Meet the speakers: Kevin Dart
An interview with Kevin Dart: CEO and Founder of Chromosphere, a boutique animation studio in Los Angeles that specializes in design and creative storytelling with technology.
Q&A hosted by Mack Garrison.
Read time: 15min
Mack:
Hey Kevin. Nice to meet you.
Kevin:
Nice to meet you too!
Mack:
I'd love to know a little bit of backstory. How'd you get into motion design? What was the draw to the animation field, and then maybe a little bit of that path that led you ultimately to starting Chromosphere?
Kevin:
I switched careers after graduating from college, because I originally wanted to work in video games. I went to a school called DigiPen up in Redmond, Washington, originally in the engineering program, because I wanted to program games. I think by the third semester, I was in calculus three or something and I was just like, this just isn't what I wanted. It was too heavy on physics and stuff for me, but I always had a real passion for art and design too. I actually was more interested in graphic design, especially in high school. I always drew, but I also spent a lot of time designing websites. I was really into just the worldwide web of the nineties when I was growing up. I taught myself HTML and Perl and various types of web coding languages, so I could build my own websites.
That was my real intro into art, was through web design and graphic design. When I was having that third semester crisis, there were only two programs at DigiPen; engineering and animation. I was like, "Well." I always loved animation too. Maybe I could get into it. I threw together a portfolio and they let me switch over to the other program, and then I did that. It was mainly focused on 3D art, learning how to model and animate in 3D.
I graduated with a degree in 3D animation and then went to work in video games as a character modeler. I did that for almost three years. And then I had another existential crisis... I think I had some awakening or something, when I saw Samurai Jack. I think that actually came out when I was in school, but it sparked something inside of me where I was like, "I think maybe I actually do want to work in animation." Something about it was just so ... it was an epiphany for me. That bug never left me and it kept growing.
At some point, I made a trip down to LA and showed my portfolio around at an event I was at, and met this amazing recruiter from Disney named Dawn Rivera, who's still working at a lot of different studios today. She was like, "I think you really might have something here." She set up this whirlwind bunch of meetings for me at some studios around LA, and none of them went anywhere, but being as naive as I was, my first time in LA and going to these big studios, I was like, "Well, I guess I'm in."
Meet Kevin Dart!
Mack:
Ha - Nice.
Kevin:
I pretty much quit my job a few weeks after that, thinking I was just going to go start working in animation and that wasn't what happened. I think I ended up being unemployed for two or more years or something, trying to figure out how to get into animation and realizing that having a meeting at a studio didn't mean that I was actually going to have a job there.
Mack:
How old were you at this time? I'm assuming this is Samurai Jack, so I'm thinking early 2000s, something like that.
Kevin:
Yeah. I was in my twenties, early twenties. I was probably more naive than I should have been at that age. I think at the time also, there was a really huge geographical disconnect between animation and being centralized in LA. It felt to me, being in the Seattle area, it was basically impossible. There were just no options to work in animation. At some point, I finally made the move down to LA, I think it was 2007 or so, which was actually spurred because my at the time, girlfriend and eventually wife, were long distance dating. She was living in LA and I was up in Seattle. It provided the impetus I needed to finally move down to LA. Then once I got down here, things finally started connecting because I was in the area and I was able to actually go to studios I was talking to and meet with them.
One of the first things that happened was, I got an internship at Pixar in the visual development program in 2007, which was really cool and surreal, because that was a place I'd wanted to work at for such a long time. Then I got to just spend a summer there, learning from all these guys that I only knew from captions and art of books and stuff. Then weirdly from there, I started working a lot for European studios like Cartoon Network Europe.
Mack:
Interesting. Just committing to being there, you were able to meet with some of these studios, you got in at Pixar. The internship itself for the digital development stuff, was that a one-year gig or just a few months?
