Those who stay through the closing credits might spot a south Louisiana family name among those who created the “Garfield” movie.
Marrero native David M. Breaux Jr. was one of the animators for the lead character.
This is Breaux’s first feature film, but the 1990 John Ehret High School graduate has animated video games and left his mark on local landmarks as a sculptor. Before heading to the West Coast, Breaux spent a couple of summers working with Kern Sculpture Co., for whom he worked on three-dimensional Carnival characters, and Studio 3, for which he created sculptures for Harrah’s New Orleans Casino.
Breaux was among the 10 original animators to work on the “Garfield” movie for Rhythm & Hues Studios. Another 41 animators would eventually join the project when they completed “Scooby Doo 2,” he said.
The cat character was animated by more than 400 shots, about 24 created by Breaux, he said.
“Any given shot can take from a week or two to a couple of months to complete,” he said. “There is a lot of give and take with the director.”
An animator is usually working on five or six shots at a time, Breaux said.
Breaux and other animators are taking a break before heading back to Rhythm & Hues in August to work on an animated adaptation of the C.S. Lewis tale “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.” The movie, which Breaux described as a “kids’ version of ‘Lord of the Rings,’ ” is scheduled for a December 2005 release.
Breaux began drawing and creating three-dimensional figures from Play-Doh as a child. His parents eventually bought him a Commodore 64 computer, and he enjoyed a drawing software application on it.
At Ehret, he studied art appreciation, participated in the Air Force JROTC and considered a military career. After graduation, the arts won out, and Breaux received a bachelor’s degree in fine arts with a concentration in illustration at the Columbus College of Art and Design in Ohio.
Most of today’s animated features are created with computer-generated animation, which differs from hand-drawn animation, Breaux said. Animators on the “Garfield” movie attended a three-dimensional anatomy class at the University of California at Los Angeles, he said, to learn body mechanics.
Because computer animation starts with a skeletal figure, it is harder to distort than hand-drawn figures are, Breaux said.
By Johanna Schindler
