What drew artist Kevin Koch to the world of animation was a pencil. What has kept him in the business is a digital tablet.
Like dozens of animators who work for movie studio DreamWorks SKG, Koch spent nearly a decade honing his pencil-on-paper artistic skills: turning a curved line into a straining back, blurring colors to bring a subtle blush to a woman's cheeks, transforming a flat drawing into a living, breathing creature.
Then, this year, Koch's managers at DreamWorks sat down and gave him the news: The studio, facing a steady box-office decline for its old-fashioned two-dimensional animated films, was making a big push into the new territory of digital animation.
Computer animation -- An article and photo caption in Sunday's Business section about 2D animators being retrained as 3D computer animators misspelled the surname of a drawing instructor at Sony Pictures Imageworks. His name is Karl Gnauss, not Guass.
Put down the pencil, his bosses said, and let us retrain you to use a software palette. Otherwise, you'll have to leave.
As president of the local chapter of the union representing animators, Koch knew it was a choice thousands of other artists in California would have to make. With 2D animators facing waves of layoffs as their jobs move overseas, there is only one answer.
"You retrain in 3D," Koch said. "If you've kept your eye on the horizon, it's been pretty clear that this was coming."
Computer-generated, or CG, animated films are the toast of today's Hollywood. George Lucas recently announced the creation of Lucasfilm Animation to produce computer-animated features. Sony Pictures Animation has six CG films in development.
DreamWorks has four in its pipeline, including the sequel to the 2001 sleeper hit "Shrek" and the mob-themed comedy "Sharkslayer," which features a cast of fish. Of the 15 animators working on "Shrek 2," all but two have a background in traditional, non-digital animation. Nearly all of the 40 artists working on "Sharkslayer" have been retrained from 2D.
Even Walt Disney Co., the studio that has led the way in hand-drawn animation for nearly a century, is embracing computers. Although some 2D feature-film projects are in the works, artists at Disney's animation headquarters in Burbank speak nervously of drafting tables being put into storage, to be replaced by Linux machines.
Employees point to a staff meeting this spring, where the president of the animation division, David Stainton, proclaimed that the future would be digital and that the more than 500 animators would have to be retrained to work on computers.
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