Recent UCLA Magazine Article About Workshop Alumni Gil Kenan's "Monster House"

Monster Man

By Anne Burke

Gil Kenan (MFA '02) is living a Hollywood dream. The whole thing -- the big studio movie, the red-carpet interviews, the posters on the sides of MTA buses -- is almost unfathomable to Kenan, who not long ago was making short films in the kitchen of his "super seedy, well-south-of-Pico" bachelor pad. When asked about his improbable career trajectory, Kenan can only blurt, "I know, it's ridiculous!"

Kenan, 29, is the director of Monster House , the scary-funny animated movie due out from Sony Pictures on July 21. Monster House is executive produced by Robert Zemeckis and Steven Spielberg, who hired Kenan mostly on the strength of a short, black-and-white film called Lark , which Kenan made as his thesis project in the film program at UCLA.

Monster House could easily have gone to an A-list director. But recognizing Lark as the work of a fresh talent and original thinker, Zemeckis and Spielberg were willing to go out on a limb for a 26-year-old who had never directed a feature film.

Kenan is talking to UCLA Magazine from his office on the Sony Pictures Lot in Culver City. He's leaving for New York that afternoon for a Q&A, in front of a live audience, with the New York Times critic Janet Maslin. It's the first stop in a press tour that will take Kenan from Mexico City to Singapore. Along the way, Kenan will sneak off for a belated honeymoon with his new wife, Eliza Chaikin, an art director with

whom he's working on his next movie, a science fiction fantasy called City of Ember . Just a few days earlier, Monster House screened at the Los Angeles Film Festival, before an enthusiastic crowd at the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre.

Kenan has a Beatles- esque mop of dark hair, not unlike the young hero in Monster House . DJ Walters is a precocious and curious 12-year-old who is a good egg, no thanks to distant and self-absorbed parents. DJ's best friends are the chubby Chowder, who wears a super-hero cape and is mostly unburdened by intelligence, and Jenny, who is smart and sophisticated beyond her years.

Something mysterious and scary has been happening on DJ's tree-lined street in suburbia. Old man Nebbercracker's derelict-looking house terrorizes the kids on the block by swallowing errant basketballs and tricycles. When DJ and his pals set out to uncover the evil that lurks in the heart of Nebbercracker's house, all manner of madness ensues.

The Monster House script came to Kenan after Creative Artists Agency (CAA) signed the young UCLA grad about three years ago. But Kenan says none of it would have happened were it not for the School of Theater, Film and Television's Spotlight Awards, held each year at the Directors Guild of America on Sunset Boulevard. In 2002, Lark was among 10 student shorts screened at the event, which gives aspiring filmmakers the chance to show off their work before an industry audience.

In the audience that night was a CAA assistant. At the end of the evening, he asked Kenan for a copy Lark .

Kenan is telling the story sort of breathlessly, as if it just happened. "And within a couple of days, there was this buzz around the (CAA) building about the tape. And, like two days later -- something crazy -- they have an officewide meeting where the all agents were present and they screened the movie for everyone. Yeah! It was really amazing. They asked for a show of hands of who wanted to represent me, and I guess a bunch of agents raised their hands."

Kenan read about 200 scripts at CAA before Monster House came along. "I flipped out. It was by far the best script I had read," he said.

As an untested director, however, Kenan was a long shot. "It was explained to me when I read it that they could probably sneak me into a meeting but that's probably all it would be. There was a long list of directors they were meeting with, who were all pretty notable."

Kenan was so excited about Monster House that he immediately started hand-sketching all the elements in the movie -- the characters, DJ's street, and most importantly Nebbercracker's house, which, true to the movie's title, is a monster that heaves and growls and lurches about. "It's a really

out-there concept, so it's important that whoever gets to tell the story isn't afraid of the idea of a house that can move around on its own," Kenan said.

Kenan also had an ace up his sleeve in the form of a plot twist that wasn't in the original script. Zemeckis and Spielberg loved Kenan's idea. (It's a spoiler, so you'll have to see the movie.) A few days later, Kenan got a phone call with the good news. "I screamed and flipped out," Kenan recalled.

