Who I Am

This is a digital painting by Robin Joseph for The Dreaming.

I've had some comments about who I am. I've considered this blog a House of Cool studio blog but if people want this thing to be a little more personal I will oblige.

My name is Ricardo Curtis. I was born in Kingston, Jamaica but I grew up in Toronto, Canada. I studied classical animation at Sheridan College in Oakville, Canada. I've worked in feature animation for most of my career but I've spent some time working in television also. I've been an animator, supervising animator, designer and storyboard artist at studio such as Warner Bros., DreamWorks and Pixar. I moved back to Canada over three years ago with my wife and had a son and started House of Cool. I am currently the head of story on Horton Hears a Who at Blue Sky while still supervising operations at House of Cool.

I'll let everyone else at House of Cool write up their own bios.

The Family Thing

Another piece from The Dreaming.

We've had some comments about how we balance the pressures of running a studio and having a family. This is how my wife answered the question.
I will speak for myself and leave it up to Ricardo to share how he balances family and work. As for me, I stay at home with our toddler and it is the hardest job I have ever done!!! When I have freelance to do, I have my mother look after our kid for a few hours a couple of times a week while I do some work (also some weekends), depending on its degree of importance. It is not easy to tune out family of your mind and concentrate on work, the theory is simple, the practical aspects of it are extremely different. But most of the time I live unhealthily by working after he goes to bed, late at night and into the morning for a few days at a time. It might be a different story with more kids, though. The key for me is to decide when to work around family or make the latter fit around work. A constant prioritization and a good, supportive partner are key. Hope this helps!
Kate

From my perspective, there was a time in my life when career and animation was the most overpowering factors in my life. I lived animation. Everything I talked about was animation. All my friends worked in animation. Then I started to noticed that many people who spent all their time thinking about animation, were no happier than people who spent more time living life (especially Europeans). I decided that in my career there must be balance. I have not done any overtime for many years. I also do not expect anyone who I supervise or work for me to do any overtime. Even though I run a business and there are many responsibilities, they all must happen within a certain defined time. If you allow yourself to let work-time absorb into family time suddenly work will know no bounds. Now that I have consciously limited when I am allowed to work it has become habit. I now find the idea of doing overtime to be repugnant. "Ricardos don't do overtime'". This doesn't mean I don't think about animation when I am not working. I love the art form so my wife and I often talk about it because we enjoy it.

I believe that I will continue to adjust my priorities as I age. It is possible that the studio will require more time than I am willing to give it. At that point I will either delegate responsibility to others or limit the amount of work that the studio accepts.

It was quite a journey...

Working on the website has been a bit of a rollercoaster for us, but we have finally made it official. It is a work-in-progress, so keep checking for any changes or new features. Gathering all the info and artwork was overwhelming, and I personally feel very proud of all the work that the crew has produced.
House of Cool has been a project that was conceptualized back in college. A few of us were going to work in the USA, get the best experience possible, and come back home (to Canada) to flesh it out into a studio and/or through teaching. It is not an easy task to achieve, but big risks can bring big payoffs!

Getting it Done

I want to include an image for every entry. This one is from El Dorado by my beautiful and talented wife, Kate. Check out her website.

I hope that I don't sound too preachy with these life lessons I've learned being in the industry so far but I think that this blog is more than just pretty pictures, so here I go again.

Getting things done is to me as important, if not more important than raw talent. How many artist do you know who can draw circles around you? They draw on every random scrap of paper and every doodle deserves to be in a museum but for some reason they are no more successful than you are. In fact they spend most of their day telling you about how crap the industry is and every night smoking a joint. Then on the other hand, someone who has very little artistic talent: you turn on the TV and they are accepting a best picture Academy award. The reason for this is these people know how to get things done. The best picture Academy award is given to the producer because producers are the best at getting things done. If I were to ask most artists to tell me an idea that they had for a movie, short film, television series or even a poster, they would be able to give me half a dozen good ideas off the top of their heads. If I were to ask the same artists if they had done anything to bring these projects to life like writing a treatment or assembling a development team or create some development artwork, most would say that they had some unfinished pieces. The problems is if you don't finish something no one will ever care.

Well, that did sound awfully preachy.

Here are some of my friends who are good at getting things done. Sanjay Patel, the creater of Little India. Alex Puvilland and Leuyen Pham, happily married in art. Mark Andrews and Louis Gonzales, sketchers supreme.

Want a studio? Need strong nerves.

Here is another lesson that I have learned running an animation studio. It would be great if having your own studio meant that you could draw, animate or create whatever suits your fancy. Unfortunately this is not the case. Your ability to create is limited by your ability to pay your rent, pay phone bills, pay utilities, pay credit cards, pay the line of credit, pay travel expenses, pay equipment leases and pay your employees' salaries. If you can cover all those things every month you can think about being creative after that.

As I'm writing this, it saddens me that to be a true artist in a field like animation, it either requires you to live in abject poverty and doodle away in you mom's attic or have to work for a much larger company who has ownership of everything you create.

