We follow animator Matt Logue on his path to becoming an animation supervisor on
“The Incredible Hulk”.
CGSociety :: Artist Profile
9 September 2008, By Barbara Robertson
When you think about the career path that an animator who worked on “Godzilla,” “Lord of the Rings,” “Happy Feet,” and “The Incredible Hulk” might have taken, you probably wouldn’t consider starting with transportation design. But, animator Matt Logue detoured onto that road before winding his way to a successful career in visual effects. So, how did he end up at Tippett Studio, Weta and Rhythm & Hues? He had a little help from his grandmother and a Star Wars modeler.
Raised in Happy Valley, California, which he describes as the kind of town people drive through on their way to Oregon, Logue had no access in grade school to training in art or animation. And, he was no better off in high school in nearby Eureka, a larger town where his schoolteacher parents moved the family later. But, this is where his grandmother enters the picture.
“She was a jazz organist who had performed in show business when my Mom was young,” he says. “She always encouraged us to do art, whether that was music or drawing or whatever.” Retired by then, and a church organist who was as poor as the proverbial church mouse, she nonetheless paid an artist to come to Logue’s house three times a week to teach him to draw.
“Art was such a huge thing to her,” Logue says, noting that she lived long enough to follow his career. “She was very happy about that.”
The drawing skills Logue gained with her help came in handy when he entered school at San Jose State University as a transportation design major. And, he might have continued down that road were it not for his professor. “He told us that if we weren’t one of the top two people in the class, we’d end up designing rear view mirrors and speedometers for the next 10 years,” Logue says.
Fortunately, his model-making instructor, Peter Ronzani, who had been an armature designer for “Return of the Jedi,” steered him in another direction. “He’d teach us about vacuum forming and then bring in a helmet from ‘Jedi’,” Logue says. “Or, he’d talk about surfboard foam and bring in a speeder bike model. It was the coolest thing in the world. He planted the seed for me to work on films.”
As a result, Logue switched his major to photography, but soon decided that was too static a medium, and switched schools, to San Francisco State. “It was the nearest school with a film program,” Logue says. And that’s when he discovered animation.
“With the film classes, you were never in the film unless you are an actor,” he says. “And the payoff comes so much later. But in animation, that’s you up on the screen and it’s instant gratification. That’s when I changed my major to animation.”
Animation as instant gratification?
He was told about animators describing the process of making an animated film as akin to cutting a lawn with nail scissors, but Logue wouldn’t have any of it. Of course, he was working with computer animation, not hand-drawn animation: SF State had just started its computer animation program and Logue realized, to his surprise, that he was good at it.
