10 questions for former DreamWorks vice president Andrew Pearce

Ex-Dreamworks VP talks to U of C science grads U of C science grads heard from an alumnus who shared how a career in the sciences could take them places they might not expect.

When he served as the the vice president of DreamWorks Animation, Andrew Pearce was a driving force behind many of this century’s most-beloved films.

This week, Pearce returns to his Alma mater, the University of Calgary, to serve as a distinguished graduate speaker at spring convocation.

Pearce, who holds a Bachelor of Science (1984) and a Master of Science (1988) from the university, was initially an economics student.

However, he says seeing a crude computer graphics display ignited a passion for the field.

Despite wanting to be a cartoonist, Pearce claims he lacked drawing skills. He did, however, have a strong aptitude for computers.

Pearce's path led him from the university to Alias, a leading computer graphics software company.

His software, Maya, played a key role in creating special effects for films like The Abyss and Jurassic Park.

Pearce then transitioned to Hollywood, working for the visual effects company behind the Matrix movies.

Combining hard work, timing and a touch of humor, he joined DreamWorks Animation in the early 2000s and quickly rose to lead the company's research and development team.

Today, Pearce is not only a computer graphics pioneer, but also a prolific patent holder and a member of the Academy Software Foundation board.

He credits his well-rounded education, including extracurricular activities like performing at Calgary’s Loose Moose Theatre, music and volunteering at UCalgary’s Gauntlet newspaper for shaping a diverse skillset.

Reflecting on his career, Pearce compares his time at DreamWorks to his student days at UCalgary, where passion, skills and an uncertain future converged.

He says the jobs he has had did not even exist when he was a student, and the descriptions of the jobs of the future have not yet been written.

This week, Pearce is hosting a seminar at the University of Calgary titled "How To Make A Blockbuster Animated Film (Your Results May Vary)," which he promises will offer a look behind the curtain at how animated characters and worlds are brought to life.

CTV News had the opportunity to meet Pearce Tuesday morning ahead of the Convocation.

Here are his answers to 10 questions we asked him:

1. Take us back to the early 80s, and tell us about the "epiphany moment" that led to your eventual career.

"I was in economics by default, because my father wanted me to get that degree and go into law afterwards. I really did not like economics, I did not like the statistical aspect of it. Then, I passed this thing in the hallway. It was a very early computer graphic. It was like a sphere with a cylinder coming out the bottom. The sphere was green, the cylinder was brown. It was supposed to be a tree. It was it was so rudimentary, but immediately I thought, 'computers can draw,' and then I switched majors and I found out it's not so easy."

2. At the time, there was no CGI movie industry. Did you anticipate what was to come?

"Oh, none, nothing. Nothing. I was doing it out of the pure joy of studying the computer graphics algorithms. I was a frustrated cartoonist, all my friends had talent and could actually draw. I could not, but the computer can draw. So, I was just interested in making pictures. That was really the basis of it, and then it was, 'Oh! I have to learn some math to do it. Oh, I have to learn linear algebra. I have to learn integration.' And I said, 'Okay, I'll do that to get to making pretty pictures.'"

3. When you left UCalgary, you went on work at Alias and create what was really the first "movie scale" CGI software, "Maya." How did that come about?

"I moved to Toronto and joined Alias. We started this little project 'power animator.' It was for the car industry, actually, to do industrial design, and some animators saw it and said, ‘Hey, I want to do motion graphics for TV with this. Can we do that?' And the industry sprung up right around me. I was very fortunate."

4. At what point in your career did you think, "This is really something"? The point where you could sort of see that trajectory.

"It was absolutely when (co-worker) Steve Williams moved to ILM and started working on this picture called The Abyss. We went to the theater to see the opening of it in Toronto, and sat there, and we saw the water snake snaking through them. It wasn't the horrible graphics of Tron, it wasn't, you know, The Last Starfighter, it wasn't these very cheesy graphics. This was integrally integrated into the movie. It was VFX that worked. That was kind of the 'Ah ha moment.' Then of course, a year or two later, Jurassic Park came out and that was it. We knew we had made it."

5. Your IMDB lists more than 30 films, many of which are movies people have a real emotional attachment to. That seems like it must be a very exciting career.

"You know, my job was probably 95 per cent like anybody else's job. You're in an office, you're working budgets, you're managing people, you're trying to get deadlines met. Everybody's familiar with that kind of thing. Then, there's that little bit where you're in the theater and your name goes by. If I told people ‘I work at DreamWorks,’ they were like, ‘Oh my god! I love Shrek! Or I love Toothless! There was an emotional attachment to what we were doing, and that, I mean, that's that little bit of sugar on top of the work makes it worthwhile."

6. Does the animation team sitting at computers feel that same emotional attachment, or is it work?

"Oh, there is no doubt that everyone who's making those films, everyone who's working there is working there because they love making animated films. That is that is core. We're all filmmakers, and everybody's contributing to this final project. So it was definitely a work of love, and we care about those characters - even the movies that don't do so well, we still put a lot of love into those characters."

7. If you look at your career trajectory, at least on paper, it looks like it was on a steady road up right from graduation. Is that how it felt to you?

"Oh, the edited version looks great. That's not the reality. I moved down to Santa Barbara, Calif., and headed up the Maya for Mac OS 10 port, and that project wrapped, and they shut down the entire office. So basically, my first layoff and here I was, I was in my 40s, I was a manager, and I went down to unemployment. Then again, went to do the Matrix movies and some other visual effects movies. Then Warner Brothers came in and said, ‘You know what? We just cancelled the Superman sequels, you're all gone.’ And they shut us down again. And so now I was older and still in a management position, and those are big ones, but there's minor ones along the way, there's no end to tests of your resilience."

8. You’ve said there will come a point in the not too distant future when computer images will be indistinguishable from real images, and that could pose a danger to peoples' understanding of reality, or acceptance of facts. Is this a real concern?

"You know, just like we're seeing animations now that are quite passable, even not even animations, but like real-looking people moving. It's just going to get better and better as these algorithms get better and better, and the processing becomes higher. It's a real danger, and if we're not vigilant –  I know this is going off into an area that I'm not an expert in – but AI and its training sets, we really need to consider how we're training these things."

9. People who work on movies often have different ‘favourite movies’ than the viewing public, because of some personal attachment. What are the favourite ones you’ve been involved with?

"Two different ones from two different perspectives. So one: the second Matrix movie was such a Herculean task, and it was my first movie, and so I always have a fondness for it, even though the critics and everybody else didn't really love it. But for me, it was just the first movie that I worked on directly that that I saw pixels on the screen that I had an impact on."

The second answer is How to Train Your Dragon. I think How to Train Your Dragon is just the most lovely film. It has a lead character that is an amputee, and you don't think of them that way. You don't realize that that's what that story is. It's a boy and his dog story, essentially a boy and his dragon, but he and his clan have all lost limbs fighting the dragons. He's come up with a wholesale change, of partnering with the dragons, but in the process, he also loses a limb that becomes part of the society. I think it brings a tear to my eye every time I think about it. I love How to Train Your Dragon."

10. How did your university education help you get where you are today?

"You know, a lot of people say, ‘Oh, you don't need to go to university,' that it doesn't really get you anything. What it really teaches you is how to learn, it teaches you how to learn in an environment where no one's teaching you, where no one's done that thing before. Right? It leads you to the edge of what the knowledge in the world is, and teaches you how to do research to go beyond that. I think the problems we're facing in this world need people that are charged to do that."