Early in 2012, I was lucky enough to tag along with After Effects creators David Simons & Dan Wilk as they dropped in on Pixar, Stu Maschwitz, and other smart, thoughtful animators. After 20 years of building the industry-standard motion graphics tool, they didn’t yet know quite what they wanted to build next, so it was fun to bounce ideas back and forth with forward-thinking creators.
Fast forward to 2020, and the product that resulted from those investigations—Character Animator—has just won an Emmy:
Today, the Academy announced that it will honor Adobe Character Animator as a Pioneering System for Live Performance-Based Animation Using Facial Recognition, showing excellence in engineering creativity. In the biz, this is an Emmy! We might be on a bit of a roll here, for industry bling, since this latest award follows on from our two technical Academy Awards in 2019 for Photoshop and After Effects.
The tool has powered the first-ever live episode of The Simpsons, live interviews with Stephen Colbert that morphed into Our Cartoon President, and more (see recent roundup below).
Congrats to the team (who are now “EgOts,” I think—winners of Emmys & Oscars!); we can’t wait to see where you go next!
[YouTube]
I pretty much owe my entire Adobe career to you – so thanks!
Hah—you owe it to being an awesome exploding savant who reached out to me & thus made me look good, my friend. Rock on! —J.
Thanks John!
I remember that first set of “Animal” customer visits with you. We didn’t know each other well yet. During our customer meetings I was surprised that most of the time you were typing on your laptop. I was thinking “if he was just going to write emails the whole time, why did he bother joining us”? Later that day I got an email from you which explained why you had been typing so much. The email contained the best damn meeting notes I had ever seen.
I just so happens I was reviewing those very notes last week. Thank you again!
-DaveS
Hah! Thanks so much for saying so, Dave. I’ve hung onto those notes & am delighted that you still find them useful. Can’t wait to see what you guys do next!