Kevin:
Yeah. It was just a summer internship. It was weird because I was a lot older than everyone else in the program. Everyone else was still, they were coming out of school or were still in school. I had been out for a few years at that point, but everyone accepted me. It was really nice, nice little camaraderie, but I did feel strange about it. They had us do our own individual projects, where we would get mentored by people. I was mentored by Harley Jessup, who was already one of my idols from just seeing his work on Monsters Inc and stuff like that.
Also just, he's got an incredible eye for graphic design, so we really matched up perfectly. I think he really recognized that I had that interest and was able to guide me on that, and just one of the kindest, most open people ever. It was just a really cool experience to be able to work with him and have that role model, someone who's so open and so interested in art in general, and particularly graphic design, to just be really encouraging and inspiring.
Frame from “Forms in Nature.”
Mack:
Especially given his ... I'm just looking at his IMDB here Ratatouille, Cars 2, Presto, the Good Dinosaur, Coco, and then the upcoming feature Elio. Monsters Inc, of course. What an immense source of talent, and you're just a sponge absorbing all of it. What an amazing opportunity.
Kevin:
I'm pretty sure it was Harley who encouraged me to do this, was to start gathering photo references and just putting it up all around me. That was something that just really stuck with me. I don't always do it actually physically printing stuff out and hanging it up anymore, but I make a big point of always starting every project with a lot of research and gathering a reference and creating boards that we can look at and just be like, "Oh yeah, this is where we're going," and just relying a lot on that research process that he talked about. He was also really big on... I don't feel like I needed a lot of prodding to also be into this, but I think he encouraged me to really focus on presentation.
That's something that's really stuck with me too. The way that you present your work a lot of times, is just as important as the work itself. If you put something out there and you're like, "Whatever," you just throw it out and it's got some messy type or it's printed badly or whatever, it really betrays the quality of what you were trying to do. That's really bled into everything that we do. I spend so much time curating our website, for instance, for Chromosphere, really getting everything just right. I want our work to be presented in a way that I feel is fitting of what we've done.
Mack:
After the internship you said you went to Cartoon Network?
Kevin:
Yeah. I just went back to LA after the internship and then started getting work from Europe, from Cartoon Network Europe first, from a director named Pete Candeland, who was there. And Pete Candeland directed all the early Gorillaz music videos, and those Rock Band promos, the Beatles Rock Band promo and that stuff. He was very iconic in that. Pete, at the time, was working at Cartoon Network Europe, developing a pilot for a show, and they asked me to do some background designs for it.
Then weirdly, they also had hired at Cartoon Network Europe, this French compositor named Stéphane Coëdel, who ended up being pretty much my most long-term conspirator and collaborator in animation. When I started on the project, they told me, "There's this French guy here. He really likes your work and he's wondering if you would be interested in collaborating on these title cards," because they were making title cards for the show and they wanted to do this old monster movie type look to the cards. They asked me to paint up a card like that. I was like, "Okay." I did something where it was a dock scene with these squid tentacles coming out or something and some horror movie type font on it. I sent it off, and then a few days later they sent me back a movie that Stéphane had done, where he had ... I was completely unfamiliar at the time with After Effects as an animation tool, and what you could really do with it. They sent me back this movie and he had taken all the layers from my Photoshop file and animated all these tentacles moving around and appeared in smoke and all this stuff. There was a little parallaxing. The whole thing just came to life and my mind just exploded. I was like, "What?" It felt like he had taken this little painting I had done and just brought it to life, created a whole world out of it. That just planted this whole seed of, "I want to do more of this." I love this process of painting and then working with someone to bring it all to life in a way that I'd never really considered.
I still thought of animation as just drawing in frames. I didn't think there was a whole other level to what could be done with 2D animation and compositing. It just really opened my mind to that. Then the next job I did was also with Pete, but he had gone back to Passion Pictures and he was directing a promo for the 2008 Beijing Olympics on BBC. For that one, they asked me to come over to London and just work on it for a month or so, doing a color script and background paintings for it.
