GW: So tell us a little about yourself?

DT: My name is Derrick Thompson, I am a story artist here at Pixar. I have worked for over 14 years in videogames, comic books, feature films and illustration. While I am currently at Pixar, I have worked for a number of other studios and clients including Dark Horse Comics, Rhythm and Hues, Electronic Arts, Giant Killer Robots and a number of smaller boutique type studios. I have freelanced for a number of years but I also have been a fulltime employee. For the last 3 years I have been working on one film here at Pixar and that is Wall.E which is coming out this summer.

GW: As far as being an artist, was there a spark of inspiration early on? If so, how much of a roll did school play?

DT: I started drawing seriously at a very young age. By serious I mean I drew a lot and often because I enjoyed it so much. I would draw monsters and dinosaurs voraciously and I was really a little kid, 5 or 6. When I was 7 years old my Mom’s boyfriend at the time helped me assemble all of my monsters into my first little self published monster collection which we sold to friends and relatives. We sold like 50 copies. So that was pretty awesome. I just drew because I loved it and all throughout high school I developed an interest in comic books and the notion of being a comic book artists started to cross my mind. I got into Heavy Metal magazine and Mobius and Corben and Druitte and a lot of the Marvel stuff got interesting as I got older. I thought I would be a comic book artist, but I didn’t think I was a good enough artist. I was midway through High School when I got the Marvel Comics Try Out book and I just choked and I started getting frustrated thinking I would never be able to get good enough to do comics. So towards the end of High School I started taking art classes for the first time in my life. My High School art teacher helped get me focused on the idea of going to art school. It just never occurred to me that I could study and train and get better at what I did. So, the last few years of high school I was very focused on getting into art school and developing a portfolio. I got into the Otis Parsons art school and got a bunch of scholarships, some were based on my portfolio and some were financial, but the combination made it possible to go. So I went to Art School and that is when becoming a professional artist really began to get in focus. Now, I had wanted to do comics so in my junior year I got my first comic work penciling a Predator miniseries comic for Dark Horse Comics. I had to decide if I wanted to stay in Art School or drop out and do comics. With the blessings of the college I was able to stay in art school, so I was actually working fulltime as a penciller my Jr. and Sr. year in college and I came out with a BFA in illustration and launched my comic book career while I was still in college.

GW: Why Comics? Were you so passionate about comics that it was all you wanted to do, or did you see it as the only outlet for an artists to do a job drawing monsters and characters?

DT: Interestingly one of the things that attracted me to comics was the parallel to film language. I always loved films and animation as a kid and was a pretty big film buff. At a very young age my Mom would take me to the art house cinema. The art house cinema would not just play Fellini movies, they would play Godzilla movies too so I saw a pretty broad spectrum at a young age. So, I would love movies and I would love comics. It took a while to make the connection but really comics were the first American Medium that juxtaposed words and images to tell a story. So much of film language is using imagery and language to tell a story. So it was a natural area of interest for me because, not only did I like superheroes, but I also liked the monster or aliens that would be in the comic book. The actual language of comic book storytelling was very appealing. I liked drawing all the stuff, but it wasn’t until I went to art school and gained the broad drawing background that I was able to employ all those techniques and get into the comic book storytelling. Now, interestingly enough, the comic book work started to dry up in the early 90's after I graduated. It was very time consuming and it did not pay very well and it was hard to sustain as a full time career. So I got into video games and from there film work and film development because of my comic book background. So the comic book work I did served as a springboard to get my first gigs doing film storyboarding and conceptual art and creature designing.

GW: So did you jump into film as a storyboard artist?

DT: No, actually my first videogame design job was for visual development. It was character design and environment design but also coupled with that was key frame illustration and scenes. So I did a bunch of key paintings as well as character design and development. By the time I was hired at ILM, I was cultivating a number of skill sets, I was 23 and I got hired with a split job. I did half my time doing storyboards for the Spawn feature film and then the other half in the art department there doing creature design and as a storyboard artist on Men in Black.

GW: Was that a position you applied for? Or did it happen to fall on your plate?

DT: Well I sort of thought it out. I moved to the Bay Area and I did not even know that Lucasfilm was even up here at the time. I was searching for work and a friend of my father’s suggested I attend a series of lectures by ILM people and that maybe there were some job opportunities there. I was struggling for work and the Rhythm and Hues stuff dried up. There was no comic book work. I had tried to get an agent, but it didn't really come together. So I went to these lectures and it turns out that I talked to somebody about submitting a portfolio. I submitted my portfolio and I also found out that Doug Chang was the big-time designer and was on the way to being the design director of Star Wars. He was going to be talking a few weeks ahead of the lecture I attended and it turned out that Doug Chang had worked for my bosses at Rhythm and Hues. So they were saying you should try and meet Doug and maybe he can help you out. Anyway I found out who to send my portfolio into and it was this guy Mark Moore. I didn’t hear anything for weeks and it turned out the Doug Chang lecture was sold out for weeks. But the lady that ran the cultural center they were doing it said that so long as I was willing to come early and set up chairs and strike the chairs afterwards I could possibly meet Doug earlier. So I went, set up chairs, met Doug, he was really nice, I met his wife and she was really sweet and I showed him my stuff and said that we had mutual friends. He had said that they had already staffed up for the episode one art department and there was not much he could do but suggested maybe I should talk to this guy Mark Moore who was lecturing the same night. It turns out this was the same person I had sent my portfolio to the weeks before and did not even know that he was going to be lecturing. So, to make a long story longer I actually met Mark and I had my portfolio with me and he was like "Wow your stuff is really great, I would have remembered this if I had seen it. Let me go back to the studio to take a look." And sure enough the next day he called me and set up a job interview, I had the interview and I had a fulltime job a week later. So it was Spawn and Men in Black. Then I worked fulltime in the ILM art department as a creature designer and concept illustrator for 5 years and I worked on a ton of projects. Some that got made, some that did not. I left to go freelance for a few years, but still maintained a good relationship with them. I decided that I needed to have other job experiences outside the studio, so I freelanced for 5 years before I came to Pixar.

