Milking the Pro's - Part 3

Dave Levy was a director on "Blue's Clues" and is an Animation Director on Cartoon Pizza's upcoming series for the Noggin channel, "Pinky Dinky Doo."

JF: What's the hardest thing about being an animation director?

DL: An animation director's challenge is to juggle many responsibilities and duties at once. You're giving notes on upcoming episodes while you're delivering another to post and you've got episodes brewing in every stage in between at all times. Ok, that's the work. The harder challenge can be working with so many people. As an animation director, you usually report to your producer and or/ Supervising Director. Then there are healthy relationships that need to be maintained with department heads in storyboard, design, edit and so on. Oh yeah, then there's the whole bit where you direct the animators.

JF: What's the biggest perk?

DL: The biggest perk of being a director is that you get a chance to fail at a much larger scale with far greater consequences. I feel lucky that as a director I have an ongoing opportunity to further improve my skills in regards to craft, working with people, and in time/ deadline management. I've made my share of mistakes along the way and each one has been a learning experience. You never get it all right all of the time (How boring would that be?)