David Navarro has liked drawing ever since he was a child. He used to drive his mother crazy by drawing storms and other shapes from weather reports all over the furniture.

Predictably enough, after High School David took the Academy of Fine Arts admission exam, and passed it easily enough, which didn't prepare him for the shock of finding his skills entirely insufficient to keep up with the classes, so he signed up for a state-run formation course in painting. They never did call David back, though, and eventually he dropped out of Art School (he wanted to be a commercial artist, and the rarefied, elitist atmosphere at the Academy was not conducive to that goal). Some time afterwards, David got a call from the Department of Employment offering him an animation course in lieu of the painting course. He said yes, and the rest is, well, history.

After some freelancing in Madrid, David got a job as an Inbetweener at Amblimation, in London, and worked his way up to Assistant Animator and then Key Assistant Animator over the following five years. At the same time, David was working at home on a Commodore Amiga, on his own CG animation projects, and when a vacancy opened in the EFX department to help with the snow on "Balto", he jumped at it. From that moment on, his fate was sealed; David hasn't picked up a pencil, professionally at least, since that day.

After Balto wrapped, the entire studio was absorbed by DreamWorks SKG and relocated to Los Angeles to start production on The Prince of Egypt, and afterwards The Road to El Dorado. At the end of this movie there were massive layoffs, and David found himself on the street with over a hundred others. Being on a non-resident visa, David was forced to leave the US.

After this, David worked as a lighting artist for Stardust Entertainment, a German studio workig on a full CG TV series, but he decided it was time to fulfill a childhood dream and get a job at a games company, so he resigned from Stardust, and currently works as an Animator for Eurocom Entertainment.

David's Thoughts on Production:
Mostly, I think that the greatest problem with some productions is not doing a sufficient amount of planning ahead. The time to exercise creativity is at the script and storyboard stages; those are the moments for self-doubt, experiment, struggle and scratching everything and beginning afresh as many times as it's necessary. But once a course of action is set, a script fixed and a storyboard settled on, then all effort should be directed to put what's there on the screen, and nothing else. Basically, there should be infinite creativity when the production is still mostly inside someone's head, and a lot of discipline and control once it hits the real world. There is nothing quite so painful as watching whole sequences, fully animated and colored, hitting the cutting-room floor because of poor planning or script changes.