Victor Navone
Animator
Pixar Animation Studios
Victor Navone is a traditional artist and computer animator. Following his B.A. in Studio Art from the University of California, Irvine, he worked in various jobs ranging from graphic design, DJ’ing, and comic book colouring, and was eventually introduced to 3D graphics when he started working in architectural and engineering visualisation.
After learning some AutoCAD, some 3D Studio, and various video-editing and paint box packages on the PC, he applied for a part-time designer internship at a small game developer, Presto Studios, in San Diego in June of 1994. He received the internship despite a nebulous portfolio and no practical design experience. He was initially hired to assist Phil Saunders in the design of the adventure game Journeyman Project 2: Buried in Time. As the game’s scope snowballed, he found his responsibilities and opportunities increasing exponentially. He went from sketching furniture and props to designing entire time zones, including Da Vinci’s studio and the “final” alien time zone.
Once he took on a fulltime position at the studio, his role as a designer expanded: he learned Photoshop and created a lot of interface graphics for the game, as well as retouched some graphics and added special effects; he acted in some of the game’s video sequences; and he even did a little writing for some of the in-game text.
Next he was given the position of Creative Director on Gundam 0079, Presto’s anime-based title for Bandai. His responsibilities included: game and environment design, storyboarding, assisting in story writing, and general artistic direction. Before Gundam was even finished he started working on the next title, Journeyman Project 3: Legacy of Time, where he once again assumed the role of Conceptual Designer, this time under the direction of Tommy Yune. Once the design phase was finished, he helped with textures and then moved onto video-compositing, retouching and special effects.
He went on to Art-Direct the graphics for John Saul’s Blackstone Chronicles and Creative-Directed Star Trek: Hidden Evil. On these projects he also took on the role of 3D artist using the production skills he had acquired along the way. Meanwhile he began teaching myself character animation on my spare time, which led to Alien Song .
He left Presto Studios in November of 1999 after five years to search for new challenges and hopefully work in films, moving to the Bay Area and taking on some freelance visual effects work for the movie Titan AE as well as some other projects.
In December of 1999 he was contacted by Pixar Animation Studios (the president had recieved a copy of Alien Song by email) where he now works as a full-time animator. So far he has worked on Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo, The Incredibles and Cars, as well as various projects in Pixar Shorts.
Victor is also an instructor with the incredibly popular Animation Mentor, an online animation school taught exclusively by working professionals.
Related links:
www.navone.org
Animation Mentor
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