One of the funniest experiences was they just threw me in the room. At the time, Passion was in this ... I don't want to say dilapidated, but it was a very old building with lots of breezes coming through. It was freezing in there, and the floors were all creaky and there was just this room and they're like, "All right, here's the guys. This is so-and-so and this person, and here's a computer for you to work at," and I was like, "Okay." I just started working and there was this guy that they had all introduced to me as Bob, sitting over here. I was like, "Okay, hey Bob." He was a friendly Canadian guy, and it wasn't until a week later where I think I was about to go home for the night and I was going over to look at what he was doing, and he was animating on paper, flipping these pages, and I was looking at it and I was like, "Wow."
First of all, I'd never been around people animating traditionally. All of my training had been completely digital and all of my experiences were totally digital. I was looking at it and I was like, "Wow man, that's really good. It reminds me of Robert Valley's stuff," and he was like, "I am Robert Valley." I was like, "What? They've just been calling you Bob this whole time." I didn't know.
Then you start finding out who everyone else in the room is, and it's like, "Okay, this is the whole team of people who've done all these Gorillaz videos and all this stuff, and why am I here?" I didn't feel like I deserved to be there, but I still tried to soak it all up as much as possible. I remember one time, Pete invited me to sit in on a review session where he was going through all the latest animation and seeing how it was all coming together.
That was such a momentous thing for me, that this person would just bring me into that process and let me observe how it was being done. I was like, "Wow, I want to do this. I want to do this exact same thing. I want to make animation this way." I just wasn't aware of other people who were doing it at that time. I haven't really traced the history, but I feel like Pete and those guys on the Gorillaz videos were one of the main originators of the whole After Effects and motion graphic style that exploded in the years after that.
I just loved the process, just getting in there and just working with all of the elements. It was also raw and immediate. The person who's animating it is just in this room over here. Then the guys, they scan it, this guy's compositing it. I would see at Cartoon Network in LA years later, the way they did animation was: you have a pre-production team in LA who does a lot of designs and storyboards, and then it gets sent off to Korea or somewhere else, and then a few weeks later you get back a cartoon.
This process was just so opposite of that. It was a team of ... it felt like maybe it couldn't have been more than 12 or 15 people coming together and using their resources to, from start to finish, create this incredible piece of animation. I think I modeled everything I've done with Chromosphere and everything off of that experience, small teams, everyone knows, everyone's really good at what they're doing and really good at improvising and coming up with quick solutions and just working together to make stuff in a very quick and almost improvisational way.
That whole period from 2007 to 2009 was really characterized by these very life-shaping experiences like that. Then when I came back to LA, I did end up getting a job doing background painting at Cartoon Network, on a show that Genndy Tartakovsky was making. Genndy's the guy that did Samurai Jack.
“June” is the story of a woman reconnected by ridesharing
Mack:
Yeah, phenomenal.
Kevin:
It was like jumping from one person I idolized to the next. If I could organize all of my inspirations in some way, Genndy and Samurai Jack, and all that stuff would just be so far at the top of what I wanted to do. Then Scott Wills, who was the art director for Samurai Jack was also on this show.
It was basically me, Scott, and one other background painter, who was Kristen Lester, who's actually now a director at Pixar. It was just another crazy experience where it's like this guy who's an industry veteran, has these two complete noobs that he's taken under his wing, to teach how to background paint. Scott is a traditional painter by trade. That's how he learned. He started on Ren and Stimpy. His story's pretty crazy because one of his first gigs was blowing up album covers for Tower Records stores in LA during the eighties, because they didn't have the technology to just scan stuff and blow it up, so they would hire him to just paint a bigger version of an album cover.
He learned a lot of painting through that, and then got hired on Ren and Stimpy and did background painting for that, and eventually found his way to working with Genndy on Samurai Jack.
What I was really astonished by, was that it seemed like he hadn't skipped a beat from being a very accomplished traditional painter to just taking all of his knowledge and translating it effortlessly into digital painting. We were painting digitally on this show. He was doing it just how he would do his regular painting, no problem. It wasn't like he was like, "Ah, I'm not going to work on computers, these newfangled machines," or whatever. He just did it. Then he showed us exactly how he did it. He broke down the process into this very understandable thing, where even Kristen and I, just being complete novices at this, could understand how he was approaching each of these paintings.