GW: You worked on Star Wars Episode 3, any memorable moments when you were working on that?

DT: OK basically the early days of Episode 3 George originally wanted to open the movie with a montage of the clone wars happening on different worlds and we started to attack it by making a bunch of random aliens. But then with the refinement of that Iain McCaig struck on a really smart idea which was looking at the cantina scene from the original Star Wars and assuming the aliens in the cantina were veterans of the clone wars. So we started taking out cues from that scene and built up off of that and presented them to George. So, I did a whole bunch of scenes and scenarios of the clone wars that touched on the cantina veterans. It was a really natural circular thing and George responded really well to it because it was anchored in a world that was that movies that he made but was still giving the audience something they had never seen before. It was like having that saturation of genre fueled material from childhood has really helped me on all kinds of projects. Certainly at ILM we would navigate and remind ourselves what we liked when it came time to designing a certain kind of creature for an upcoming project. Naturally when you are beginning designs for a film you want to forge new territory. But I have found it is necessary to know what has come before? What has worked well? What hasn't worked well? And I have worked with a number of directors with varying philosophies about that. Some directors don't even want to get near the material that is out there that might touch on what they are working on so they don't get influenced in any way possible. But for me I have always been a fan of knowing what is out there and using that as a reminder of where NOT to go. A lot of what being a concept artist was was trying to figure out what is fresh when this stuff has been done and done to death. Over and over and over again. How do you make things fresh besides just doing things in CG? What makes that alien feel really alien and whatever the prop might be. We worked on so many types of movies there that you have to stay frosty and be aware of the whole time the history. You know, I think that some people that get into design don't relish in that back-story reference phase. But I love that stuff, I really enjoy it.

GW: When creating your creatures how do you avoid clichés? Where you find inspiration?

DT: I am all for using life as a reference. I have developed a strong discipline of life, drawing since HS and art school. What I tried to do in my reference besides the obvious anatomy, mechanics, perspectives is that I have tried to look at forms in nature and forms that are built and try and find things that may not be too obvious. When I was in Japan, for example, the way that the public works was designed. The transistors, fuse boxes things as they were designed in ordinary space that if you looked at and said "if that was a monster what would that look like?" And I would start to develop a means to reevaluate and look at them in a "different lenses".

GW: With a character designer you have anatomy, with a storyboard artist how do you visualize boards?

DT: In storyboarding there are always references in film and comics and ideas and inspirations as to how to stage shots, but when it comes down to two people talking in a room and how are you going to shoot it there are so many ways you can slice that. So you try and take a cue from the weight of the story as it's being told and see if that gives you any insight into choices you might make with the camera and with the lighting or the stage. It's a really case by case thing that I feel it is always to the advantage of the artist / designer to allow themselves to be impacted by a whole range of inspiration. I read all the time, write all the time so I try and get literary story references and look at comics, watch animation, I watch films, I go to plays, I go on hikes through nature, I travel, I try and look at everything even if it is super mundane. And that does not mean anything can beautiful, but certainly if you allow yourself to find inspiration in things that might not seem like an inspiration, you might come across things. One of the things I found when in art school doing illustration and designing was that I got to thinking there were certain limitations as to what the brain of a human being is capable of in conveying design. That we have been built on a culture of representation of things and there is an art history that exists and all of us are looking at the same pool. How do you break out of that pool of the same ideas? That is when I started striking on this idea in a whole series of paintings and monsters where I would try and find material like wood or rusted metal or sheets of tile and start throwing paint down and in particular I would look for pieces of wood that would have interesting shapes or variations or imperfection in them and use those as my visual springboard. I go to thinking that the more I consciously I think that as an intellectual or in a hopefully more intelligent form thinking of what to design, the more I am limiting my imagination. However, if I allow my imagination to strip that objective mind and look at something with an abstract form and let the form of wood or the rock or the tile or whatever through I can allow it to come to me. Suddenly I find that I am tapping into a combination of things I could not think up if I sat in a room and start drawing on paper. So this idea of perception really started sinking in and like I was saying earlier was looking at objects in a different way it was that shift in perception. That helped me start to break through in design. I know a great mantra from art school. "You don't go to art school to learn how to draw. You go to art school to learn how to see". And it is that notion that once you shift perception everything else dials in a different way. I think that is one of the keys to coming up with stuff that is fresh and different and original.

GW: Derrick thanks for talking to us today.

DT: Thank you.

Derek Thompson - For More information about Derek's work visit: www.derekmonster.com

*All images courtesy of Derek Thompson.