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DREAMWORKS' MARTY SIXKILLER ON 'MADAGASCAR'

By Leroy Douresseaux
May 21, 2005 - 22:14

La. native Sixkiller with DreamWorks co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberger

DreamWorks Animation unleashes its latest computer animation feature film, MADAGASCAR, a comedy, on Friday, May 27, 2005. The film follows four residents of the Central Park Zoo in New York City. Alex the Lion (voiced by Ben Stiller), Marty the Zebra (voiced by Chris Rock), Melman the Giraffe (voiced by David Schwimmer), and a pregnant Gloria the Hippo (voiced by Jada Pinkett-Smith), are the “stars” of the zoo. When three of them leave the zoo to rescue the fourth member of the quartet, they’re captured and shipped back to Africa. However, an accident at sea strands them on Madagascar. Now, these four animals, who were pampered all their lives by humans, must learn to survive on their own.

Marty Sixkiller has been a member of the PDI/DreamWorks Animation team going on ten years, (as of this interview), having joined the company in 1995. He has contributed to numerous animation and visual effects projects, and recently completed Madagascar as a Senior Technical Director.

Sixkiller began his career at PDI/DreamWorks as a key animator in the Effects Division, working on such projects as Marvin the Martian in the Third Dimension (a 1996 short film released only in select venues), a 3D Stereoscopic IMAX Film, and several “Pillsbury Doughboy” commercials. He later moved onto his role as a Sequence Technical Director on the hit feature film Antz, the first collaboration between PDI and DreamWorks. He was also a Layout Technical Director for the Academy Award® winning animated feature Shrek (2001) and its 2004 hit sequel Shrek 2 (which also earned two Academy Award® nominations), and the popular Universal theme park ride “Shrek 4D.”

Sixkiller is a graduate of Louisiana State University, in Baton Rouge and holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Graphic Design. On April 28, 2005, Sixkiller, the Slidell, La., native and current executive with DreamWorks Animation SKG Inc., was honored during the company’s first annual Training Awards Program. In a presentation by Jeffrey Katzenberg and Ann Daly, DreamWorks Animation’s chief executive and chief operating officers, Sixkiller was cited for excellence in digital training. According to the press release for the event, Sixkiller was one of more than 35 employees who were honored for their exemplary skills in mentoring and coaching in the areas of digital, artistic and managerial development.

The Bin spoke with him recently about his being on the ground floor of the development of feature film computer animation and the use of computers in graphic design:




Going back to your time in college, what years did you attend LSU?

SIXKILLER: I was at LSU from (19)85 to 92.

You were majoring in Graphic Design?

SIXKILLER: I started off in Marketing, and my sophomore year I changed my major to Graphic Design. I went from a four-year program after two years and added five years because at the time Graphic Design was a mandatory five-year program, so that was an additional stint of college for me.

At the time were they using computers to teach graphic design?

SIXKILLER: Back then, no. At LSU, the Macintosh kind of came into play in the Graphic Design curriculum in 1989. We were being taught everything using traditional hand techniques. The professors were very leery of the Macintosh, and the computers were all in desktop publishing and in art and design.

Were you interested in computers?

SIXKILLER: Not at first. When I saw the Macintosh and what it could do and how it made things, from a traditional sense, a lot easier, I saw a huge opportunity of the computer as a tool. I knew that is was basically the wave of the future, and that I needed to learn everything I could about every operating system and every computer: what it did, what its purpose was, how to manipulate it and get results out of it. So I was immediately interested in it as a tool.

So you were self-taught?

SIXKILLER: Basically, yes.

Early on in your professional career, you worked for a place called Video Park in Baton Rouge, LA. What did you for them?

SIXKILLER: I started off as an unpaid intern, and the agreement was that I would work for three months as the nightshift Paintbox operator. I was doing two-dimensional drawings on an Aurora Paintbox system for broadcast television. After three months I was evaluated on my work and hired as a full time Paintbox artist, so I was going to school full time and working six-hour night shifts.

From the time you entered school to the time you worked for Video Park, were you paying attention to the use of computer graphics and effects in films?

