Jeremy Engleman has a hard time describing his occupation at cocktail parties.
Engleman works as a surfacer, an animation specialist who helps make CG-based cartoons a reality.
The next time you see the slick vehicles in “Cars,” or the waving blades of grass in “Madagascar,” you can thank a surfacer.
His latest project is “Monsters vs. Aliens,” the family friendly feature about a group of misfit creatures assigned to turn back an alien invasion.
To help make “Monsters vs. Aliens,” he drew inspiration from classic movie monsters as well as less familiar material.
“It’s funny. Sometimes, when you’re looking for a reference it can take you down different roads than you expected,“ he says.
His next project involves animated dragons, but he’s been spending time studying not just lizards but car tires and their stubby tread.
“They have a certain quality and dirtiness,” he explains.
Some of his assignments for “Monsters” seemed like a snap. How hard could it be to create a painted brick interior for a holding cell, he asked himself? But actually creating it became a burden. Yet imagining the look and feel of an alien spacecraft’s metallic surfaces, for which there are no sources to check on, proved much easier.
A few repeating elements in today’s animated features are always tough to design, like a character’s hair or a field of flowing grass. And even if he nails the assignment, the next design team can make it look totally different.
“You do your work, and then you hand it off to the people who light it,” he says. “We always have a little butting heads with ‘lighters.’ They’re next in line to inherent your work.”
Engleman didn’t set his sights on surfacing as a young art student. He was studying at the University of Colorado taking classes in art and photography, but he began gravitating toward computers even though “they didn’t have any,” he says with a laugh.
The emerging computer animation field caught his interest. He didn’t consider himself a great artist, photographer or sculptor, but this type of animation required just enough skill in all three to intrigue him. His big break came with “Riven,” a popular video game he helped create.
“It had such a cinematic style. It even holds up now,” he says, looking back. “That’s what got me into it, really looking at how rich and lush the actual world is.”
Today, Engleman teaches at Gnoman Workshop in Hollywood when he’s not creating Monsters, Aliens or dragons.
And while each movie project gives him the chance to work on smarter, faster computers, it doesn’t mean less work for him.
“As your capability increases, the demand also increases. They just want more,” he says.
(Photo: A massive catapiller rushes to defend the USA against invaders in “Monsters vs. Aliens.”)
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