Just drawing for fun, a doodle can turn into just about anything. I can’t think of anything more relaxing, than just drawing for the sake of drawing! It is a healthy break from the tedium of animation.

As I began to mature as an artist, both as an animator and a musician, I began to learn about the similarities between what makes good music and good animation work well. Tempo, timing, anticipation, composition, dynamics, color, weight, overlapping timing, follow-through, the spaces in between the key moments and the importance of economy — as in not playing too many notes and not over-animating. Precisely the same principles apply to both of these art forms, as well as applying to sculpting, painting, print making or any other of the fine arts.

Slowly I began to realize that every time I played music, I was honing the exact same skills that make a good animator. Raising my consciousness to the importance of sound, and in particular, the spaces in between the sounds, helped me to approach each drawing I did with newfound respect and sensitivity. Not to mention, the payoff of hearing one’s music immediately, and thus breaking the doldrums of animating day in and day out for over a year before seeing the results in color on the big screen with an accompanying soundtrack.

I have carried this knowledge into every creative endeavor in my life, and it broadens with every new art form that dabble with. Writing, too, involves tempo, theme, careful repetition, building tension up to a climax, and following through with some kind of resolution, as all good stories should, if they are to drive an animated film effectively. Although I am relatively new to the writing profession, and may not always hit the mark I am aiming for, I find myself trying to achieve much the same thing I do when I am writing a song, or animating a scene in a film. Pull the reader/viewer in, using the universal principles of entertainment, and take them on a compelling ride with a satisfying payoff in the end.

I designed an elaborate CD cover with liner notes for an album I produced independently in 1996. This was one of the “outtake” designs for the inside cover.

Photography also, has become a very important part of my creative life, and nowhere are the principles of artistic entertainment more evident.

Photography involves composition, dynamics, positive and negative space leading the viewer’s eye to the key point of interest and then pulling it away into the details around it. All of the aspects of a good photograph help me to draw and make music with greater sense of the full creative process. Diving into underwater photography in tropical coral reefs, I found the creative juices to really start flowing, and, when Finding Nemo hit the theaters, I was astounded by the wonderful stylizations of the magic of the coral reef that had so hypnotized me and informed my creative life.

Surely a great deal of underwater photography was referenced to bring those brilliant backgrounds and characters to life, as is clearly illustrated in the fantastic Art of Finding Nemo book. And so scuba diving photographers ultimately played quite an important role in the visualization of that film. Just a couple of years ago, one of my animation students, upon finding my website of http://www.joegilland.com/hawaiiscuba.html " target="">underwater photographs, asked for my permission to use then as backgrounds in her final student film project. I was delighted, of course, and the results were greatly satisfying. I sure never gave it a thought when I was taking the photographs, but there you go, all creative processes inevitably tie in together.

Currently, I am writing and illustrating a book about animation, a sneak preview of which appeared here last month. Talk about an exercise in composition, tempo and design! The chapter that was kindly printed here by the folks at AWN, was minus about 60 illustrations, and blending and laying out the text along with the countless illustrations, has been an incredible learning experience for me, with all my creative energies coming together at once. It is like a song, or a film or a stand-alone sculpture. The spaces between the lines, are as important as the content itself, a lesson we must all learn in animation to thoroughly involve the viewer, drawing them in, making them wait, building up the scene or story with tension, and then wrapping it all up with a satisfying resolution and payoff.

For the most part, this is nothing new to the professionals I have worked with in the animation industry. It is generally part and parcel of a truly engaged creative individual, to foray into new ground all the time, and experiment with different modes of expression. During my time working at Don Bluth’s studio in Ireland, I played in a bizarre “experimental” band called Toe Jam, with Greg Maguire, currently the supervising technical director at LucasFilm Animation, and Jan Carlee, formerly of Blue Sky and, I am sorry to say, I have no idea where he is working currently. (Where are you Jan?)

With our “free-form” approach to a kind of eclectic, psychedelic, progressive rock/jazz mish-mash of musical meanderings, we truly freed ourselves of the endless chore of working on mind-numbingly tedious feature films. (Especially working on Don’s final succession of seriously mangled stories, and a feature film scored by none other than Barry Manilow, [no disrespect Barry… ]) It was an absolute gas!

Years later, at Walt Disney Feature Animation in Florida, I teamed up with an enormous group of musicians and semi-musicians, we all rehearsed for months, and then we all played a memorable gig at the annual feature animation Christmas party, being introduced as (believe it or not) “Mucus and the Membranes.” I would love to list off the names of all the musicians and singers involved in that experience, but there are too many and I am afraid I will leave a key individual out. We had several lead, rhythm and bass guitar players, two keyboard players, three lovely ladies singing backup vocals, a horn section, a drummer or two (including the greatest female drummer I’ve ever heard!), tons of alternative percussion players and countless other guest performers and singers.