Kenan filmed Monster House using a process called motion capture, which is a blend of live-action cinema and computer-generated imagery. Monster House stars three newcomers (Mitchel Musso, Sam Lerner and Spencer Locke) as the intrepid trio, plus an impressive line-up of familiar names -- Steve Buscemi, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Kathleen Turner, Jason Lee and others. But the cast did much more than read dialogue into a microphone.

Kenan gathered his actors on a 20' by 20' box-like soundstage on the Sony lot. The performers donned wetsuit-like outfits with plastic reflective markers at various points from head to toe. As the actors performed scenes, Kenan's crew made a digital recording of their movements. ("I had a whole neighborhood built of foam houses and had [Turner] stomp around and rampage," Kenan laughed.) The data generated from the recording was used to chart the movements of the computer-generated -- so called CG -- characters in Monster House . The result is that DJ, Chowder, Jenny and the rest of the Monster House gang move their bodies like real people do.

The way the characters look is something else entirely. Kenan's characters are stylized in an unusual way that reflects the director's background in puppet animation. The characters have oversized heads and stilt-like legs. "It's really important when you're doing a film like this with human performances, you don't want to recreate the performance on screen, you want to caricature it," he said. The skin of the characters has a clay-like texture that is unlike the flat, shiny skin often seen in CG characters. "That drives me crazy," Kenan says.

In just a few short years since leaving UCLA, Kenan has assembled much of the accoutrement of a Hollywood somebody -- things like an assistant who makes phone calls for him and tells people that "Gil Kenan will be with you in just a moment." He's still a little uncomfortable with it all, and people who know him say that he's not that way at all.

"The thing I like about him is that he's incredibly talented, but it hasn't gone to his head," said Douglas A. Ward, a visiting assistant professor who knew Kenan at UCLA. "He's just a guy you would meet at a party."

Kenan, for his part, realizes that it could all be gone tomorrow. Just in case, he's been carrying around a digital camera and shooting photos of the Monster House poster on MTA buses.

UCLA Magazine , July, 2006

"Winning Draw"

By Kate Stanhope
DAILY BRUIN CONTRIBUTOR
kstanhope@media.ucla.edu

The walls are covered with character stills, fliers and movie posters. Large wooden drawing desks dating back to the 1930s border the large classroom in Melnitz Hall; sprawled in the middle are more tables, splotted in every known color of paint. The wooden desks were, once upon a time, where the Walt Disney magic happened in its early days, and now it's where the magic happens for the UCLA Animation Workshop in the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television - home to a long string of successful leading animators, animation production heads and animation professors, among others.

Two recent alumni who can now be added to that already long list are 2005 graduate Shane Acker and 2002 graduate Gil Kenan.

Acker's senior-thesis film "9" went on to win both the Student Television Academy Award for Best Student Film and Motion Picture Student Academy Award, and will vie for Best Animated Short at the Academy Awards this Sunday. Acker has also struck a deal with Focus Features to direct a feature-length version of "9" with the backing of Tim Burton.

Kenan, on the other hand, is prepping for Sony's summer release of his feature animated film "Monster House," backed by Steven Spielberg and Robert Zemeckis; the film shares many aspects with his UCLA award-winning student film "The Lark."

The UCLA Animation Workshop was established in 1947 by Bill Shull, a former Disney animator, and founded on Shull's philosophy of "one person, one film," where one student is solely responsible for every aspect of their film, from the opening shot to the closing credits. The program is still based firmly on that philosophy today.

"The purpose of 'one person, one film' ... is so that you can put your personal vision on film," workshop chairman Professor Dan McLaughlin said. "They take away their personal view of animation, what it can achieve, their love for it, and what they want to do in animation. They also know the process of making an entire animated film."

Acker credited the "one person, one film" approach as a major factor in the workshop's success.

"That philosophy has really prepared me because now I know all of the aspects and possibilities," Acker said. "It's more about training you as a filmmaker, not just an animator. It's up to you to choose your direction."

