Former Pixar animator David Tart, far right, works with Lauren Grinde, 12, left, and Hutch Quinlan, 11, right, in his Rocky Mountain Animation Labs, in the basement of the Smiley Building, last Thursday. Tate offers regular classes in the state-of-the-art studio on cut-out, stop motion and other tricks of the animation trade./Photo by Jennaye Derge

Drawing on creativity

Former Pixar animator sets up shop in Durango

by Ted Holteen

I never cease to be amazed at the number of people in this town who are profoundly more interesting than myself. To further my own self-deprecation, I choose to interview them and write about them while working hard to mask my own jealously and feelings of inadequacy.

And so this week we meet David Tart, another guy who has lived a fascinating life and who now spends much of his time in a basement in Durango. But it’s a really cool basement.

Tart has converted an underground space in the Smiley Building into the home base for Rocky Mountain Animation Labs, where students old and young can learn to be the next Matt Groening or Walt Disney. Tart may not have achieved such iconic status in his profession, but as one of the first animators at Pixar Studios in the early 1990s, his place in the medium’s history is secure. And so is his future, which has allowed him to open a small but extremely technologically advanced school in a place like Durango.

“In my career I’ve done all I want, so I’m in this position to invest some money to start this school,” Tart said earlier this month in between classes in his studio.

The classroom consists of eight high-end iMac computers, each with an accompanying cubicle and HD camera, two vertical green screens and a dry-erase board surface. With industry-standard software, students learn traditional animation methods before moving on to more specialized animation like cut-out, stop motion and pixelation. It was a lesson he learned from Pixar co-founder John Lasseter while he was still a student at San Francisco State University.

“He said ‘study traditional animation, acting and comedy,’” Tart recalled of his soon-to-be mentor. “Everyone else was talking about writing code and other tech stuff, but I bought into his idea and I started studying traditional art and animation. And that worked out very well – a year after I graduated, I was working at Pixar.”

That was a life-changing job, to say the least. Tart was an animator on such modern classics as “Toy Story,” “Toy Story 2,” “Finding Nemo” and “Monsters, Inc.” That doesn’t mean that every scene you see is Tart’s work; just like the old days, modern animation is a team effort, with many different animators working on each film. Tart said that despite modern technology that relies much less on freehand drawing, it still typically takes up to a week to produce just 20 seconds of on-screen action.

“None of the software has saved any time,” Tart said, adding that most of the benefit of computer animation is continuity of images, sound and motion.

After a slew of early successes established Tart’s status in his profession, he left Pixar for Blue Sky Studios, where he worked on “Robots,” among other projects, and later moved to Dallas where he got his first job as animation director on “The Ant Bully.” It’s one of two hats Tart wore during his professional career. As animator, he worked on individual assignments; as director, it was his job to wrangle as many as 20 animators to work together using each others’ strengths to create the best possible product.

A quick aside – if you have the same chicken-or-egg question as I did about animated films, you may be surprised to find that the vocal recordings always precede the visuals. So, Tom Hanks would lay down his voice, maybe in his underwear while lounging in a Burbank mansion, then Tart and his ilk would take it from there.

“I listen carefully over and over to the dialog,” he said. “We listen for major accents and emphasis and how to represent postures, gestures and facial expressions. Then we go into a room and actually act it out ourselves with a video camera and create that performance. We’re responsible for all the non-verbal communication like blinking and gestures. So it turns out about 30 people starred as Woody.”

As an animation director, it’s Tart’s job to decide who is the best at each task – animation, storyboards, backgrounds, dialog, etc.  Those are the basics of animation, and that’s what Tart wants to pass on to the next generation of artists. While clearly a technophile himself, he still holds true to the lesson he learned from Lasseter all those years ago. He believes that the ever-emerging and changing technologies are just tools, and many would-be animators never get to perfect their craft because they’re too caught up in keeping up with the latest gadgetry.

“That leads into this school,” Tart said. “I want to teach traditional animation techniques like drawing and stop-motion, because once you learn that, the technology is just a tool. Technology keeps throwing a wrench into a pretty stable process.”

Education is nothing new for Tart, either. His resume also includes a seven-year stint in Denmark, where he worked with Morten Thorning to create and grow The Animation Workshop. The institution started as a one-room schoolhouse and is now among the most revered schools of animation in the world.

“I figured if Morgan Thorning can create a place like that in an isolated part of Denmark, I can do it here.”

And after a globetrotting career that saw him work in Germany, Mexico and Australia, among many others, Tart seems to have found a home – for now, anyway. His wife earned her Ph.D. in Albuquerque, and a job at the Durango V.A. clinic introduced the couple to this part of the world. Like so many, they decided to stay. Looking out the basement window north to the San Juan Mountains, it’s easy to see why.

“It’s beautiful here,” Tart said.

The fall classes at Rocky Mountain Animation Labs are full, but the next sessions start up again in January. It’s not exactly cheap at between $425-$475, but that includes three months of intensive instruction with the aforementioned state-of-the-art technology. Most of Tart’s students are school-aged kids and young adults, but I can say firsthand that what he teaches is just as desirable for grown-ups as well. He’ll have several one-day seminars before the January classes teaching basic computer animation, cut-out animation, stop motion and pixelation. He also offers one-on-one sessions and will hold destination summer camps next year. It’s a unique educational experience not only in Durango, but anywhere else for that matter.

“I hope people find us, and I can introduce as many as possible to this art form,” Tart said.

Ted Holteen is always on the lookout for the good people in Durango. Help him – egholteen@yahoo.com.