Sit down with animator Aaron Notestine, and one of the first things he asks you to do is close your eyes and imagine a plane flying. It doesn’t have to be a cartoon plane. “Now, is it a wheel coming one inch off the runway? Because that’s how we get started with taking off,” he says. “Not the glorious up with the clouds, making money, man.”
Notestine is a Milwaukee-based co-founder, co-owner, and chief operating officer of Guerrillamation Films. He also used to work for Pixar, DreamWorks and Disney.
He’s leading an event Tuesday, March 25, at UW-Milwaukee's Lubar Entrepreneurship Center for “Tea @ the LEC” that will offer a chance to try out 2D, 3D and stop motion animation. But perhaps more importantly, Notestine says, it also covers the business aspects of striking out as an animator or starting an animation studio.
“The biggest fear for animators is not even doing the work — it’s promoting it,” Notestine says. “It’s saying, ‘Hey, I have something. Would you like to see?’ Because that potential vulnerability of, ‘Oh, god, are you going to hate it? Are you going to not be interested?’ But I want to. But how do I, and where do I go?”
Notestine’s path into animation began at North Carolina School of the Arts. His first year at the school was also the launch of its animation program, so Notestine and his classmates had to break ground. “We literally transformed a broom closet into our studio and there were brooms and mops in the corners until I graduated,” he laughs. “And so they told us to keep our hopes down.” It also didn’t help that there were no alumni of the school’s program with whom to network.
But Notestine had a dream. He wanted to work at Pixar and DreamWorks and Disney. Three of his teachers really believed in him and told him to keep applying.
"I applied 16 times to get into Pixar,” he explains. “I have 16 rejection letters that I have printed out ... The 17th time, my last time, as a senior — because I had started working at all these other places to impress Pixar — I finally got in. And that’s when people don’t ask about the 16 times [of rejection], they go: ‘You got in!’”
Notestine says there are some drawbacks, though, to working at one of the big and storied animation companies — like the fact that there’s no residual income. That’s money earned from sales if a film or project does well. “A lot of the unions who went on strike in L.A. for writers recently — it’s over increasing their residuals. Animators have none. And the idea of asking for some is a nonstarter for [the big companies]. So how do you, as an artist, navigate this world that is gig-to-gig and that, you know, comes with a lot of mysticism? How do you navigate it?”
He says it’s tough to strike out on your own, but some advantages include being able to live outside the West or East coasts in other parts of the country, like Milwaukee. Notestine says UW-Milwaukee is a fantastic resource — specifically the Peck School of the Arts. In some recent years, UW-Milwaukee has been ranked one of the top 25 film schools in the country by The Hollywood Reporter.
He says one personality trait that can make someone a successful animator is “a disproportionate amount of pain tolerance — inner pain tolerance. If you can deal with frustration and keep going, animation ... it fits like a glove, if you can endure it.”
He also calls the career, though, “a joy!”
And as for a favorite Pixar film? Notestine recommends WALL-E. “That opening first 30 minutes with almost no dialogue, I think, rewired me in a really cool way. All of the potential of what you can do with animation as a story and as a medium for telling a story. So, shout out Andrew Stanton on that one,” he says.
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