Here is some more artwork from a television project we are developing called POV. The artist here is Normand Lemay. He is the second fastest sketcher I know next to Mark Andrews at Pixar.

The Dreaming

This is a feature project that we have been developing for some time. It is a personal film for me because I wrote it and I have my son as the main character.

One Man Band

A big congratulations to Andy Jimenez and Mark Andrews on their nomination at the Academy Award for 'One Man Band'! Though they didn't win the big prize they are both super talented and I'm sure they'll get it the next time.

More Popo

Some more images from our feature Popo that is in development.

The Incredibles

In the summer of 2004 John Walker, the producer of The Incredibles, asked me to pencil the four issue comic book for Dark Horse Comics. I had already worked with Brad Bird on The Incredibles and The Iron Giant so he was familiar with my drawing ability.

I always liked to see the original pencils of the comic book pages so I'm showing some pencils for the covers and pages.My wife Kate painted the covers for all four issues and a friend from college, Ramon Perez, inked. I have to mention that working for Dave Land from Dark Horse was a pleasure.
I had a hard time drawing this book because I had to stay somewhat on model when drawing these characters and this is not my normal drawing style. Tony Fucile designed many of the characters on The Incredibles and his work is brilliant but very difficult to draw consistently. I did my best but next time I do a comic I want it to be in my own style.This picture is promotional photo I had done for an interview. My brother-in-law David Moo King from mooishi took the picture. David and is business partner Bryan Ishiguro are two of the hottest fashion photographers in the nation. Definitely check out their stuff if you are into beautiful images.

Bliss

Two years ago I decided that House of Cool was going to make a short film. I had been itching to make another film since college and I had an I idea about the state of the world that I wanted to put on film. I used the United Nations as a metaphor for these giant creatures who only had eyes on the tops of their heads so they couldn't see the tiny creatures they were stepping on. This film was going to be our grand entrance into the world of independent film production. We applied for a grant from Bravo!FACT that we were awarded but the catch was you didn't get any money until the film was completed.
I decided to do it as a 2D/3D mix. Of course we had no experience in CG production so we made every mistake possible. We choose to use Cinema 4D then we switched to Maya then used a mix between the two. The budget grew far beyond the grant amount, while the timelines were pushed passed the original four months.
These are two images from the film. The first one was a development piece that my wife Kate did and the second image is a frame from the actual film.


It took almost a year to finish the six minute film. It was shown on the Bravo! channel on Feb/05. I'm about 80% happy with the final project but 100% with the experience. The film can be viewed at http://coolhouse.ca/House%20of%20Cool/Bliss.html . I developed a new appreciation for the process of getting something like this done. House of Cool will make another short film at some point but because of Bliss we will be much more prepared.

Our Own

The concept that is most prevalent at House of Cool is we want to do what is cool. What that means is that we have to create our own projects. I encourage anyone in the studio to develop properties in various mediums including film and television. In this blog we will include some images of the projects we have been working on. We can have to keep some stuff secret but I am excited about showing the world what we have been up to. This is a feature project called Popo. Much of the development painting that come out of House of Cool are made by Robin Joseph. It was his birthday yesterday.

In the beginning

When I was in college I had an idea of creating an animation studio. I was going to take the animation world by storm and make edgy one hundred million dollar films for young adults like myself. I thought that the early Disney films were the pinnacle of animation but anime was the future. I thought that Don Bluth was an artistic genius because of The Secret of Nimh and Space Ace but he was a hack because of everything else. I thought that if you make a great film the people will come.

This is what I know now.

No movie studio is going to give anyone one hundred million dollars unless they can be guaranteed to make two hundred million in return. In the current market there aren't enough young adults who will go to an animated feature to cover a one hundred million dollar budget. Styles for animation will always change and evolve but the emotions that people feel when they see movies always stay the same. Don Bluth my not have needed to be a genius because of the talent that surrounded him. Don Bluth may not have been a hack because of the forces that may have been working against his films. After my experience on The Iron Giant I now know that if you make a great film they will not necessarily come. But we are still going to take the animation world by storm.

-Ricardo

Merry post Christmas

This was a Christmas card that I had one of my artists, Robin Joseph, do for our clients. I'm always amazed by what kind of attention you can get with a simple thing like a painting. We got a job based on this image alone. The little guy on the end is my son, Maxwell.

What we do.

I created House of Cool because I didn't want to be one of those artists who say "that sucks" or "if it was my movie I would" about everything. I felt I only had the right to criticize the work of others if I had attempted to do it myself. So I got together my wife, some friends and young talent to try and create something cool from scratch. We do a lot of service work for other animation companies. Mostly storyboards and design but we are always developing our own properties because I think that is what is most fun about film and it's the future of this company.

-Ricardo

New website

House of Cool is building a new website with a link to this blog. We will start using this blog properly after we are published.

-Ricardo