Photo by Sai Sampath
Written by Sai Sampath
Pixar Animation Studios, one of the leading animation studios, presented at SCAD Tuesday, Jan 13, to talk to interested students about a career at their company.
This year, three representatives came to give a presentation and interview SCAD students for internships at Trustees Theater.
“There are three feature films that we do have coming out in the next couple of years,” said University Relations and Program Lead (HR) Ryan Howe. “We’ve got ‘Inside Out,’ which is the next feature film scheduled to released June 19; ‘The Big Dinosaur,’ which will be out in November and then ‘Finding Dory,’ which will be the sequel to ‘Finding Nemo.’”
Howe opened the presentation with the various opportunities for students and graduates. He mentioned programs such as internships and career paths at Pixar. These included classroom-based internships, production-based internships, business operation internships and residency.
For classroom internships, undergraduates from the sophomore to senior level take classes at the studios with professionals. Production internships allow students to work on feature films during the live productions. The business internship deals with marketing, operation and so forth. The residency program is only for graduates who are hired for a project for two years; those in the program could conceivably go on to be hired as part of Pixar’s permanent staff.
All the internships are fully paid and interns are able to choose the location to work at. Some of the benefits, as stated by Howe, are free movie screenings, a cereal bar and a 24-hour gym.
“We even have a photography club,” said Neil Helm, animator and SCAD alum that graduated in 2008, after expressing his interest in photography as a hobby to clear his mind from work.
“We even have like five or six bands, who just get together and jam,” said Helm.
Helm described his journey to Pixar through one of the residency programs and showed his work in “Toy Story 3,” which gave him a start in his career after animating a complicated octopus. He mentioned that after his job with the octopus, he was promoted to an animator position from being a fix animator.
It was mentioned that filmmakers, cinematographers, editors and many others who work on live action films see a new way through the layout part of the timeline; where shots, camera angles, sets, props and other factors were decided.
“I think what Pixar wanted from me was someone who is filmmaker, someone who knew how to tell stories to an audience, and somebody who understood how to structure a scene, how to design a shot so that it was affected,” said Adam Habib, a camera and staging artist.
The presentation ended with a Q&A session. Recurring questions touched on how to have a personalized cover letter to stand out, how to choose work for a portfolio and any other interesting jobs or volunteer work to include in a resume that would help during interviewers. At the end they gave out free posters for “Inside Out” and information on various job and internship offers.
For more information on applying, visit www.pixar.com/careers.
