Across all creative disciplines, artists are faced with the same obstacle at the beginning of their projects: the blank page. For many of us, there is nothing more daunting than staring at a sheet of paper and wondering: “How do I begin?”

For animator and storyboard artist Jackson Read, this step is half of the fun. He sees the blank page as an opportunity to let his ideas flow freely and his imagination run wild. It’s what he loves about animation. It is a medium that is unique in its ability to capture our imagination. An artist begins with nothing and creates something that evokes the feeling of life. This is why we can look to the earliest cartoons, some of which are a hundred years old, and still feel the same sense of wonder that audiences felt when they first premiered.

Jackson’s passion for the craft has led him to work with some of the most famous animation studios in the world – Disney, DreamWorks, and Warner Bros., to name a few. You can check out some of his work here.

Jackson sat down with CreativeFuture’s own Davis Read, who happens to be his little brother, for a conversation about his career, his process, and his favorite cartoons.

DAVIS READ: Jackson, we are brothers. I believe this is the first time that has happened in the StandCreative series, so we’re witnessing history being made here.

JACKSON READ: Happy to be a part of history!

DR: I’ve always known you to have an artistic inclination, but what is the first exposure you remember having to the arts?

JR: When I was a kid, we had all the old Disney “Renaissance” movies on VHS, and on those tapes, they would always include a preview of the next movie coming out, which hadn’t been finished yet. They would include the actual pencil tests of these films on the VHS, and that was the first time I realized, “Wow, these movies that I love are actually drawn by people – this is a job people actually have.” That was probably the first time I realized animation was a real thing made by humans. 

DR: When did you decide to take a crack at drawing for yourself?

JR: I remember in grade school art class I would try to draw my favorite cartoon characters – like SpongeBob or Bugs Bunny – from memory. And of course, the teacher would always tell me to try and focus on whatever I was supposed to be drawing, like a cylinder or a sphere, and I would just want to keep drawing cartoons. It wasn’t until middle school or high school that I had art teachers actually encourage me to draw like that. 

DR: How did you go from doodling in art class to actually making your own cartoons and animations? I remember long before you had any formal education in animation, you were making your own comic strips and animating on your own. 

JR: I loved doing comics, that was super fun. I would also try to emulate the Disney animations that I saw with little flip-books on pads of paper. Then, when the internet came around, I would see people making their own Adobe Flash animations on Newgrounds and I thought that was really cool. Those same artists would post videos about how they were making their cartoons and explaining the software they were using. So, I downloaded some of those programs and started trying it out for myself. 

DR: Going back to what you said about watching those Disney Renaissance movies, what were some of the early films or other pieces of media that had an impact on you, either as inspiration or as something that influenced your style?

JR: Those Ron Clements and John Musker-directed movies from Disney in the ’80s and ’90s like The Little Mermaid (1989)and Hercules (1997)were such great combinations of storytelling, humor, music, and incredible craftsmanship. But the drawing style was so far beyond what I was capable of at that time. When I saw shows like SpongeBob SquarePants and other cartoons of that era, that was when I thought, “Well, I could draw like that!”

Tim Burton was also a big inspiration for me. He was a Disney animator originally, but he couldn’t draw in the traditional style that Disney was famous for. He had his own unique style of drawing and designing that he’s now famous and beloved for. That was a major realization for me – that you didn’t have to be a perfect draftsman to tell a story and to be effective as an artist. That’s why I love his work so much. 

DR: Once you decided this was what you wanted to do for a career, what was your schooling like? And what was that learning curve like for you?

JR: I went to Ringling College of Art & Design in Florida where I was able to secure a scholarship and study at my dream school in their computer animation program.

It was definitely a sharp learning curve because the first year was all focused on traditional art, which I had almost no training in. I was taking figure drawing classes and I had to draw nude models, having never even taken a class like that! After that, we had to learn traditional animation, which was fun because we had the actual animation desks that were used at the Disney Animation Studio in Florida. We were working on the same desks I had seen on the Disney videos growing up!

We learned how to animate frame-by-frame with pencil on paper. That’s how we developed our foundational skills in animation, how to time motions, how to animate with arcs, and the twelve principles of animation that carry you through your whole career.

DR: I was curious about that because so much animation is computer animation now. How do those traditional animation skills translate to what you do with computer animation?

JR: Well, another lightbulb moment for me was the realization that 3D animation is still 2D from the perspective of the audience. No matter what is going in the computer, it’s still a flat image at the end of the day. So, when you’re animating, you get that camera set up, you lock it, and then all that matters is what the camera sees. You can use whatever tricks you want to make the image as cartoony or as realistic as you want, and no one is ever going to go in and see the back of the image and all the little cheats you did to make it look how you wanted. 

DR: After school, what was your first job in animation?

JR: My first job right out of college was making these cartoon shorts for Butch Hartman’s (The Fairly Odd Parents, Danny Phantom) app, the Noog Network. My best friend Jared and I made these shorts entirely on our own. I would write the story, storyboard it, and animate it, and he would do all the music.

That was really fun because we got to work on every stage of the animation pipeline. We did about ten of those shorts over a year and then I had a body of work that I was able to show to some people I had met in college at JibJab. They were working on Ask the StoryBots, at the time. The creator, Evan Spiradellis, invited me to animate on the show for a three-month contract. After that, they extended my contract and I ended up working on the show for several years, first as an animator, then later as a storyboard artist and writer.

DR: You mentioned a couple steps in the animation process there. Could you give us an Animation for Dummies overview of the production pipeline on an animated project?

JR: The way the pipeline works, typically, is you start with either an outline of an episode or a script of an episode, depending on if the show is storyboard-driven or script-driven. On StoryBots, it was more storyboard-driven, so we were first given an outline of what the episode would be. Then, the storyboard artist would take that concept and write and storyboard the whole episode. Then you have the outline of the episode with all the images you’ve drawn.

