Do successful animators follow similar paths as they move from student to success? We checked in with three animators at the top of their game. Two are rising stars within major studios – Ben Willis at DreamWorks Animation and Animation Mentor graduate Travis Tohill at the visual effects house Industrial Light & Magic (ILM). The third animator, Nicky Phelan, received an Oscar nomination this year for his short film Granny O'Grimm's Sleeping Beauty, created and produced at Brown Bag Films, a small studio in Ireland specializing in animated television series and commercials.

Phelan knew he was an artist from the time he was a child and discovered animation at a fairly young age. Tohill suspected he was an artist, but was a better musician than animator – at first. Willis didn't know if he was an artist or not, but he followed his gut instinct.

Three animators. Three character arcs.

Nicky Phelan - Dublin, Ireland

"As far back as I remember, I drew," Phelan says. "My mum has pictures from when I was three years old. Always, always I drew. I never remember not doing it."

No wonder. His mother studied art and his grandfather, the Irish poet Patrick MacDonogh, was also a painter. "My parents were very encouraging," Phelan says. "They never told me to go look for a real job."

When Phelan was 11 years old, he saw a booth for Dublin's Ballyfermot Senior College at a cartoon festival in Rathdrum, Ireland. The college's animation classes, started by Don Bluth and his colleagues in the late 1980s to train animators working in his studio, intrigued the young artist. "At school, I drew more than I studied," he says. "I realized that I could study drawing and work doing drawings."
 When he graduated high school, Phelan went to Ballyfermot and spent his introductory year drawing, painting, and studying the basics of animation and layout. When offered a chance to spend the final two years studying classical or computer animation, Phelan opted for classical.

After college, a Ballyfermot tutor asked Phelan and a friend to do an animation job. "We were inexperienced," Phelan says. "We didn't understand things like mastering. So we went to Brown Bag for guidance."

Brown Bag was quick to spot talent and hired Phelan to do inking, painting, and compositing, and soon, tested him on character design. That was six years ago. Since then, Phelan has directed two animated TV Crap Rap series which aired on Ireland's Radio Telefís Éireann (RTÉ) in 2006 and 2007, as well as his Oscar nominated short.

He based the short film on a performance by Kathleen O'Rourke at the Dublin Fringe Festival, and told the story using 3D and hand-drawn animation. "I trained classically and have a soft spot for 2D, but I think they're just tools. The principles are the same. It all boils down to posing, convincing emotion, and weight. The motivation should be what feels like the right fit for the story."

He and the rest of the crew at Brown Bag worked on Granny O'Grimm's Sleeping Beauty in off hours. "It was a lot of overtime," he says. "I fit it around my day job."

Now, his day job is directing a series for pre-school children. Someday, though, he hopes to direct a feature. "I'd love to do one here at home and tell Irish stories," he says. "We've got a good few of them."

In the meantime, he's happy with what turned out to be a real job. "I've ended up doing what I hoped to do," he says.

Travis Tohill - San Francisco, California

You'd think a guy raised in Nashville, Tennessee, might become a musician rather than an animator. And, Travis Tohill almost did. "I enjoyed drawing when I was young, but it didn't hold my attention as I got older," he says. "I think I had a bit of talent, but I didn't want to draw professionally."

Even so, the avowed movie geek studied digital production at Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU), not music. "I loved animated and regular features, Toy Story, Jurassic Park. I watched more bonus features than movies," he says. When he graduated, he had a BS with a major in digital animation, but it was a technical program. "I learned how Maya works," he says. "I knew nothing about animation."

He knew a lot about music, though. During college he had made money on the side playing drums in a band and went on the road with singer/songwriter Sean McConnell. He continued after he graduated while doing modeling and lighting for a company who created children's educational materials for DVD releases. "I had to animate a couple things by necessity," he says. "I didn't know what I was doing. My entire skill set was, 'Does this look weird?' But, I realized that if I could get good at this, I would really enjoy it."

So, in 2006, he traveled to SIGGRAPH in Boston to learn about animation, and there, an amazing thing happened. In an auditorium filled with 2,000 people, he sat next to an animator from Nashville. "I had visited the company he worked for, and it was like, wow, here he was in Boston," Tohill says."I started talking to him, and he preached the merits of Animator Mentor. If there was ever a sign from above, this was it."

But part way through Animation Mentor's Class 2, he had an offer to go on the road with McConnell. "I talked to my mentor, and he suggested taking a leave of absence to figure out what I wanted to do," Tohill says. "He said I could always come back."

So Tohill spent six months on the road. "I loved it," he says. "When you're on stage, it's amazing. But, the rest of the time you're in a bus, a van or a hotel room and it's kinda lonely. It wasn't the lifestyle I wanted."