SIXKILLER: Yes, in film. I’ve always been an avid moviegoer. I think the biggest one that really caught me was The Abyss, when I noticed the computer graphics that were in there and how amazing and seamless they were. Of course, there was Terminator 2: (Judgment Day). Ironically, the biggest thing that really jolted me was when PDI did the Michael Jackson video, “Black or White,” and introduced the morphing technique to the world.

I’d forgotten about that. Did PDI also do the effects in the James Cameron films (The Abyss and T2), or was it his own company?

SIXKILLER: That was actually ILM, Industrial Light and Magic (George Lucas’ SFX firm). They did the work for Cameron, and created the pseudo-pod and the CG (computer graphics).

Seeing those films at the time, did that make you more interested in using computer graphics and effects for film?

SIXKILLER: Around that time as I started using the computers and the Macintosh – using the computer for art, I was also freelancing. I started my own freelance design company in 1989. I started off training other artists how to use Photoshop and PageMaker and some of the real basic desktop applications – programs that were out there for desktop publishing. I also started a consulting firm that would teach other people how to use it. I would buy Macintosh systems and the hardware and set it up and buy software and install it, and then train people how to use it. Design firms were my market.

The one thing that kept coming across as I was doing this was I began becoming very frustrated with the print medium – that I would design something in the computer and give it to a printer or a pressman or a publishing company, and it would look totally different from what I’d wanted it to. I became very frustrated that the final piece wasn’t under my control. I didn’t have the control over what it looked like when it came out.

However, when I was working as a Paintbox operator, the graphics that I was doing appeared on television exactly how I designed them and in the manner in which I wanted them to appear. I liked that level of control. I could change something right before it hit the air and I could get approval from the client and have more creative input. I didn’t have to depend on someone else on what the outcome looked like, so that led me more away from the graphic design terms and focused me on looking more into computer graphics.

In 1992, you began working in Miami for a company called Edefx as a CG animator. Why did you take the job?

SIXKILLER: I was basically working in Louisiana by myself. I was the department manager. I was a Paintbox artist and a 3-D animator. I was doing everything myself. Getting back to the PDI morphing technique – when I saw “Black or White,” it really open my eyes to what was really going on outside of Louisiana in the animation industry and what was being done.

We were using Wavefront software in Louisiana, and I was mainly working on local accounts in the states – mostly car (advertising) spots. I was tired of working by myself. As an artist, I realized that my work was starting to plateau. I wasn’t trying anything new. I wasn’t taking any risks. I wasn’t really developing as an artist, and I really had the desire to collaborate on a team and to work for a larger company that was working on national (advertising) accounts.

I was doing a lot of research, and I came across a woman by the name of Jamee Houk. She was in a lot of the animation trade magazines for her work. I really became inspired by her work as an artist. When I tracked her down, she was actually working at Edefx, so that was another reason that brought me there. I was really excited by her work and wanted to join their team as an artist, so that brought me to Miami.

Could this be described as the job that gave you the next big step, so to speak?

SIXKILLER: Most definitely. We were working with national accounts – ESPN, ABC, and the PGA. We had clients from Brazil, Mexico, and Latin America; we had a very big Latin American client base. They were all national accounts. I was getting a chance to work on stuff that was of a higher profile and getting more attention. I really enjoyed the collaboration. We had a pretty big, decent sized graphics team.

After my third year there, it was actually one of my clients from New York who came down. He was very pleased with a job I’d done for them. He asked me a really simply question: “What are you doing here. You need to be in Hollywood.” I had never entertained the idea before. I’d always told myself that I was never moving to California.

I had a ton of friends in the industry. Back then it was a very small industry, and it still is. A lot of them were freelancers, jumping from studio to studio. They were working really crazy hours; they were burnt out. The pay was great, but from a personal life standpoint they were married to their jobs. Here, I was living in Miami. I was scuba diving every weekend. I was sailing. I was enjoying the outdoors. I was enjoying the Miami nightlife. I was single, and I was in heaven. Then, this client said what are you doing. Why aren’t you in Hollywood?

