Chatham native shares in Spider-Verse Globe win
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, which won the Golden Globe for best animated feature, has a connection to Southwestern Ontario through Chatham native Lisa Bechard, the movie’s digital producer. Although she had a major role in the production, Bechard didn’t attend this week’s gala event, noting invitations are typically limited to executive producers and directors because of the small venue. Instead, Bechard, 51, watched the Golden Globes with her parents, Ron and Jean Bechard, at their home on the outskirts of Chatham.
She said since the best animated feature was the second award presented “there was no time to get nervous.”
Bechard admitted being surprised that Spider-Verse won the award, figuring Incredibles 2 would get the nod.
“I’m responsible for the movie once it is production-ready,” she said of her job as a digital producer. She said after storyboarding (a guide for the sequence of images) and voice recording have been completed, “then they’re ready to actually move it into animation to actually create the visuals.” Bechard said she was responsible for the crew and the schedule for the production process — “right from modelling all the way through to the final delivery of the final picture.”
Although this is the first Golden Globe-winning project she has worked on in her 20-plus-year career in the digital animation industry, Bechard said winning is exciting and great for the movie. “But I think I’ve spent too much time in L.A. to be too dazzled by it,” she said.
Working in digital animation was an unexpected opportunity for Bechard. While attending the University of Ottawa, she met people who were producing government videos and that landed her a job at a company called Planet Pictures. While there, she was recruited by a producer with Toronto-based Core Digital Pictures who was looking for an experienced production co-ordinator for a new live-action hybrid television series called Lexx, which first aired in 1997.
“In the late 1990s, we started doing full-animated television series and our first series was Angela Anaconda,” Bechard said. The series was nominated for Daytime Emmy Awards in 1999 and 2000 and Bechard attended the ceremonies in Los Angeles with her mother.
“That niche of animation just stuck me and I stayed in animated television for a long time.” In 2010, Bechard seized the opportunity to move to Vancouver to work for Pixar Canada until it closed in 2013.
The next year, she began working at Sony Image Works in Vancouver.
Bechard compares working on animated movie projects to running a marathon.
She said when doing a visual effects movie like Black Panther, “you need to be a bit of an adrenalin junkie to do that work, because it’s fast and furious … you have to do an extraordinary amount of work in a short period of time.” But animation is a long and slow process with a lot of time to plan. “That just hit my wheelhouse as far as what my comfort level was,” Bechard said.