It was just a very ordered, understandable and reproducible way of working, that I still paint that way now. It was just such a great way of starting with blocking in simple shapes and then you add light and then shadow. He would group all of his layers in a very organized way, like someone who'd been painting digitally all their life. He just had complete mastery over how to work in Photoshop in a way that was just very, very thorough and very organized. I think for me, it was especially cool because at the time I had no real process to speak of.
I felt like every time I would paint something, it was a totally new approach, that I was just fumbling through to get to some result, hopefully. Then this was the most incredible tool set because it was like, "Well, now I can always make something because I have this process I can rely on. I don't have to make a bunch of mistakes and then end up here. Hopefully I can follow these steps so I'll always end up having a painting at the end." It was ideal. It was an ideal process, especially for that job where you do have to crank through a certain number of paintings every week.
It was a whirlwind at that point, because I sort of started two different careers, where I was working at studios in LA doing either vis dev or art directing stuff, but I was also trying to keep alive the dream of what I had seen Pete doing in London in 2008, making short films and doing it in this way that I was really inspired by. Stéphane and I, at that point, we'd been making films together. We were doing some of the early Yuki 7 stuff at the time, and then eventually started getting gigs co-directing these things. We did this little film for Persol sunglasses, but all of this was happening simultaneously. I was always working two or three jobs at the same time for several years.
Frame from Yuki 7.
It went on that way til 2014 or something. I think my wife and I were having dinner one night and I was just like, "I only want to be doing this one part. I want to be doing all the fun films and stuff, and I want a studio where I can" It just felt like I was in this place where I had this amazing fortune of learning all these different things. I learned how TV animation worked. I'd learned how feature animation worked. I learned how commercial animation worked. I'd even learned how video games worked, how they were made.
I was like, "I want to take all of this," Take all my friends I've met, these incredible people like Stéph or the various artists I was working with at Cartoon Network, like Jasmin Lai or Tiffany Ford, all these people, and form some place where we could do projects that just didn't follow any way that any of the studios in LA were doing things. I loved all the shows that I worked on, like Steven Universe, or Power Puff Girls, or Peabody and Sherman or whatever, but I didn't want to do that process. I wanted to be in that situation, what I had seen Pete doing, where it's a small team of people just creating something really cool together.
Mack:
What was the next step of, "I want to do this, so I'm just going to start a studio."
Kevin:
Luckily, my wife Elizabeth Ito (Creator of City of Ghosts) was just really supportive. We talked to our therapist about it too. It was a big topic. It was a huge decision. It felt like I'm talking about basically just leaving this industry that I worked so hard for so many years to get into, to just strike out on my own now. I think something I was struggling with a lot of the time was, all I ever wanted, if I rewound 10 years ago or so, was to work with all of these people that I've now worked with. Now that I've done it, I feel like maybe that's not all I want. Maybe I want to go a whole step further and build something on my own that was just different from everything else, in some way that was hard to define at the time.
I just started taking the steps really slowly, first just registering a business name. At first, it was just a small freelance business, where I felt like a snake oil salesman type guy for the first two years. Basically, what happened is anytime someone would write to me saying, "Oh, are you available for work on this thing?," I'd be like, "Yeah, maybe, but the thing is I'm actually running a studio now," and I had no studio. I was like, "I have a studio, so maybe." If they were looking for an art director for a movie, I'd be like, "Well, would you be interested in talking about hiring my studio to do all of the vis dev for your movie?," or whatever. Most people were like, "Is this a real thing? Can you actually do that?"
Air BnB - The Good Guest
Mack:
Like… "Can you deliver on this? Who are you?" haha.
