FINDING NEMO visual development

Finding Nemo was the first time I’d ever worked for Pixar. As a freelance visual development artist, I worked mostly at home under production designer Ralph Eggleston’s capable supervision.

At that time, Pixar was struggling to increase its bandwidth to do more than one movie at a time. As amazing as it is to believe now, back in the year 2000 Pixar had trouble filling positions, because the main focus of the late 90s/early 00s animation boom was in Los Angeles, and it was hard to crew-up anywhere else.

Pixar was not yet a huge studio with multiple parallel production pipelines and most of their bandwidth was being used on Monsters, Inc., which was then in the heat of production, and most Pixar staff artists were focused on that, so the NEMO team had to use available freelance artists like myself.

I must have jammed on visual development for about 6 months or so, until they assembled a proper art crew. I drew fish, sharks, turtles, birds.. you name it. It was a really fun time.