BONUS: Joshua Beveridge — The Journey of an Animator Creating Spiderman: Into the Spider-Verse

Dec 25, 2018

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Today’s conversation is a crash course into the journey of an animator. It’s about how a young man who never met an art medium he didn’t like chose to pursue a highly competitive and challenging career and truly thrived in his art form. We follow Joshua Beveridge’s early memories in a home filled with art history books, as a kid always painting and drawing or sculpting, to attending a College of Art and Design to being the Animator Director on "Spider-man: Into the Spider-Verse".

Joshua Beveridge is a Head of Character Animator at Sony Pictures Imageworks. His other titles have included Animation Director and Supervising Animator. Beveridge earned his BA in Computer Animation from the Ringling College of Art and Design before landing his first professional job on Disney’s adaptation of C.S. Lewis’ “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.” Since then he’s worked on various teams as a Character Animator, Supervising Animator or Lead Animator in popular films such as “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2,” “Alice in Wonderland,” “Hotel Transylvania 2,” “Arthur Christmas,” “The Amazing Spider-Man 2,” and “Storks.” His work on Warner Bros “I Am Legend,” starring Will Smith and Alice Braga, garnered a 2008 Visual Effects Society Award nomination for Outstanding Performance by an Animated Character in a Live action Motion Picture. Beveridge’s latest animated feature film “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” has broken the mold (again) for telling stories.

Quotes:

“The idea of animation being a job people did was kind of like a lightbulb, aha, moment.”
“You have to be comfortable with making things. Just making something is better than trying to make something perfect and letting that paralyze you from trying.”
“We’re manipulating every single shape and motion and form is sculpted, crafted, posed and a decision. Nothing happens accidentally.”
“Talent is such a small percentage of anything really great. Work ethic is the most important. Work ethic runs circles around talent any day and I was an early subscriber to that.”
“The actual process of truly being an animator I didn’t learn until on the job and I think that’s a luxury that I don’t think exists anymore.”
“I feel like with every promotion I’ve gotten it’s really just been another way to help more animators.”
“There’s nothing impulsive about animation.”
“If you are afraid in art that’s usually an indication that you’re on the right path.”
“There’s no such thing as enough information. All we’re doing is trying to be as observant as possible.”