SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. (KRON) - A Bay Area animator is back in the spotlight for a project he did years ago.
The movie business can run very slow sometimes but it's not the first project he's been involved in that's turned a lot of heads.
“I was an illustrator in Atlanta. Self-taught animator and have been very fortunate to work with some great people,” Jamy Wheless said.
Great people like George Lucas who had Jamy Wheless bring to life a memorable star wars character.
“When I was working on Yoda, it was really kind of the turning point in my career because I was breathing life into this little guy. And it just was exhilarating. I couldn't do get enough. And so then I went on with Hulk and worked with Ang Lee and the Pirates of the Caribbean,” Wheless said.
It was on that film that he created one of the most amazing special effects characters of all time, Davey Jones and his tentacled beard.
“What we do as animators is you, you drill down into that, the psychology of what's really going on there. So you can project that through the digital creature,” Wheless said.
A few years ago he was approached with another idea.
“What was fun is we actually got to design from, you know, ground zero a mermaid, and that was quite a task,” Wheless said.
In 2009, he rented the Petaluma Municipal swimming pool and started improvising underwater with a model to try to get the animated character's expressions and movements down.
“We did it on the fly. I mean we basically had about three months to pull this together so development and design was not complete, but it was good enough to show that we were well on our way,” Wheless said.
The end result was this mythical creature, which can now finally be seen in "The King's Daughter" starring Pierce Brosnan, released more than a decade after he made the mermaid.
“It's, it's amazing films get made and we're an independent film, so it made it even harder,” Wheless said.
Ever since George Lucas put Petaluma on the movie-making map with "American Graffiti" almost fifty years ago, the Sonoma County city has become a magnet for artists of all stripes.
“We left ILM to start Light Stream back 15 years ago, I just felt Petaluma had that real old culture and that charm and that character in its own town,” Wheless said.
Jamy's next project is a short animation feature about a puppy. If audiences can identify with a Yoda or a Hulk, a cute puppy is a slam dunk.
“It's a very simple, the heroes journey. Basically, we all live that life, you know, where, where we overcome adversities and, and have to bust through our fears. And that's what the story is,” Wheless said.
from KRON4 https://ift.tt/xRsk8p1
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