Who are you, and what do you do?
Jim Capobianco. I mainly work in animation. Writing, directing. I’ve done some voice work too. I went to school to learn the craft of animation in 1987. Whoa, that’s a long time ago. Shit. It pains me to write that year down but that’s when it was. I went to the California Institute of the Arts or as it is more simply called - CalArts. Incidentally, that school was the last big project Walt Disney had a hand in creating. That’s pretty neat, the Obi Wan, the dean of animation created a school of the arts as the last thing he ever did. I like that and I’m honoured to be an alum.
At school I learned about storyboarding and developing stories. Decided that was what I wanted to do. Lucky for me Disney Animation, thanks to the success of Roger Rabbit and eventually The Little Mermaid, was expanding its feature animation department. I was hired as a storyboard artist, the youngest at that time, in 1992. Worked at Disney for five years. My first film as a story artist was The Lion King, followed by Hunchback of Notre Dame and Fantasia Continued (later retitled to Fantasia 2000). Eventually, I got bored with the way Disney made its films, each had to be a musical. Again as luck would have it, my old story teacher from CalArts, Joe Ranft, who worked at Pixar and sidelined at Disney saw my work on the Tin Soldier sequence of Fantasia 2. He said I should come up to Pixar. In 1997 that’s just what I did, landing a gig on A Bug’s Life. I then rolled on to Toy Story 2, Finding Nemo and then co-wrote the original script for Ratatouille with its creator Jan Pinkava. I then went on to supervise the storyboard team for five years.
After Ratatouille I wrote and then directed my first film, the DVD short “Your Friend the Rat”. Then I directed the end credits of WALL-E. It was at this time I finished the independent short film, “Leonardo“, about Leonardo da Vinci and his dream of flight. The film was created with hand drawn animation and took me ten years to finish it. I also connected with Secret Lab in Tasmania to make a game based on the Leonardo character. I continued to storyboard for Pixar until 2016. It was after that I supervised the 2D animation of Mary Poppins Returns (here is a segment) and began in earnest to develop my independent feature film The Inventor, which took the Leonardo character I had developed into stop motion mixed with 2D drawn animation. It again had been about 10 years in the making. Produced in France, the film came out in 2023. It is available on Amazon and other streaming services. Currently I am continuing with Secret Lab to make the Leonardo game, another decade long (actually even longer) project and writing and illustrating a children’s book series NOT about Leonardo da Vinci. In addition to the books I am writing other screenplays also not about Leonardo da Vinci.
But again, please see The Inventor and if you like it leave a review / tell friends and family.
What do you use to get the job done?
For writing screenplays I use Final Draft and for writing children’s books Scrivener on a MacBook Pro. I also use Pages and the Notes app to work out outlines/ideas and whatever.
For drawing, pencils, pens, paper. I color in my work with coloured pencils and also watercolour. I have a small old Winsor Newton travel watercolour set that was my mom’s and a water pen. Typically I like Blackwing pencils but I’ll use whatever. Same for pens, but often I use Microns from Japan. Before switching to all digital at Pixar we used Tombo pens and drew on pads made from the same bond as animation paper. I had a big hand in switching the story teams to an all digital pipeline on Ratatouille. Drawing the storyboards in Photoshop using Cintiq tablets and then placing the drawings into a propitiatory timeline/editing program called Pitch Docter. ( Docter is spelled correctly, as it is named after Pixar director Pete Docter. ). I regret in some ways of helping to create the digital process, but I suppose they would have gotten there anyway by now.
I still draw into Photoshop using a Cintiq. I currently have a 22 inch one on a swivel bracket stand. However, many of my storyboards for Mary Poppins and The Inventor were drawn on paper, shot with my phone and sent to the editor to create what we call a story reel, animatic or Licca reel. Which is a pre-creation of the film with only drawings. I carry around a sketchpad when I think to. Generally a Moleskin, Talen’s Art Creation or other hardbound book. That with a pencil and my little watercolour set, it’s all I need.
What would be your dream setup?
Hmm. I’m so haphazard in my approach to my artistic endeavours I don’t really know. Would I even stick to one if I had a dream setup? Ideally, I think I’d like a setup that didn’t distract me with email, social media and all the rest.