That’s when I started doing some research. I picked the top ten animation companies: Industrial Light and Magic, PDI, Resonate, Digital Domain – all the big dogs. I sent all the resumes out. I got feedback from the top four. I interviewed at ILM first, and the following week, I interviewed at PDI. PDI, at the time, had about 65 employees. One of the things that really drew me to ILM and PDI – both studios had their own software. They had developed proprietary software, in house.

One of the things that helped catapult me out of Miami was I was really tired of using office software to do things that everybody else could do. I wanted to go work for a company that was setting groundbreaking techniques, and kinda really being on the leading edge of technology of computer graphics. I felt that ILM and PDI were two of those studios. I chose to go with PDI because it was a smaller studio. I felt that I could get more intimate and kind of be mentored and learn more in a smaller company than get lost in the numbers in a bigger company. With that said, I’m coming up on my ten-year anniversary in November.





You said that at the time you were coming up, people were working so much. Was that because so few people could actually do that kind of work?

SIXKILLER: Yeah. The software back then, about 92, was pretty expensive. It was only the bigger companies that could afford it, and there were only a few studios that were doing it (computer graphics) well. When I was coming out of school in 92, computer graphics were in there infancy, but they were still being defined, as technology kept pushing things. When I was in school from 85 to 89, there weren’t really any places that you go to learn computer graphics. There were a few big institutions where you could go and learn this stuff and where the tuition was pretty pricey. Most of the gurus, the old timers that were in the game, were either learning on the job on the job or teaching themselves.

A lot of it was trial and error. The movie studios were asking for these brilliant computer graphics and effects. A lot of the big studios, where it was all trial and error, people were pulling long hours trying to find techniques of how to do things. A lot of it was research, but on the clock, so to speak. A lot the films were difficult projects to work on.

I can imagine that, especially after Jurassic Park, the studios and the filmmakers were asking a lot of a relatively small group of people.

SIXKILLER: The community of really refined computer graphics artists was relatively small. There weren’t a lot of people working out of their garages. It was big studios that had the capital to buy the hardware. Back then, we were working on 20-megahertz machine. It was a big deal to have 50-megabyte hard drive, and that was expensive back then. It was a hundred grand, so it was a matter of economics as well.

When you started at PDI, what did you do for them.

SIXKILLER: It was pretty funny, and I still tell this story to this day. In my interview, they asked me what was my favorite thing to do, and that was to animate the camera and really have control over the camera and motion and understanding of motion. And they asked what was the thing I liked to do least, and I said lighting. With that said, I got hired and my first assignment was as a lighting animator. I was kind of frustrated. I’m like, didn’t you guys listen to what I said in the interview – I don’t like to light.

Here, I was being staffed on Marvin the Martian in the Third Dimension. It was pretty much a large format project. It was one of PDI’s biggest projects that’d they had (up to that point). They’d just finished “Homer Simpson in the Third Dimension” (known as “Homer3” from the “Treehouse of Horror VI,” the 1995 installment of “The Simpson’s Halloween Special”) for television. When I was coming on board, that was wrapping up. I came on as a lighting animator slash effects animator.

Yeah, I realized how much I didn’t know about PDI when I asked for the interview, so I went on Google and dug up stuff about PDI. When did PDI start working on Antz? I think you worked on layout for that film, at least, according to your listing on the Internet Movie Database (IMDb.com)

SIXKILLER: I started working on Antz in April of 96. At the time Toy Story was the only computer animated feature film that had come out, and that’s actually when we formed our partnership with DreamWorks, where we were actually contracted to produce Antz, and they were going to market and distribute it.

I think at the time, Marvin the Martian was the biggest show we’d ever done, as far as the number of shots goes, and that project was actually split up among a number of studios. We’d only handled a number of shots, and here we are starting on Antz trying to figure out how to handle a movie that’s 80 minutes and is over 1300 shots.

