typography. There’s something about animating speech and imbuing words with personality and finding motion to fit the context of what’s being said, etc, that’s really enjoyable in a very West Indian way.

Career-wise I’m caught somewhere between wanting to use animation to highlight and elevate voices and cultures, particularly those back home in the Caribbean, and wanting to make some trippy-looking animation for TV shows- ideally both!
I want the art I create to provide representation that I didn’t have growing up. Having an identity influenced by 3 Caribbean countries has exposed me to lots of culture: colors and shapes and aesthetics that are rich in imagery and context. I would like to design worlds that people like myself can easily imagine themselves in – put them in narratives they’ve heard all their lives from a rich culture of orature and storytelling and augment it visually. That aside I’d also love to share Caribbean culture with the world. The Caribbean is home to lots of people and cultures- an excellent case of plurality. Lots of these cultures have very strong ties to an oral tradition and storytelling is everyone’s birthright in a very cultural way. Everyone does it and in their own unique ways at that. More than just technical skill, animation is the art of storytelling and it is my dream to contribute to the animation industry in the region so that we can turn all that storytelling potential energy into a differently tangible cultural capital we can utilize to boost our voices and share our uniqueness with the world. The wider world has been interacting with the Caribbean for hundreds of years and historical and geographical context creates a microcosmic cultural ecosystem that is unique in its multitudes and ripe with storytelling potential. I’d like to develop my skills as a storyteller to become an appropriate tool with which to extract from the goldmine of storytelling opportunities that exist back home.

I’m currently working on getting my MFA at SCAD Atlanta. There are lots of things I’d like to do with this education I’m receiving but the most important thing I’d like to do with it is open a studio back in Trinidad and Tobago where I grew up.

Any resources you can share with us that might be helpful to other creatives?

In short- pretty much all of them. To expound- I’ve been interested in animation for quite some time. That’s not to say I’m a grizzled veteran in the industry. I’m 28 years old. If I were a cheese i’d be a humble dry-aged block of krasdale new york sharp cheddar with aspirations of being a nice wheel of parmesean you can find in a Trader Joe’s. I’ve no gray hairs and there’s still a great deal more I’d like to do with my craft but this is a journey I started when I was 10 and a little bored with a webcam in my parent’s study. In the 18 years that have passed the world looks vividly different for anyone who fancies themself a creative individual.

The advances in technology and open-sourced, democratized, accessible creative tools that creatives have at their disposal would be enough to make 10 year old Jabari’s head spin off its shoulders.

I remember asking my uncle to burn several disks worth of photoshop CS4 so that I could make cool looking edits on pictures of animals. Things like cats with rabbit heads and snakes with banana bodies. Things I’d see on list websites that existed before buzzfeed but still had hours worth of funny pictures or cool photoshop jobs for a young me to look at and try to figure out how it was done.

It’s the year of our lord 2024AD and the world is different. I’m teaching children who have access to blender and the “school of youtube” and digital art programs you don’t need an industry career to be able to afford and I’m a weird combination of proud and jealous of them. In these kids I see the same creative hunger driving their journey that drove mine but on top of that there’s this insane wealth of resources that feed it and it makes me wonder where I’d be now if 2005 gave me the same tools that 2023’s giving them.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

I really want to help develop the industry in the Caribbean. Start a studio, teach people how to practice the craft, take all the story telling that exists within the Caribbean and use it as raw material to pass through the animation machine and get world class productions with a West Indian spin.

I don’t think it’s difficult based on our other creative industries native to the region. We have so much creativity that flows out of our being and we’ve been refining that creativity in so many ways that it’s inevitable that animation takes root and flourishes in the region. I’m volunteering myself as some nitrogen rich fertiliser.

It’s why I’ve been tutoring animation to kids and it’s why I’ve taught community center courses on it and it’s why I’m working on my ability to teach just as much as I’m working on my ability to animate. I come from a family with many teachers in it and one of my favorite things to do is talk about things I’m interested in. It’s very quick maths that I’d enjoy teaching animation too.

I hope that one day Caribbean animated storytelling will be giving Japanese anime a run for its money and as inevitable as I think something like that is I’d still love to help make it a reality.

Contact Info:

• Website: Jabari.art
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jahbari_b/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jabari-brown-2a8274140/

Image Credits
Jabari Brown