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I recently had the opportunity to speak with acclaimed VFX artist, Victor J. Garza. Victor is a Hair and Grooming Supervisor at DreamWorks Animation. You may have seen his work in Alvin & the Chipmunks, Kung Fu Panda: The Paws of Destiny, Dragons: The Nine Realms, and Fast & Furious: Spy Racers. At Dreamworks, Victor and his fellow artists developed new ways for hair and fur to become as detailed and realistic as possible for a 3D animated show. Victor’s incredible career and experiences are truly unique and his work is remarkable. Read more about him and his journey below.
Tell us a bit about yourself. What was your first job in the entertainment industry, and how did you decide to pursue your craft professionally?
I fell in love with animation and animated films at an early age. My father is an architect, but he always had a talent for illustrative drawing. Both of these things got me drawing as well. I loved drawing and hoped I could one day join the animation industry. Toy story came out and after seeing this film, I knew I wanted to pursue a career in 3D graphics.
Fast forward a few years, and when it was time to choose a career and a school to pursue my career of choice, I found a school that had a 3D animation program. This was a 2-year program in Houston, Texas. Once I completed that program, I continued my studies at a school in Los Angeles that had an expanded program in the same field.
Technically, my first job was an internship that crossed over to a job once I graduated. However, the job was short-lived, as the company folded within a month. Sometime after, Dariush Derakhshani reached out to me and a few of my fellow graduates for a job opportunity working for a start-up VFX studio. Dariush was one of my instructors while in school and always pushed for hiring entry-level talent at the studios he worked at. We are still friends to this day.
At this studio, we worked on Team America: World Police and Tim Story’s Fantastic Four. Dariush was the head of VFX at the studio and vouched for myself and a few other green artists looking to get their foot in the door. A few years later this studio folded, but at least I had some work to put on my resume that was relevant to my career of choice.
From there I continued to pick up gigs at commercial studios, doing generalist CG work, often working at some of these studios on consecutive projects, as they were happy with my work and I was happy to stick around for as long as they would have me.
Eventually, I was hired at Rythm & Hues, another studio that is no longer around, to do character fx, starting with the movie Alvin & the Chipmunks. This was when I started to narrow down my craft to a specialty, in this case, hair and fur dynamic simulation and related matters that were considered Technical Animation.
After this, I went back to commercial FX work at Psyop LA where I was a generalist CG Artist with a specialty in hair grooming and dynamic simulations. And after that, I started my tenure at Dreamworks Animation Television as a Hair Artist.
Tell us more about your work at DreamWorks.
Back in 2013, Netflix had made a noteworthy deal with DreamWorks to produce a large number of shows for multiple seasons each. This guaranteed DreamWorks had several years’ worth of work. It also meant DreamWorks had to build a Television division- this is where I come in.
At the time that the DreamWorks television team was being put together, a close friend of mine and fellow colleague was brought as a Surfacer for this start-up team. They needed a Hair Artist, and thanks to his recommendation, I was brought in for an interview and subsequently got the job.
The objective of this initial team was to build a 3D animation pipeline that would serve as the foundation for the 3D shows that were to be produced. I was responsible for developing workflows and standards for the Hair & Fur portion of the pipeline.
A lot of this type of work was new to me – I knew how to groom, but had never been in a position to develop how the hair would be created and work at such a large scale for an animated show’s production. It was very rewarding but very challenging. I was lucky that they had put together a really good team with very talented people that were easy to work with.
Since Hair does not work alone, the development work was done in close collaboration with the artists in charge of developing the other stages of the pipeline. The workflows and standards I created were used by dozens of artists to make Hair & Fur possible for a 3D show.
I also groomed the first few characters, which allowed me to act as an artist on the shows I was developing tools for. Years later, we continue to update & improve our process as well as shift our approaches as we work to meet the technological and artistic needs of every new show we work on.
How would you describe your artistic style?
If I had to describe my style with one word it would be pragmatic.
When I do artistic work, be it professional or personal, I approach it with a technical mindset. “How long do I have to work on ‘it’, what resources do I have to work with, what is the goal of the piece?”
With these questions answered, I can strategize where I should start, what areas will need the most attention, and work on it until I am either happy with the piece, or have no more time to work on it.
Since Hair Grooming is still very technically involved, I have to play with the balance of the final look, and how the piece was constructed. This is where the original goal of the piece comes into play.
When you are assigned a new project, what is the first step in your process?
The first step for me is to get details on the resources the production has to work with. This determines how we will need to approach the project.
The artistic goals of the production come second.
3D animated tv shows, no matter how simple they may seem, are all technically challenging. So I need to know what parameters we are working with in terms of producibility so I can provide informed guidance to the teams working on the designs, stories, and scheduling of a production.
The kinds of questions I ask are “How much time do we have before we start production, what kind of budget does the production have, what style of the 3D show is the production expecting to achieve?”.
The result of a project may be purely artistic once it lands on the screen, but it takes a lot of technical know-how, communication, and collaboration in order to get it onto screens.
I know this industry can require a lot of hours, but it is surely a labor of love. What do you all find to be the most fulfilling or favorite thing about your job?
Each project is a tech-heavy endeavor. It takes many hours of work to get workflows in place, document said workflows to share with the artist teams, build tools that help these productions work at volume, and most importantly, coordinate development with adjacent stages of a 3D pipeline and coordinate with the team’s artists working on any given project before we get to see it all put together.
My favorite part of the job is seeing the first images or clips of all our efforts put together in a fully rendered sequence.
It takes so many pieces to work together for a 3D show to come together, that it still makes me excited whenever I can say “Great, it’s working!”. At the same time, it gives me a sense of joy to see the cool art we make. The fact that I get to be part of making the type of work that inspired me to pursue this field and the chance that my work may be an inspiration for a younger generation to go “I want to do that when I grow up” is so fulfilling.
Do you have any last words of advice for anyone else who is an aspiring Hair & Groom Supervisor?
Keep learning, keep an eye on the industry’s technology trends and lastly, keep grooming.
My role as the Hair & Groom Supervisor is focused on the logistics of how to make awesome looking hair and fur for 3D shows, but I have to be able to create hair and fur at the same level we expect other artists to achieve so that I can set them on the right path as we go into production.
In today’s age, there is an interminable amount of resources to keep moving with technology and keep making really cool art.
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Thanks for reading! Learn more about Victor on IMDb or his website.
Watch Season 1 of DreamWorks’ Dragons: The Nine Realms on Hulu.
