Nathan Jensen
FANTASTIC ANIMATOR

As a kid, I wanted to grow up and be an animator. I LOVED Ralph Bashki's, "Hobbit" and "Lord of the Rings" and I looked forward every Christmas for the Rankin/Bass stop motion and animated specials. 

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Post college with a Fine Arts degree from the University of Texas, I got my chance. My then roommate, Bob Sabiston, created an animation software program he named 'Color Engine'. He did some work for MTV with it which led to work for PBS. What was wonderful about the animation software was that it was very accessible to the artist's 'right brain'. There was no plotting of x,y,z coordinates. You just drew a line, advanced forward in a timeline and drew another line. His software took care of the inbetweens.

 

Our work caught the eye of Richard Linklater. The 'swim' of the computer generated inbetween lines and shapes was perfect for an idea he had for a film about dreaming. "Waking Life" was born. 

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Post production, I went on to work on various freelance animation projects. Most notable of them was working with Robert Krulwich on "Our Genes Our Choices" on PBS. Here I got to shine in full animation production. As Robert put it -"You are a true storyteller.". 

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I signed on with Peter Barg's boutique studio - ZAnimation. Here, I directed and animated Caleb Kane's music video for Warner Bros, "Go Mad" as well as did work for Microsoft through TBWA/Chiat/Day. 

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I moved on and worked again for Linklater on his movie, "A Scanner Darkly" starring Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr., Woody Harrelson and Winona Rider. 

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Present day, I recently finished work as lead animator on another Richard Linklater film - Apollo 10 1/2 starring Glen Powell, Jack Black and Zachary Levi released on Netflix. For this project the production studio, Minnow Mountain, used rotoscoping techniques using TVPaint animation software. I was also able to work with them on season 2 episodes of the Amazon series, Undone. 

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