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Paul Taylor has a way of explaining how the life of a Blur employee can be furiously busy on the one hand, vitally competitive and creative on the other.
“Blur's main goal is to create our own feature films and the short film format is a great way for us to write, direct and work out production pipeline issues on our own stories. Each year we have a call for entries. Every employee can enter as many ideas as they want in any format they want. Some people write outlines, some draw storyboards, others write full scripts. Then the CG supervisors vote on the submissions and we announce a winner. The entries then get put in one or both of these categories: Sci-Fi/Action/Fantasy and Comedy/Cartoony. This is our fourth year making shorts and each year the ideas get better and the competition gets stiffer! I personally submitted four scripts but I felt that ‘In The Rough' was the strongest.“
Paul Taylor graduated from the Academy of Art College in San Francisco and began his career as a 3D animator and art director with game developer Amazing Media. He later worked as a contract animator for Time Warner, Microsoft, 3DO and other companies. In 1996, Paul started BigWig Productions, a multi-media game company, then Spankhole Productions, which specialized in game cinematics. “When my partner and I dissolved Spankhole, Tim Miller asked me to join Blur. And I've been here for nearly five years now.“
Paul Taylor is now a Director and CG Supervisor at Blur Studio with an emphasis on writing, character development, layout and editing. Since joining the company in 2000, he's worked on and supervised a wide variety of projects, from music videos, game cinematics, commercials, ride films to short and feature films. His credits include the games ‘Return to Castle Wolfenstein' and ‘Blood Rayne', the 70mm stereo ride film ‘SpongeBob SquarePants-3D' and the broadcast network image campaign for Kid's WB. He also served as layout and editorial supervisor for a series of animated shorts that Blur produced for the best-selling Disney DVD release ‘Mickey's Twice Upon a Christmas'. It's got all of the classic Disney characters in 3D for the first time. Right now, Taylor is working on development for Blur's foray into feature films. “I'm reading a lot of potential feature scripts“, says Taylor, “as well as talking to folks about a possible ‘In the Rough feature'. I'm also working on three different game cinematic teasers for E3. This is a busy time of the year for Blur because we do so many game cinematics.“ |
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| Tim Miller, Blur's co-founder and Creative Director, and Taylor, co-directed ‘Aunt Luisa', the studio's first animated short, which was short-listed for an Academy Award nomination in 2002. “At the time we weren't even considering entering it for any awards. We just had a bit of down time and Tim had this story idea he wrote in college. But then our Director of Large Format, otherwise known as ride films, Yas Takata said. ‘Hey, you guys should enter this into the Oscar race'. It just so happens that Yas is an Academy member so he's really the one that opened our eyes to this whole new world. And we're glad he did because ‘Gopher Broke', the other short we produced along with ‘In the Rough', got a nomination!“ |
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