That goes to an editor, who takes all of your drawings, and compiles that with temporary sounds, sound effects, voices. Then the whole episode is timed out so that you can watch it as if you were watching the finished episode.  

DR: And these are just still drawings at this point that you’re pairing with some voices and sounds?

JR: Yeah, ideally you have enough still drawings to make it appear loosely animated. It shows you what all of your shots are going to look like, how long each shot is, and everything is timed out. Once all the designs, the animatic, the edit are all locked, it goes to the animators.

When you’re an animator, you’re basically given one shot at a time. It’s locked down, you know how long it’s going to be, you have the audio already. You then animate to that and make sure everything matches. Once that’s animated and approved, it gets passed on to the lighting and compositing team where they put in the lights, they make it look beautiful, and it finally looks like the polished image you see on TV. 

DR: It sounds like you’ve done a little bit of everything in that pipeline. Which part is your favorite? 

JR: My favorite, and what I’ve gravitated toward most, is storyboarding. It’s the stage where you have the most creative freedom. You essentially start with a blank page, which is daunting in one sense, but also very fulfilling. It’s almost like you get to be a director, writer, and cinematographer all at once. I love being an animator, but when I was animating, I felt like the story had already been told. I could make it fun to watch and pretty to look at, but I didn’t have that much input into how the story was told, which is a part of the process that I really like.

DR: You mentioned the challenges of starting with the blank page. What is your approach to your craft? How do you go from a blank page to a finished storyboard?

JR: When I’m storyboarding, my process always starts the same way. I always start on paper. So much of our work is on the computer, but when I’m in that very early stage, I like to draw with just pencil and paper.

I’ll print off the script, write my notes on it, do whatever doodles come to mind as I’m reading, and then I bust out my notebook. And I’ll just divide a page into a bunch of little squares and just very roughly get an idea of what I want each shot to look like. That’s a fun way to start because it allows you to be very loose and your ideas can flow freely as you sketch. Once I have that done, which usually takes a couple of days, then I go into the Cyntiq (a tablet computer used by artists) and start storyboarding it.

DR: Are you working on one episode by yourself? Or are you working with a team usually?

JR: It’s different from show to show. On a show like StoryBots, I would be given an entire episode to board myself, the same goes for Frog and Toad. And that’s a lot of fun because you get to be kind of a mini-director of the episode when you’re doing that. On other shows you work on teams. When I was on Primos, I had one storyboard partner throughout the entire run of the show – Ainsley Dye. We would just split the work 50/50; one of us would take the first half of the episode and the other would do the second.

On other projects like Trick or Treat Scooby-Doo!, we had a team of about eight storyboard artists all working on one movie at the same time. It’s crazy watching the movie now because it comes off as one seamless project, but working on it I can remember each scene and who on the team boarded it.

DR: You mentioned a couple of the titles you’ve worked on there. What are some of the highlights of your career so far?

JR: Most recently, I worked on Primos for Disney Television Animation and I just love that show. The storyboard crew was insanely talented, and the animation style was a lot of fun to storyboard for. It’s a 2D show, so a lot of the exaggerated faces and drawings from our storyboards would make it into the final show.

The other highlight was StoryBots, because that was an independent company, and everything was animated in-house. Everything from the writing, to the storyboarding, to the animating was done in the same building. You even had different styles of animation in the same episode, so there were people doing 2D animation along with CG and even stop-motion animation under the same roof. I’ve never worked on anything else like it. 

DR: Our nieces are animation lovers as well. That must be cool for you to be able to say, “I make this stuff!”

JR: Absolutely. When I was working on StoryBots, they were too young to understand that people make TV shows, so when I said that I worked on the show they were like, “YOU KNOW THE STORYBOTS?” The characters interact with real-world stuff in the show, so I was like, “Heck yeah, I know them!”

And now with Primos, it was really cool to work on a show where the protagonist is a like a 9-10 year old girl because that’s the exact age of the older one of our two nieces. And she’s so much like her, it was really fun to put elements of myself and my family into the show. And they like it! Which is amazing! 

DR: What are some animated projects that you’re enjoying right now?

JR: Disney Television Animation has been on a really good run lately. They have some very talented people working over there. They’ve been putting out a string of original projects that are really great like Amphibia, The Owl House, Primos (which I worked on), and then Stugo, which is just coming out now. They’ve all been really fun and totally original.

Besides that, I’ve really liked all the great animated films that have been following in the footsteps of the SpiderVerse movies in terms of breaking the mold of CG animation. Mitchells vs. the Machines, The Wild Robot… it’s been really cool to see these 3D projects that respect the aesthetics of traditional animation and incorporate all these different textures and painterly qualities. They just look gorgeous. 

DR: For the young people out there who are maybe like you, drawing cartoons in art class and aspiring to one day be animators, what advice would you give them?

JR: The advice I would give is the same advice I received at that age, which is to just start making stuff. The resources nowadays are incredible – you can go on YouTube and pull up tutorials where people will teach you how to animate. And there’s so much free software today that didn’t exist when I was getting into animation. There’s nothing stopping you from making it on your own. I was recently inspired by the movie Flow, which just won the Golden Globe® for Best Animated Feature.

DR: I just watched that! It was great. 

JR: Yeah! It was amazing! And the story behind it is the animator, Gints Zilbalodis, made his own short film by himself when he was 17. It was a little crude, but he kept making more and more films and honing his craft, and then he was able to put a team together and make this amazing movie that won a Golden Globe®! So, look to stories like that and remember that there’s nothing stopping you from making art like this if you’re passionate and dedicated enough.