John Jagusak

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What is your name and your current occupation?
My name is John Jagusak and I am currently a freelance cartoonist. Some of the projects I’m working on now include comic strips for several publications and character design for a web series.

 

What are some of the crazier jobs you had before getting into animation?
I would have to say that my previous job as a tattoo artist was the craziest job. One day I would be tattooing a group of teenage girls and the next I would be tattooing a group of 1%er bikers.

 

What are some of your favorite projects you’re proud to have been a part of?
Around 2007 I had the opportunity to collaborate with a great cartoonist and writer on a syndicated comic strip. That was a pretty fun project. At around the same time I also landed a job at the newly reformed Cracked Magazine which had been a life-long goal of mine. However, Cracked magazine only lasted for a short 3 issue run before the presses once again came to screeching halt.

 

Where are you from and how did you get into the animation business?
I’m originally from Cranford, NJ but I currently live in Long Island, NY. From 1999-2003 I attended the School of Visual Arts in NY for Cartooning. During my first 2 semesters at school I was working on the weekends as an airbrush artist at children’s parties. In the summer before my third semester I was hired as the art director for a children’s publishing company (basically cheap labor). Around this time I had Continue reading

Alex Schumacher

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What is your name and your current occupation?
My name is Alex Schumacher and I am currently a comic book artist/writer and freelance illustrator/character designer.

 

What are some of the crazier jobs you had before getting into animation?
I think any job you do that you don’t love is crazy. Having said that, I’ve mostly worked retail and/or customer service jobs. Anyone who has ever worked in those fields can tell you that describing it as “crazy” is putting it mildly.

 

What are some of your favorite projects you’re proud to have been a part of? 
The most recent (and probably biggest) projects I’ve been a part of so far are a couple of graphic novels being released in the new year from Viper Comics and Arcana Studios. I’d say I’m proud of those but hopefully my best work is yet to come…

Where are you from and how did you get into the animation business? 
I’m from a small-ish town in California called Salinas. Most of us just say we’re from Monterey as A. People actually know where that is and B. We don’t want to say we’re from Salinas. I’ve always drawn from a very young age and growing up on Disney, Bakshi, Kricfalusi, Avery and the like I’ve always been interested in the animation industry. I dreamed of Continue reading

Kyle A Carrozza

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What is your name and your current occupation?
My name is Kyle A Carrozza and I’m seeking new storyboard artist work. (I have to state my unemployment loudly, or people will assume I’m working and I’ll miss out on work. This has been my experience lately.)

What are some of the crazier jobs you had before getting into animation?
Nothing super interesting. I used to scan volumes of encyclopedias for digital archiving. I spent quite a while working for a company that bills for ER doctors.

 

What are some of your favorite projects you’re proud to have been a part of?
Getting to do my own short, MooBeard the Cow Pirate for Nickelodeon/Frederator for their “Random! Cartoons” show so early on was quite a thrill. Working on “Fanboy & Chum Chum” was tough at times, but a really great gig. I hope someday Nickelodeon airs the episodes I storyboarded. I’m very proud of how far my webcomic, Frog Raccoon Strawberry has come from where it started. I’m a huge proponent of learning by making things, and Strawberry has certainly helped me do that. A webcomic is a good place for trial and error.

 

How did you become interested in animation?
I found that interest very early on just being a kid watching what was on. I watched lots of cartoons as a kid, and I remember one specific day when I was Continue reading

Vadim Kapridov

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What is your name and your current occupation?
Vadim Kapridov, currently a director of animated TV series for preschoolers.

What are some of the crazier jobs you had before getting into animation?
I worked once as a builder of ice town.
What are some of your favorite projects you’re proud to have been a part of?
Web – Progress from Above, TV – Futz!, Peep and the Big Wide World, and the incredibly challenging show I’m directing now – Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood.
How did you become interested in animation?
I always loved animation and wanted to be an animator even as a kid. I used my school textbooks as Continue reading

Gerry Mooney

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What is your name and your current occupation?
My current name is Gerry Mooney, and my occupation is Director of Motion Graphics for a litigation graphics firm in Westchester, New York.

What are some of the crazier jobs you had before getting into animation?
I designed slot machines for a tiny outfit in Charlotte, NC, for a year. It was moderately interesting, in that there is some amazingly sophisticated graphic and animation work being done for slots and their related displays these days, but the downside is that the gambling industry is not that interesting. So it was fun to do the work, but what you were selling was not very challenging.
In between my magazine illustrating days and animation, I did web design for a few years. One temp job I got was with a pretty major NY ad agency where the entire web staff had walked out the day before, so they were desperate for freelancers to jump in and take up the slack. I worked there for a month and the odd thing was that since everyone had walked out, I never knew for that whole month who exactly I was supposed to report to. I handed in my work to a guy across the hall, but he wasn’t my superior or manager, he was just a guy who was still there.  I’ve always managed to make my living as an artist though. I worked in a framing shop after college, assisted Joe Simon in his home studio back years ago, and did layout and pasteup for a physics journal, “The Physical Review” at Brookhaven National Laboratory.  I spent most of my professional career as a magazine illustrator for pubs like Forbes, Parents, The New Republic, Cruising World, Medical Economics, The NY Daily News, a Consumer Reports magazine for kids called Zillions, and American Express, clients like that. One of my favorites was doing a regular humor feature for Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, called “Mooney’s Modules”. That ran for three years and was the first place the Gravity Poster was seen by a large audience.

What are some of your favorite projects you’re proud to have been a part of?
Certainly that Asimov’s gig would be at the top of the list. I would submit a bunch of sketches, and I’d be surprised at some of the ideas they signed off on. I wondered sometimes if they actually got the jokes or if they just didn’t want to appear that they didn’t.
I completed an animated music video last year where I was given complete creative control. It was for Shawn Letts, an American musician who lives and works in Singapore. It was a dream job! I was just told, “Call us when it’s done”. I really felt free to explore imagery and effects that I could just play around with, without having to “sell” a client on the concepts. And then of course there’s my graphic novel, “Sister Mary Dracula”, which is currently being shopped around to publishers. It originated as a Flash animation that I did in 2001 and put online. It got accepted as an entry in the San Diego Comicon’s Independent Film Festival in 2004, which motivated me to expand it into a graphic novel that took me four years to complete.  These are all one-man projects, not strictly speaking things that I was “a part of”; I WAS the projects!

How did you become interested in animation?
I’ve always been interested in animation and dabbled as a kid with both clay and cel animation, but Continue reading

Lee Daniels

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What is your name and your current occupation?
Lee Daniels – Freelance Media Creative – Illustration/Animation/Editing/Graphic Design.

 

What are some of the crazier jobs you had before getting into animation?
I havent’ had any particularly crazy jobs unless you count collecting shopping trollies for pocket money at Tescos as a 13 year old. I was a Digital Retouch Artist and Graphic Designer for 13 years before going freelance so slightly altering the appearance of subjects for amusement was not unheard of (with or without consent…)

 

What are some of your favorite projects you’re proud to have been a part of?
Producing my own animated shorts as solo projects is the most gratifying work I’ve done to date. I always wanted to be a cartoonist from a young age so, now, thanks to the extensive tools on Adobe off the shelf software and my years learning Photoshop and Illustrator on live projects, I basically have the knowledge and studio kit that I never thought attainable.
How did you become interested in animation?
That one’s easy… Continue reading