“I NEED A CINTIQ AND PHOTOSHOP IN MY OFFICE”
Aaron couldn’t get studio execs excited about his film. It was time to make the leap into digital…
“I was working on a film called the King of the Elves and everything I was doing was still traditional. But the film was going to be digital, a 3D film, with a very photo-realistic look. I was having a hard time getting the executives to see what I saw in my head from these little watercolour sketches. They couldn’t make the leap. I realised: ‘Okay, this thing that I had been fearing for years, this digital world, I’m going to have to get over that fear.’
Luckily for me, I was working for Disney. I said: ‘I need a Cintiq and Photoshop in my office.’ Next day, they were there. I had a friend of mine, Andy Harkness, one of the art directors on Moana, show me how to use it. ‘How do I open a document? How do I draw in layers?’ All this kind of stuff.
I sat and worked probably for 12 hours straight just doing drawing after drawing. I was so enamoured with this new medium. I didn’t put it down for weeks. I would dream about it, get up the next day, sit down, and just start working again. I figured out that I could bring in my own digital photographs and mix them with my paintings and create worlds and textures that
I just couldn’t do traditionally.
I was finally able to create worlds, images that looked like the final frame I wanted to create in the film. I started getting the executives excited about the film. Then I was pitching the movie to Steve Jobs and a few other Disney executives. At the end, Steve Jobs pointed up at one of my images up on the wall, a digital image, and he said: ‘That’s the movie we want to see.’ I’ve never looked back since.”