How did Ana Maria Alvarado get started in animation?
After living in Nicaragua, the US and Sweden Ana attended FAMU Film School in Prague and finally landed at NYU Film School in 1992.

Ana had a habit of choosing the challenge she was least likely to conquer. While at NYU she realized she had no idea how animation was created or how a computer worked, so she signed up for a computer animation class. A few months later she took the class again, just for fun. Deep down inside she knew this was the beginning of something.

Oddly enough, after graduation, no film work was coming her way, and she soon found that the computer animation "hobby" was slowly becoming a career. To make sure she wasn’t making a total fool of herself Ana enrolled in a traditional animation course, bought way too many books, went to SIGGRAPH (when she could afford it) and joined the CG-Char list (a cg character animation email list). After freelancing a couple of months in NY, where she worked on - amongst other things - a Dave Letterman Top 10 List, Ana finally got steady work at Ernst & Young, an accounting firm with a fledgling multimedia department.

After two years of working for accountants (not a bad lot - really!) in 1997 Ana moved to LA with a job offer from Metrolight Studios. Right away she worked on the lead character for Poseidon's Fury, a MCA Universal Florida ride-film. Soon after she animated Draco, the young dragon in "Dragonheart II" (otherwise known as "Dragonheart: A New Beginning"- at a video store near you). As "Dragonheart II" came to an end Ana began to develop an animation project called, "The Donkey" based on a fable by Aesop, all set in a sleepy Latin American village.

Just as things with "The Donkey" started to get going, Ana joined Sony Pictures Imageworks, where she's animated bacon, worms, broomsticks, mice and other odd fellows. Her recent credits there include, "Hollowman" ( Kevin Bacon), "Harry Potter" (the broomsticks), "Evolution" (the worms) and most recently "Stuart Little II" (the mice and other odd fellows).

Ana's thoughts on production:
My thoughts on production are more like meditations. There's fun to be found in every production, you just have to concentrate on the lava-lamp on your desk. Never drink black coffee in the afternoon, wait until evening when your day just gets started. Always save your file every hour - and if you live in California, pray. And always, ALWAYS, eat something before you go to dailies, 'cause lets face it, animation without any sound, is VERY VERY quiet, and if you have a rumbling stomach like me, it can be a major embarrassment.

And now, a serious thought: be your own worst critic, and when that doesn't work, get a second opinion. After hours of staring at looping frames it's really difficult to distinguish what works and what doesn't. Get a fresh perspective.

Also I think one thing that always really helps me with character animation is being able to have mental library of interesting characterizations. I can't always seem to remember the name of the movie or the exact person I saw doing a specific gesture - but if it impressed me as a gesture that communicated something - I will try to hold it in my mind. Drawing is a great way to do this - you're forced to really study the parts that make up an expressive pose.

Finally, I'm in awe of the power of timing (or what Boleslavsky calls "rhythm" in ACTING: the first six lessons). I try to spend some time at the beginning of a shot just moving keys around, trying to find the right spots for the accents, and how much emphasis to give them. To me, this is the real fun part of animating - forget the lava lamp.

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