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The other blue at Blue Sky Studios
This is a story with a moral: keep in touch with your classmates and professors.
There might be a dream job in it for you.
Robert MacKenzie, ’98 Graphic Design, designer and color key artist at Blue Sky
Studios, and Jeff Biancalana, ’98 Graphic Design, Blue Sky story artist, started out as classmates at SJSU.
“Bobby was what you could call a perfect student,” Biancalana remembers.
MacKenzie says: “Jeff was a complete and total clown.”
In retrospect both seem amazed that they became friends, much less roommates, in San José, in San Francisco and again in New York. Although, Jeff jokes, “we’ve vowed never to live together again.”
The newest Blue Sky hire, designer Lizette Vega, ’04 Art, finds it “awesome that the three of us are working on the same movie!” The movie is Horton Hears a Who!, an animated feature film based on the Dr. Seuss story and scheduled for release by Blue Sky in 2008. Lizette was a student of Robert’s at SJSU, and Jeff provided the “inside lead” that nabbed her a freelance job at Leapfrog. “It’s a small industry,” she says. “Every job I got was because of my connections with SJSU.”
Robert’s road to Blue Sky
Robert was the first of the trio to land a job at the computer animation studio headquartered in White Plains. Founded in 1987 and acquired by Twentieth Century Fox in 1997, Blue Sky counts among its credits the Oscar-winning short film Bunny and the feature films Ice Age and Ice Age: The Meltdown.
While at Lucasfilm, working on Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and The Hulk, Robert also taught illustration at SJSU. Initially he found standing in front of a classroom “a pretty terrifying experience,” but he’s convinced “teaching made me a better artist.”
In 2003, he left Lucasfilm for Dreamworks, only to be recruited by Blue Sky in 2004 to work on Ice Age: The Meltdown.
His Art Department post means he gets to collaborate “with virtually every other department. We have to make drawings that guide the modelers in building all the objects that end up in the film. Then I make paintings to help figure out the color, texture and lighting. In computer animation, nothing is real.”
Jeff’s vacation that wasn’t
After graduation, Jeff was hired as an animation assistant at Curious Pictures in
San Francisco. He also worked at Wild Brain, Mondo Media, Spazzco and Leapfrog — jobs that introduced him “to the San Francisco animation scene” and gave him “the opportunity to do just about everything my field has to offer: animation, design, storyboards and directing.” Then he returned to SJSU, as a graduate student and instructor in the animation program.
“Bobby (MacKenzie) had been in New York for about a year when I decided to take a week off and visit him,” Jeff recalls. “Since I was coming out, I told him I’d like to show some of my work to the artists at Blue Sky.” Jeff’s portfolio, along with Robert’s recommendation, resulted in an invitation to test for a position in the company’s story department.
“So for most of the week that I was in New York (on vacation!) I sat in Bobby’s apartment drawing away,” Jeff recalls. The 150+ drawings he submitted got him the job: story artist on Horton Hears a Who!
Lizette’s part-time contract turns full-time
BFA in hand, Lizette began her career as a freelancer, working primarily as a 2D designer. At Hallmark Cards, she designed Keepsake Ornaments. At Leapfrog, she did design and artwork for children’s educational media and toys. Never did she encounter a shortage of freelance opportunities. Even at Blue Sky, she started as a freelancer. Mere months later, the company flew her East to interview for a full-time position. Now officially “a New Yorker,” she admits she was “hesitant to make the move. It seemed so far away from home and such a drastic life change. But my first day at Blue Sky, I knew I had made the best decision of my life.”
Doesn’t every kid love to draw?
Lizette has been interested in animation since picking up her first pencil as a kid in Union City. After seeing Disney’s Snow White as a three-year-old, she went home to “practice drawing” the character.
Growing up in Daly City, “the foggiest place on earth,” Jeff quips, he “loved animation and drawing. I think most kids do. I just never grew out of it.”
To “escape the fog,” Robert says, his parents moved from San Francisco to San
Mateo. “When I wasn’t at swim practice, I was drawing pictures. My sister and I would stretch a roll (of paper) across the room and each start drawing, one at either end, until our drawings met in the center.”
Current and future projects
With other Blue Sky story artists, Jeff is contributing to a group graphic novel. His piece “is about a lava monster who falls in love.”
Robert is working on two children’s books. His goal? “To break into creating my own stories and pitch story ideas to film studios.”
Lizette says she’d one day “love to be art directing in feature film animation and to publish more of my personal work.”
“It’s important for artists to develop and own their ideas,” Jeff adds. “When you get into the industry, you spend a lot of creative energy on someone else’s property and the studio owns it. As an artist, I see the importance of creating long-term income from intellectual properties. It’s a concept we need to integrate into art education.” —Kat Meads
This story originally appeared in the Summer 2007 edition of Washington Square magazine. Visit the Washington Square website at www.sjsu.edu/wsq.