Martin Leeper learned production the old-fashioned way: by gaffing on live-action sets. After being bitten by the filmmaking bug, he enrolled in Santa Monica College and learned the craft of animation.

Gaffer to Movie Maker
Martin Leeper’s work just “leaps” off the screen. His Beat Girl short shown at the spring student show at Santa Monica College’s Academy of Entertainment and Technology took the audience by surprise. This CG animation of a “superhero girl,” à la The Incredibles, avenging the bad guys, is sensational and to think he did it in one year and all by himself.

Martin has the desire to make his own movies. He is not new to movie making at all. He was a head gaffer on motion pictures, commercials and television series for more than nine years. As the lead technician, he lit the live-action scenes and along the way he got the urge to make movies of his own way.

He thought animation would be a great way of storytelling, but didn’t have the confidence in his hand drawing skills. He felt the Mac could aid in doing this. He really thought the computer did all of the work of drawing and animating. He soon found out.

He checked out all of his options for an education and chose Santa Monica College because “it was cheap.” He spent the next three and a half years learning a new craft. In his last year he was devoted to a couple of classes and animating Beat Girl.

Martin learned by doing. Beat Girl started as a motion study and grew from there. Trial and error taught him everything. He learned from his mistakes, which “created the challenge” in him.

While at SMC, Leeper made Beat Girl. After graduation, he landed at a dream job at Technicolor Interactive doing character animation, animatics and camera for CG game cinematics. © Martin Leeper.

He graduated from SMC in December 2005 and on January 2006 landed at Technicolor Interactive doing character animation, animatics and camera for CG game cinematics, a dream job. He is already plotting the festival circuit for Beat Girl. Who knows what’s next?

Still to Motion to Pixels
Annette Buehre-Nickerson of Opticam has been behind and under a camera for her entire career, until now. She is now behind a computer monitor.

Training manuals brought her to Los Angeles after graduating from the University of Miami with her degree in photography. But she had a hankering for the glamour of motion pictures and took a job at Crest Film Labs. There she met her future husband, Jan Buehre. Jan’s father had the first-ever camera service.

In 1976, Jan and Annete opened Opticam, a combination animation camera and optical printer service. Jan taught her how to shoot on an animation camera and she was hooked. Animation held all of the magic of live action. Opticam’s first commercial was produced by Charles Eames Co. and directed by Alex Funke, a famous effects director, for Polaroid. And then there were hundreds of sequences for Carl Sagan’s Cosmos series. What a start for a new company.

After opening and running a successful animation camera and optical printer service, Annette Buehre-Nickerson finds much pleasure learning new digital skills.

Jan died in 1981, but Annette continued to update the camera system from traditional to a motion control systems so she could shoot the backlit method just like in Star Wars. In the 1980s much of the 2D animation of television stations ID work was going in-house onto SGI computers, but there were still commercials to shoot.

Annette shot lots of commercials in the 1980s and 1990s for Acme Filmworks, Duck Soup, Tools of North America and many more production houses. Designer/director Betty Green brought television main title sequences from shows like Law & Order and Mission: Impossible for Annette to shoot. She also had a constant flow of independent producers and animators bring their creative projects and energy through her doors.

By the end of the 1990s, she knew that the computer was taking over. She started taking classes at Santa Monica College. First, computer programming courses, such as Java and C, with the mind to move Opticam into the digital age. But these did not excite her like the classes in Photoshop and Illustrator, especially After Effects. She was amazed that what would take her an entire night under her camera to do a “killer shot,” could be done in a fraction of the time by pushing a few pixels and moving a mouse.

Alas, two years ago the business came to a screeching halt and at the same time she learned how difficult it is to convert Opticam to a digital service. This has sent her to working with a real estate agent. But this has not daunted her. She continues to take classes and now has Maya, Flash, Houdini, Final Cut Pro and Shake all under her belt. She gets so much great energy at SMC because they are always upgrading their labs and improving the Academy of Entertainment and Technology. Why does she do continue to pursue this? “It is just so darn much fun!” she said.

These are just three of the thousands of stories showing how hard work and passion for animation has taken them from one career to another.

Jan Nagel, the entertainment marketing diva, is a consultant involved in the business of animation and visual effects since 1991. She represents creative producers and productions companies worldwide, Blanca Ruiz, Jim Keeshen Productions, AGOGO Corp. Hong Kong, as well as being a frequent guest lecturer on the subject of the business of animation. She is also a founding member and current president of Women in Animation International.