Kevin:
Yeah. Most people just wouldn't respond because it felt like a crazy proposition to them. One of them actually bit, and it was actually for a movie that just came out recently, but this was back in 2014. There's a movie that came out recently called Paws of Fury. I pitched the directors of the movie the idea of hiring my fledgling studio to do the visual development for the movie, and they agreed. We worked on it for maybe nine months to a year or so. I just built a little team, just all freelance, of my friends, to create all the designs for this movie.
I just did that on the side as I was also still working full-time as an art director at Dreamworks. Basically, that created enough of a seed fund for me to take the next step with Chromosphere, with renting an office space. I built up enough where I could rent an office space for a year, so if we just go under and I make no money whatsoever, I've got enough in the bank to pay for the office for at least a year.
We also got a job designing a little short segment (at the time) for the new Cosmos series. It was a three to four minute little short film about ancient Mesopotamia and how they basically went away because of drought.
Frame from the Ancient Mesopotamia shot on the Cosmos.
Mack:
What's really funny to me about this is even just how cavalier you were about how it came up, right? You're pitching your studio and you're not getting responses or anything, and then Paws of Fury is like, "Yeah, sure." Did it catch you off-guard too, since that was the first one where you just like, "Oh, shit. Okay, cool. I guess this is happening."?
Kevin:
Yeah. I was just completely just winging it. I didn't know. I don't think I ever even put together a full budget for it or anything. They wanted to know how much it would cost per week, and I just asked everyone what their rates were and added it up, and then added 10% to that or something, and was like, "I guess this is our rate," and they're like, "Okay." Then that 10% over the course of a year, added up to enough for me to rent a studio, so I was pretty proud of that.
Mack:
Amazing!
Kevin:
We don't do stuff that way anymore. It's been a process like that. There was no one around to show me how to do any of that part of it, any of the business management. That was one aspect where I never had a role model, for better or for worse, who could bring me in and show me, "This is how you run a studio."That was just completely trial and error. It feels like to this day, it's still trial and error sometimes. You still keep finding these situations where it's like, "Wow, we've never done that before." These things just come up. It just gets more and more complicated as you get into it, from running just a small design production, to working on a Netflix series or whatever it is. Things just get a lot more complicated. We try to ask questions and we make a lot of mistakes. I don't know. We're still going somehow.
Mack:
You got Chromosphere. It launches. Was there much of a plan with it initially? Had you given that much thought? Or was it still just seeing what developed ultimately?
Kevin:
That period was really tough. There were a bunch of people I called up for advice around that time. I remember one of them was Ken Duncan, who's a veteran Disney animator, who has his own studio in Pasadena called Duncan Studios. I guess I shouldn't have said there were no role models, because just not where I was actually working with them and day-to-day seeing what was happening, but Ken was very open. We went to lunch and he told me about his experiences and was very clear. I just had lunch with them a few weeks back and caught up again, because we've kept in touch over the years. And I was like, "Man, some of the stuff you told me at that first lunch we had, I still think about it all the time."
It was just things like, "What are you going to do if it gets down to it where you just can't pay the bills or something?" I was like, "I don't really know." He was like, "I've been through some hard times." He told me that he started a studio in 2007 right before the big financial crisis. Suddenly, everything was in turmoil and he was like, "It was pretty dark." He was like, "It's a whole different world, having that responsibility on your shoulders."
I also met up with Chris Prynoski and Ben Kalina from Titmouse, and they told me their experiences. I think the main thing I was asking them was, "How do you know when it's real?" From the point where you have an idea to start a studio and even when you rent a place, how do you know it's finally going to just keep going?" They were like, "I don't know." They just had that look in their eyes that now I recognize. Every year I'm so thankful that it's still going. They were making a thing of it that I've been a full-time employee of Chromosphere since 2016. It's my main thing. I don't have to do anything else. I never thought that would be a reality.
Mack:
I think it just shows that maybe we're all in it together, but we're also trying to work it out ourselves.
