This animation director and compositor use tech to bring drawings to life

Tech has become a crucial part of the animation industry.

According to Rachel Headlam, animation director at University City-based JumpButton Studio, tech and animation are intertwined, especially in her interactions with compositors.

Headlam focuses on character design and visual development. And she works with compositors like Matt Pichette, who bring together all the elements of an animation — layering backgrounds, adding sound and lighting, making things move and doing visual fixes using the program After Effects, which Pichette described as “Photoshop for video.”

The pair recently worked together on a cartoon called “Pizza Girl,” which follows a 15-year old girl who runs into challenges as she tries to talk to her crush. As a director, Headlam developed the idea for the story and created the initial art.

Pichette helps determine the final look of the project, creating variations of the final product for her to choose from.

“Ultimately, the compositor’s job is to also encompass the vision of the director and how the whole look of it should be,” Pichette said. “Sometimes that vision may shift or adjust. Even at the very end, there’s still a learning process with making sure everything looks great together.”

Both Headlam and Pichette have art backgrounds, but Pichette said he learned about post production careers in college and chose to go that route. He said having an art background helps him to better understand the programs he works in now.

“What stood out from Matt was the fact that he also drew and had that knowledge,” Headlam said. “I think it’s super, super helpful to just have somebody on the team that is familiar with the different aspects of pre-production, and the production in general.”

Pichette said it’s valuable for anyone who works in animation to learn a skill that they don’t normally work in. Having that knowledge will inform how you do your job and how you collaborate with other people in the process, he said.

Headlam said in the process of creating an animation, collaboration is extremely important. She called out that JumpButton tries to keep its teams smaller, which fosters more collaboration between the tech and art teams and makes it easier to solve problems that come up.

“As an artist, I think the more you learn about different tech and different programs, and how the programs actually work, that can only really bolster you and prepare you as new programs and new, different avenues of creating digitally come out,” Headlam said.

Sarah Huffman is a 2022-2024 corps member for Report for America, an initiative of The Groundtruth Project that pairs young journalists with local newsrooms. This position is supported by the Lenfest Institute for Journalism.