I am James Rowell, the owner and operator of Orange Imagination & Concepts, Inc. Please find my linked in page here and a resume can be provided upon request.

As a professional visual effects artist who has been in the business for over 20 years, I'm frequenly asked "How did I get into this line of work"? Well, at the risk of providing too much information and boring my audience - I'm going to tell my story of how I got to where I am today!

I know the exact moment that I fell in love with computer animation. It was Saturday November 21 1981 while visiting the Computer Culture 81 exposition that was being held at the Ontario College of Art in Toronto. I ventured down to OCA from my residence at York University (where I was in my 2nd year of film studies) to see what was being shown on "Computer Animation Day".

I was not disappointed. The day started out with a bang as one of the first films screened was James Whitney's hypnotic and beautiful analog computer animation "Lapis" (see link to the right - too bad the youtube vid isn't higher resolution since it's such a detailed work of art, but it's still worth watching). As each film screened my excitement grew - by the middle of the afternoon, probably during "Zooms on Self-Similar figures" by Nelson Max, I was hooked and could barely contain my excitement. My sense was that the computer was an infinitely malleable image-making tool - It seemed perfectly suited to further explore the abstract and experimental themes I had been most drawn to as a young film-maker. On that day I knew that becoming a computer graphics film artist was the direction I wanted to go.

However in 1981 it wasn't clear to me what it meant to be a computer film artist since there were so few of them and the art form itself was so young. I answered this question by relating it to being a contemporary painter. I reasoned that contemporary painters (in part) directly confront the reality of the medium itself. They don't ignore the nature of the flat canvas and the nature of paint itself and acknowledge the constraints placed upon them by this physical framework. They look for ways to exploit and underline these limitations, plus they look for ways to break the rules and push the boundaries of what a painting is and where those limitations lie. At least that's how I view part of what is going on in the contemporary art world to varying degrees over the past 100 or so years.

The lesson from the contemporary painter told me I had to more deeply understand computers since that is the medium and that it wasn't enough for my needs to enroll in a program where I'd learn how to use a piece of animation software or study techniques to make animations (*). So on that conclusion I switched tracks from studying film at York University to getting a Computer Science degree at the University of Toronto.

((*) - Note: this was a perfectly good route to take and in 1981 I had the opportunity to enroll at Seneca College to study animation (including computer animation) taught by Robin King - but decided that UofT was better for me.)

At some point during my first or second year as an undergraduate at the University of Toronto, I knocked on the door of the graduate level computer graphics lab called the Dynamic Graphics Project to introduce myself. They were a warm welcoming bunch and tolerated an eager young undergrad hanging around asking questions. I tried to pick up what I could in addition to my regular studies and felt lucky to be exposed to the cutting edge of Computer Graphics. My association with this great group of people (and having involved myself with a couple of dgp projects during my undergrad years) lead to my first job upon graduation thanks to Bill Buxton. It was a summer internship in The Human Interface Group at Apple Computer in Cupertino California.

My supervisor in the Human Interface Group was Kristee Rosendahl (but with married-surname Kreitman in those days) and she arranged to have her brother, Carl Rosendahl, give the summer interns a tour of his company Pacific Data Images which is now a part of Dreamworks Animation. The tour was fantastic and I could see that this was the kind of place that I wanted to work someday. It was easier said than done actually getting myself a job at PDI, being a Canadian (work visas etc.) and really having no direct production experience (yet) that could land me a job there, so I had to wait for that opportunity.

Back in Toronto that fall I got my first crack at a computer animation/graphics job. The Ontario Center for Large Scale Computation, which ran the Cray X-MP/24 supercomputer at UofT, wanted to set up a Graphics-Lab to help the scientist visualize their data sets from computational experiments run on the Cray. So I was hired and I designed, configured and ran the Graphics-Lab for its first year and a half of its existence and even landed a cover of nature magazine with some work produced there.

After OCLSC I got a job at Alias Research (now Autodesk) to work as a software engineer on a new modeling/rendering program called "Alias Sketch!" which we built to run on Macintosh Computers. It was one of the first commercial software packages written in the fairly new language "C++" (at my recommendation). Part of "Alias Sketch!" that I had written, namely the low level vector/matrix/geometry math library, is still at the core of Maya which was born from work we did to create "Alias Sketch!".

Following on the heels of this achievement at Alias Research I was offered the opportunity to take a job at Autodesk in San Rafael CA to work on AutoCAD Release 13 which was to be a total re-architecture of the software that was starting to show signs of age. I was part of the team that redesigned and rebuilt AutoCAD from the ground up in C++. Autodesk was kind enough to help me get me my Green Card while I worked there. With my Green Card in hand, plus my accumulated experience with computer graphics, and that I had been actively painting (see example painting above, click for expanded view) the door was open for me at Pacific Data Images. I finally landed my dream job as an actual 3d computer animation artist!

After several rewarding years at PDI I landed another dream job at Industrial Light & Magic (I'd love to have been able to go back in time to my 16 year old self while sitting in the theater for the sixth time watching "Star Wars, Episode IV - A New Hope" that I'd someday be working at the studio alongside some of the people that created this film) where I was also rewarded with some fantastic experiences. I worked as a lighting technical director on some really stunning shots. One of my most enjoyable experiences was working on Star Wars Episode III alongside fellow compositing artist Matt Brumit on some choice Yoda shots when Yoda's battling the Emperor in the Senate Chamber. Good times!

Life took me to the East coast for a while where I worked in Midtown Manhattan at Charlex producing some great commercial spots. I also had the opportunity to be a visual effects director at an Architectural Visualization firm, and discovered how enjoyable it is to put together arch-viz animations, which amongst other things involves fun tasks like flying around in helicopters.

To fast forward to today - I am in the very happy position to be running my own 3d computer animation company. I have found delight in so many more aspects of making computer animation than I could possibly have envisioned on that sunny Saturday in 1981 - from the nuts and bolts of making the systems work, and the math and science behind the processes, to the aesthetic calls at the highest level - plus the fun of telling a story with moving images and working closely with others is still the same as I experienced as a young film-maker. Having my own production studio is perfect for me - like a painter has a studio, brushes and paints to produce his art - I now have my very own infinitely malleable image-making tool at my finger tips.

My love and passion for computer animation has not diminished in what is coming up on 30 years now since that watershed moment in Toronto in 1981 - that same love and passion is brought with me to every project I undertake here at Orange Imagination & Concepts. It's what I do!