Kenan emphasized the approach's flexibility. "What makes school so great is that it is an individual effort," he said. "What fails and succeeds is totally on you. At every other program, there is a very rigid program but (at UCLA) there was a lot of room for experimentation. The reason I went there was that I knew I would really be able to find my own voice in Dan's program."

The three-part undergraduate courses teach basic animation skills, storyboards and production skills, while the graduate program covers everything from the basic principles of traditional animation to the ins and outs of computer animation.

"We train people so they can have their own studio," McLaughlin said. "We don't train people for the first job they have, but for the last job they have. The purpose of all animation programs is to learn by doing. All (the classes) are production-oriented."

The supportive atmosphere created by staff and fellow students is vital.

"Faculty resources allowed me to do what I did; I couldn't have without their support," Acker added. "The greatest strength (of the workshop) is your peers. You lean on each other a lot for feedback and criticism. It creates an interesting environment to learn and grow together."

Now that both are deep in work within the industry, they are prepared to learn a few new lessons, one of which is the ability to communicate with the team involved with the film.

"It's still you and a story. The difference is now there are 100 people working to make it happen; it's a process of learning to work with others and keep your vision," Kenan said.

The only major problem in the UCLA Animation Workshop, according to McLaughlin, is the number of students who are able to find full-time work quickly and thus leave the program before earning their degree.

Acker, for example, left for Australia in the middle of his work at UCLA to work on animation for the "Lord of the Rings" films. Fortunately for him, he felt compelled to return.

"I really believed in the film that I was making ('9'). I had a feeling this film would open a lot of doors for me," he said. "I remember (animation director) Mark Anderson lectured saying, 'You're never going to have this opportunity to tell your own story again.' I tried to take that to heart as much as I could."

The Daily Bruin , Thursday, March 2, 2006

Recently the UCLA Animation Workshop was the recipient of a "Eastman Kodak Product Grant" for $2000.00 worth of film. Special thanks To Eastman Kodak for this wonderful gift.

SHANE ACKER - MFA Animation, Graduated 2005

Shane and his graduate thesis film, "9" have been on a meteoric ride ever since its completion in 2005. As of this writing Shane has been nominated for an Academy Award. The film has become a huge hit in the festival circuit from Sundance to the Student Academy and Emmy awards where it took the gold for top honors. There is even an image from "9" on the first page of Animation Magazine's annual 2006 guide to schools that teach animation.

What's more "9" is being turned into a feature film in conjunction with Tim Burton and Focus Features. The best part is Shane will be co-writing with Pamela Pettler and directing the project, not bad for someone just graduating from the UCLA Animation Workshop. Although truth be told, Shane did gain some previous feature film experience working on the third "Lord of the Rings" feature in New Zealand. For most of our students, once they go to work in the industry we don't usually

See them again, but to Shane's credit, he still managed to finish his thesis, which was "9".

"9", is a loose adaptation of "Beowulf" set in a post apocalyptic landscape, pitting a small burlap covered character against a giant, cat-like machine. That description barely scratches the surface of this remarkable film that Shane created using Maya 3D software.

During Shane's tenure as a student in the Animation Workshop he was a teaching assistant for our Maya class before going off to New Zealand. Two other projects he created here at the Workshop were, "Hangnail" and "The Astounding Talents of Mr. Grenade", the first created in 2D and the second a 3D film animated with Maya software. These two hilarious films have also been very popular on the festival circuit.

While Shane was working on his thesis he spent many hours in our Walter Lantz Digital Animation Studio where he had access to an animation desk and all the digital tools he needed to complete his film. We are sorry to see him go, but the Workshop is extremely proud of his accomplishments and we look forward to watching for his future success.

Amy Winfrey - MFA - Graduated 2000

Amy Winfrey who attended the UCLA Animation Workshop from 1997-2000

has left her mark on our program. The Workshop website that you are now visiting was designed by Amy for us and is only now going through its first major revision since its inception. Good design lasts a long time. (The Workshop website was originally constructed by another alum, Chris Fria.)