Kevin:
It was also funny about catching up with Ken Duncan again. We've talked twice I think, during the pandemic. He was like, "Remember when I told you about how stuff gets crazy?," and I was like, "Yeah," because now we're both in it simultaneously. A lot of people I talked to at big studios seem like they've moved past it, but running a small studio through the pandemic was ... it got hairy. I felt like I experienced what Ken had warned me was going to happen at some point. Our entire business model just basically completely changed during the pandemic, because so many TV productions shut down and TV work had become a real backbone of our studio leading up to the pandemic.
We finished up the shows we were working on before the Pandemic in the first six to nine months or whatever, and then never got another TV show after that. I kept thinking it was just going to come back, and it just never did. We had to pivot completely, 180 degrees, to just all this other stuff that we're doing now, which has been really fun and everything, but there were those moments where I was like, "I don't know what we're going to do." I felt like I was flying an airplane where you see the fuel running out and you see the ground approaching and you're just like, "I don't know if we're going to make it."
Mack:
What did you do?
Kevin:
We looked at everything we possibly could. We called up everyone we'd ever worked with. The things that came out of it that were real savior moments for us, were starting to work with Unreal and Epic. We started applying for and getting these mega grants from them to do work in real time. We started creating short films with the Unreal Engine, which started to financially support us for a good while, and then just started picking up any work we could. It was doing some animations for social media, doing some 3D model designs for this game or whatever. There's been no pattern to it, but also it's been all good. It's all been very fun, smaller stuff, documentary animation, just things like that. We still do development work for some people, but it's primarily been the Unreal stuff, and then pairing that with just adding up all these small projects to make up the rest of it, essentially.
Frame from Mall Stories - a documentary style short.
Mack:
Well, it's interesting because I remember following y'all's work when it first started coming out because it looked really good. I will say that it feels like you've got way more range now, and maybe than you ever had before, just through the experience of doing all these different things. It has to make you a bit excited about the future, because I'm sure when you started the company, you had this vision of this little niche that you were going to fill. It's blossomed into becoming more than that. I'd love to hear some of your ideas on where are you guys now, staff wise, what size are you and have you thought, I don't know, what's next for Chromosphere as we look ahead over the next 10 years or so?
Kevin:
We're a lot smaller now. Before the Pandemic, I think we were around 30 or so, and now we're around 10 or 12 most of the time. The studio rebalanced itself, because we got a lot bigger, because we had had a huge design team to work on all the shows that we were doing. Now, it's this very small team, but we have a lead in every area we need, for 3D, or animation, or design or whatever. It's funny. It feels like just back to the start again. In some ways it's a comfortable spot for me to be in, because it is like I've been through this before. I remember when we first started the studio and it was just a couple of us and we were just trying out new stuff.
In a lot of ways, the stuff that we're doing in Unreal feels like that moment when I first saw Stéphane comp that little poster for me a long time ago. It's this whole new way of working that I've gotten so excited about, just creating things in real time and being really experimental with it. It's already led to new stuff. We did the opening titles for the Beavis and Butt-head movie that came out last year. We did that all in Unreal.
Mack:
I had no idea.
Kevin:
We never would've known that if we hadn't gotten into this situation in the pandemic and found our way to Unreal, and then this strange job comes up out of nowhere and we're like, "We could do that. We know Unreal." We're pushing really hard into more of our original projects. We're pushing hard into educational based projects. We've started applying for grants, like federal grants and educational space for projects we're developing. We've learned a lot about that during the pandemic too. We're working with educators and people to figure out how we can use art, just for better purposes.
It's become a huge passion of ours in the studio. Everyone feels very strongly about it. We want to find a way to use what we're doing for education in some way. We've made that a big initiative at the studio. We're just exploring everything. We're looking at creating 3D assets to sell in the Unreal marketplace, so other people can build things with our stuff. It's honestly just super fun. It's so new again, which is just great. We never wanted to get to a place where we're just a factory, just churning things out and anything like that. All these circumstances have forced us into a place where everything is just new again.
Mack:
Kevin, this was fantastic, and super excited about your talk this summer. Have a good weekend, and we'll be in touch soon..
Kevin:
Yeah, you too. See you guys.