Jude Brownbill Revs Up Cars 2

By Bill Desowitz

Jude Brownbill and Holley Shiftwell were made for each other. Why not? It took a young British female animator to get under the hood of a young British female spy car. They were both relatively new to their professions, so that was an added plus as well. In fact, Brownbill set the tone for Shiftwell in Cars 2, her first feature since joining Pixar last year straight out of Animation Mentor.

Indeed, Brownbill was happily working as an animator at Blue-Zoo Productions in London, but had ambitions to work on animated features. She had been following Animation Mentor, so, in July 2008, she signed up, and subsequently left her job at the end of the year to pursue her animation studies full-time for the last four classes.

The time difference was a bit awkward for her, but Brownbill says it was well worth getting up at 4 a.m. for her animation training sessions. She was mentored by Sean Ermey (Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs), James Chiang (Open Season), Martin Hopkins (Shrek Forever After), Kevin Koch (Rio), Elliot Bour (The Lion King) and Greg Whittaker (How to Train Your Dragon).

"Because Animation Mentor takes you from basics to in-depth acting and performance, I was a bit apprehensive at first because I'd already gotten a degree in animation, and I didn't want to have to go back to the [basics] again," Brownbill admits. "But when I got to class one, I learned so much I didn't know that it was amazing. Then when it came to things like the acting and the dialogue, I think I had a good foundation with which to build upon. And I wasn't struggling so much with the technicalities of animation, so I could concentrate more on the performance."

During the last part of her 18-month tenure at the animation school, Brownbill completed a short, Crush, which helped her win the Mentor Choice award. It's about a girl who sits at Regent's Park and quietly eats her lunch by the fountain, who gets smitten with a guy that she tries to impress, but not before falling off the fountain and embarrassing herself. It was all about capturing believable performances.

"What was nice about it was there were no words — everything was communicated in pantomime," Brownbill explains. She relied on video reference, which was one of the most important lessons she learned at Animation Mentor. "You really have to be sure of who your character is before you can figure out gestures and expressions."

Brownbill graduated from the online animation school in January 2010 and sent her short to Pixar, where she was interviewed and immediately hired. Of course, she was very surprised that she landed at Pixar so quickly after graduation. Even though she got great feedback on her work at Animation Mentor, she wasn't sure what it really meant in terms of her professional value.

"I remember when I first saw her little short film in our reel review, I was really excited and said we've gotta get this girl," remarks Victor Navone, a mentor at Animation Mentor and directing animator of Cars 2. "It's great to get someone right out of school and bring them in here and nurture them. We always try to get a variety of people with production experience, but also people who are less experienced that can bring something fresh.

"There were ideas that she came up with about this woman in her situation that I would've never come up with because I'm not a woman. It was little observations she made about particular female behavior that were really entertaining to watch and felt honest. And that appealed to us."

And it was serendipitous for Brownbill to work on Shiftwell, whose nervous energy echoed Brownbill's. "They hadn't really animated Holley that much; and they got this big sequence when she's outside the Tokyo bathrooms and about to meet the American agent for the first time. And then this whole miscommunication occurs, so Shawn [Krause] and Dave [Mullins], the supervising animators, gave me that whole sequence to do, and it was my first ever on a feature film. This is where Animation Mentor helped me a lot. [For the] first shot briefing John [Lasseter] actually recorded on his iPad because he was so busy with the other departments. And so I was listening to him [describe] how Holley was feeling; how nervous she was and wanted to prove herself."

Brownbill had voice actress Emily Mortimer's recording sessions to draw on as well, and incorporated her mannerisms into Holley's. For example, during the sessions, Mortimer would nod or shake her head before she spoke. "She's so ahead of the game that she knows what to say before even saying it," Brownbill continues. "I tried to get Holley to be like that. And there was this nervous energy to her — always blinking. Sometimes, people would come to me for advice about her mouth shape and performance. I couldn't believe that! This was my first film!"

Animation is very subjective, she notes, but was pleased that her ideas were taken seriously and incorporated into the character.

"Statistically, there just aren't that many women in animation," Navone admits. "Our department at Pixar is about 10% female. I'm not really sure why that is, but it's really exciting for us to come across another woman who's a really good animator and brings that female point of view to the animation world."

If there was anything that Brownbill struggled with at first, it was technically mastering Pixar's proprietary software. A Maya user, Brownbill was glad there were only six controls and could ease into it. "And it was really good to get the essence of it with just a head or a tire jilt," she adds. "It was challenging but fun."

As fate would have it, Brownbill is now animating another British female: Queen Elinor (Emma Thompson) in Brave (June 22, 2012). It marks Pixar's first stab at a comedy/adventure with a fiery Scottish princess as the protagonist.

"It's really fun because I'm animating a British character -- a very regal one. It's a huge step up in complexity, but you just have to treat it the same. Do your video reference and try to find a bit of real life that you can put into it, and the mannerisms, really knowing the character and who she is, and trying to figure out a way she'd react to something."

It sounds like Brownbill has come full circle back to her Animation Mentor experience with Crush.