For Amy, Web based animation has been a thriving business making her both a successful independent and commercial animator.

During her time as a graduate student she created three films, "The Clummyrat and the Wooseblossom" - A nonsensical whatnot about a rat and a flower and various beasts.

"One Windy Wednesday"- One windy Wednesday all the "W's" blew away...

"The Bad Plant"- A potted plant plots and plans to leave his happy home.

This last film won a gold Student Academy Award, an honor she shared with another MFA from the Workshop, JJ Martinez, who won the gold for, "Luz".

As fate or luck would have it, Amy ended up writing for an animated series that JJ was directing called, "Cloud Trotters". She also worked as an animator for, "South Park", on both its TV and feature productions.

  Amy's other work goes back to the Internet, here is a list of her projects in her words; "I wrote, created and animated an Internet series called "Big Bunny" for

a company called Nibblebox (now defunct). "Muffin Films" - 12 little films about muffins.   This was my thesis project at UCLA.

"Big Bunny" - A web series about a 20 foot tall carnivorous rabbit who

likes to tell stories to tender children.

"Making Fiends"- A series about a little blue girl that makes friends and

a little green girl who makes fiends.

She also, had a tremendously popular website here at the Workshop called,

"The Traffic Cone Preservation Society". This fictitious organization dealt with

the world of orange traffic ones, and would receive numerous daily hits and fan mail.

Currently, Amy is working with Nickelodeon to develop her, "Making Friends", project into a television series. We wish her much success and hope that she will be able to maintain her unique storytelling and animation style when she makes the jump from the web to TV. When asked what she plans to do in the future, she answered, "I plan to keep creating shows". That is good news!

Dori Littell -Herrick - MFA Animation, Graduated 2005

Dori had two student careers in the UCLA Animation Workshop, the first in the 1970's and the second in the 21 st century. What follows is her story or more precisely, her journey from education to the animation industry and back to education. In 1972 she began her graduate studies in the Workshop, but in 1975 left before completion of her degree to start a family.   Two years later she started her first job for the animation studio of Steve Bosustow. Over the following 25 years Dori worked for numerous studios around town in many different capacities, here is a short list with highlights in her words:

"...Filmation was a fun place to work but not exactly classic animation.   I met

a lot of artists there who became classic animation stars, Tom Sito for one."

(Note: Tom Sito now teaches an animation course here at the Workshop.)

"Film Fair was my first commercial job and I really still love commercial

work because it is short and sweet.

Disney was, well, difficult, but Little Mermaid is a great film and I got to

work with Glen Keene.

Kroyers is still my all time favorite.   The artists were great, the projects

fun, and I was most proud of my work there as an artist.

Metro Cel was a detour into digital paint.

Rich Entertainment was a freelance job that worked me back into the business

after a bad bout of carpel tunnel.

Warner Feature Animation was a real learning experience, and I made the jump

to development which was great.

My most recent job was Assistant Director for Pepper Films doing

commercials."

After leaving UCLA, Dori got married and had two children, Ray and Ame, and soon after began her animation career. Yet, even though she was working and parenting she still managed to take time to teach. As a visiting professor, Dori taught two courses here at the Workshop, "Principles of Animation", and the "Process and Principles of Animation", which got into developing pitches for shows. She also taught at the California Institute of the Arts and at the American Animation Institute.

Dori enjoyed teaching so much that after leaving Warner Brothers Feature Animation she decided that she wanted to finish her MFA and learn more about computer animation. She convinced UCLA that she was serious about returning and she was readmitted. While here she created the three films including her thesis; "181C: The Ups and Downs of an Animated Film", an autobiographical project of her career as told from the point of view of an unfinished animated film.

After finally receiving her elusive MFA she was hired in August 2005 by Woodbury University in Burbank, California. Dori is now the Chair of Animation in the School of Architecture and Design. When asked what plans she

had for the future, her response was this; "to teach the next generation of animation artists, work on my personal films, and enjoy a new role in the animation industry".

Given her track record we have no doubts that she will achieve these goals.