LearnStorm Growth Mindset: Animation Director on setting goals

My name is Lisa Labraccio. I'm 32 years old. I am an animation director at Ted Ed. I've always wanted to do animation, so it just, at whatever point in high school, when they tell you to start looking at colleges and what you might, where you might want to go and what you might want to do, I was very tunnel vision. This is the thing that I'm going to do.

So I eventually decided to go to the School of Visual Arts, which is here in New York as well. I chose that school because they had a very specific focus on traditional animation, which for whatever reason, is the thing that I really was sure I wanted to do. So, not 3D, not computer-generated animation, but hand-drawn traditional cell animation. I started school for that and was in my first year of school, worked as an intern on an animated film, a feature animated film.

That was a really cool project for me because he was still shooting that film on film and animating it on cell, even though a lot of places had moved on. He hadn't taken to digital yet, so I kind of got this opportunity to work on animation in a truly old school way. I was painting cells for him, and that was a totally free internship that I, you know, I wasn't paid. I just went during like three days a week during the summer. I commuted to New York to work on that project.

I started in animation in the independent animation world, which is the low end of that. I worked on documentary stuff and short films, festival films, projects, ads when they come in. But all, you know, that's the lower end of it. I work as an animation director and as an animator there. So, I actually work with that educator to ideate, so to make that lesson into that script into a video.

As an animation director, what will happen is that I will get a script early on in the process. From there, it's my job to research all of the information in that script. As I'm trying to, of course, it's been fact-checked when it's come to me already, so I'm not doing research in the typical sense, but more in a visual sense. So I'll look at other artists' work for inspiration, I'll spend some time on Pinterest. I'll be reading up a lot of extra information about the topic, looking at all the different theories and communicating with the educator quite a bit to ask questions and get more information.

Then from there, I start to put together a style board or a look and feel for the project. So I'll start to decide what method of animation I'll use because I work in traditional animation. I do stop motion, hand-drawn, a lot of tactile elements as well. Then I'll start to create characters and storyboards, and at that point, decide if I need other people on board with me to help me execute the project.

As animation directors at Ted Ed, we get creative freedom, so we do get to decide what style and what way to execute the project we get to do each time, which is a major perk. That said, if anything that we're doing is not in service of the information, so it's very important that we're creating an overall educational film. For what I do as an animation director, and especially working on educational material, it's important to be really strong with visual storytelling.

Some of that is something that just comes from having watched a lot of content, and some of it's from having made the content, worked under directors who made great decisions that you watched, and sometimes terrible decisions that you watched. So that way you can learn from that. But I would say that's the number one important skill is that visual storytelling, which comes with a sense of like what's best to have on screen to tell this story.