At the end of the tour, Tohill told McConnell he was done. He moved back into his parents' house in Nashville. He got a part-time job in a coffee shop so that he'd have 30 hours a week for school. "I did Class 2 through 6 straight through," he says. "And, in the last three months of school, really the last two months, the light bulb went off. My shots started to work better. I don't know what the turning point was; I just started to understand visually where the shots should go."
 Tohill redid a shot he had created in Class 4 and put that plus a new piece created in Class 6 on a demo reel. "I hoped I could get a good entry level job in video games or commercials," he says, "and someday work my way up to films."

After he finished classes, on the spur of the moment, Tohill decided to use airline miles and attend the Animation Mentor graduation in San Francisco. "I thought I could hand out my demo reel at the job fair and get contact information for recruiters to stay in touch down the line."

The last table he stopped at was in ILM's booth. He stood in a long line of people handing demo reels to the recruiter. "You know, it's ILM," he says. "It's Jurassic Park. It's not just anything."

To his astonishment, the recruiter knew who he was. He describes the moment: "She said, 'I've seen your work. Do you have your cell phone on you today? What do you think about Transformers 2?' My head was a jumble. They wanted to set up a phone interview in two days. I almost threw up."

Tohill and his girlfriend were in a hotel room on vacation when ILM put through the conference call. "There were six or seven people online asking me animation questions," he remembers. "How do I work through shots? What do I like or dislike about video reference, acting, physical reference. I guess I handled it well, and they were super nice, but internally, I was going mad. It's strange to be on the phone with people who can just hand over one of your life's dreams."

Six days after graduating from Animation Mentor, Tohill was working at ILM. "It took me a bit to calm down and realize once you're working, you're just someone else working," he says. "You're not 'here's the new guy' It's a big team effort."

When Transformers ended, the ILM recruiters helped him find a job at Tippett Studios on New Moon in the Twilight series. And when that ended, he moved back to ILM to start on Iron Man 2. "Coming back the second time was better than the first," he says. "There was a massive turnaround in my work between the end of school and the beginning of Class 6, and now that I've worked for a year, I've learned even more. Every day I learn something new. Sometimes something small, sometimes something that blows my mind. I love being back here and I'm excited to see where it goes next."

Ben Willis - Glendale, California

When Ben Willis told his guidance counselor at a Catholic prep school in Massachusetts that he wanted to be involved in art, she handed him a booklet for the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD), and that started him down a road that led to DreamWorks Animation.

"I hadn't taken any art classes," Willis says, "But I drew. Silly doodles. My parents were scared for me, but I thought it sounded like fun. We visited several schools and SCAD felt just right. I saw a student spinning a 3D model of a human and knew that was exactly what I wanted to do." He had yet to learn about animation.

In modeling class, Willis had to animate the Tasmanian Devil he had sculpted in 3D as a final project, and he was hooked. "It was so much fun, I stayed up all night," he says. He went on to complete two short films in 3D, and those films impressed an alumnus working at Charlex in New York enough to hire him straight out of school.

"I had two dialogue pieces on my demo reel," he says. "My eye is different now, but I can see what they saw. My mechanics were pretty good and I think they saw potential, which is the most any student can hope for."

At Charlex, he worked on what was to become the studio's award-winning short film, One Rat Short. And after work, he created a new demo reel. "I felt my eye grew by leaps and bounds at Charlex," he says. "The biggest revelation for me was looking at animation on a frame-by-frame basis rather than looking at it from key-to-key; how one frame relates to the next frame. I also focused on composition. At school, I had struggled just to make something move right. Now, I could focus on heart and soul." And, on a long-held dream: He sent his new demo reel to DreamWorks.

"They put me in their outreach program," he says. During that six month trial period, he was able to work on shots of Po in Kung Fu Panda, and when the trial period ended, the studio offered him a job. He continued on Panda, animating a shot in a sequence that had Po under a peach tree stuffing his mouth with peaches. Willis's shot is of Po spitting out one peach and putting another behind his back.

"I thought I'd be clunked down in a pipeline, like I'd just be a cog in a wheel," he says. "But that couldn't be further from the truth. Making a feature film is collaborative. You're living in that world of animation where you want to live. Every day one of your peers creates something awesome you want to check out."
 When he stepped out of that world, he learned that personal artistic expression is only one reason to be there.

"I had seen Kung Fu Panda a bunch of times when I was working on it," he says. "But opening weekend, I went to a theater to see what a general audience would think. There was this one kid up front, and during the shot with Po and the peaches, he just died laughing, and I thought, 'this is why we do it.' Maybe this is going to be his favorite movie. Maybe Po will be his favorite character. Maybe someday he's down or feeling sick and this will cheer him up. That moment brought everything into perspective."

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Barbara Robertson is an award-winning journalist living in the Bay Area.