It was a lot of learning our workflow and process. I had spent close to a year working on that and some other projects, and I was fortunate enough to be included on the pipeline development team to help define how we make movies and how we get from building a model – setting it up, animating it, lighting it, rendering it, and getting it to film. I was very fortunate to be in on the process and to help define and streamline how that works. I am pretty sure we worked on Antz for about two years.




Two part question: what did you think of the final result in Antz? Was PDI concerned that some commentators and critics were perhaps unfairly comparing Antz to what Pixar had done with Toy Story?

SIXKILLER: We were very proud of what we’d accomplished. Looking back, it went very smoothly. We were still figuring out what we were doing. At this point, Pixar was the only company that had done it… a full movie. I think we were very proud of what we’d accomplished in the time we did it. We very pleased from an aesthetic standpoint and from a storytelling point. We’d took a risk and didn’t make a movie that was for kids. We used the medium of computer graphics to help tell a story to young adults, adults, and kids – to a wide variety of audiences that could enjoy it. I think we kinda broke that barrier that where people saw animation and they thought, “Oh, that’s a kid’s movie.” I think we kind of help break down that wall that was around animation. People and the public think it’s only for children, and that’s not the case.

As far as comparing Antz to A Bug’s Life, we were very proud of what Pixar did because if they weren’t successful, that made it harder for us to kind of continue to be competitive. It happens all the time in the movie industry that there is more than one movie about volcanoes, tidal waves, natural disasters, etc. It just happened to be that we were doing a movie about ants, and they were doing one about bugs that happened to have ants in it. The two storylines were totally separate. Stylistically, the movies looked totally different. From a story standpoint, they were both different.

Both movies were successful, and we have a lot of respect for the artists at Pixar and for the art form – of what they do. We were just as ecstatic as they were for us that we had produced a hit and that they’d produced at hit. I think we proved that Pixar isn’t the only company that is creative and can do computer animated films.

I’m guessing that you, as a group, weren’t going to let outside reviewers and commentators, make you feel that your work was inferior.

SIXKILLER: Not at all.





What did you do on Madagascar?

SIXKILLER: I stayed in the layout department again. I was in the layout department on as TD (technical director) on Shrek, Shrek 4-D, and Shrek 2. So I stayed in layout for MADGASCAR. Mainly I enjoyed the development because layout is the first group to do anything inside the computer. We feed inventory to all the other departments. We are the first stop in the process, so I really fell in love with being down in the trenches of production and getting my hands dirty with the artists. Really, the fact the I got to collaborate with every department of the film. I got to see the film start off in its raw form in layout, and it progresses to animation and then to effects and then to lighting. To really watch the movie blossom from both a storytelling standpoint, from an animation standpoint, and from a lighting standpoint – from this position, I really got to sit and watch, while I worked, this movie really evolve.

I was just (pause) - I miss it now. I was promoted in January (2005) to Senior Editorial Technical Director, so I work on every film now in a small capacity. So I’m not in production now on a specific film. I really wanted to stick with the layout group because I really liked working with all the departments; it was never boring. It was always challenging. Each movie brought on a different set of challenges. Each movie was different with the exception of Shrek and Shrek 2; stylistically those two movies for specific reasons were intentioned to look alike. I really like the fact that Madagascar stylistically looks different, and from an animation standpoint looks different as well.

That’s one reason I really enjoy working at DreamWorks is that we have artistic and a kind of technical diversity across every one of our movies. If you look at Antz and you look at Shrek, you’ll see stylistically the movies look different. The animation style is different. If you look from Shrek to Madagascar, you’ll also see that stylistically the movies look different. There are different animation styles, as well.

Would layout be the foundation of the film?

SIXKILLER: If you were looking through a camera to take a picture of a bunch of people in a room, you’d see people standing there, you’d see tables and chairs, and pictures on the wall. If you’re standing in a restaurant, there might be cups and forks and knives on the table. We start off from a simple standpoint of putting a virtual camera in a room, and then putting the characters in the room. If the characters are sitting at the table, we might put the table in the room, and that’s it. We start off from the very basics.

As we progress in layout, we move onto the next phase, which we call “set dressing.” That’s when we start putting the pictures on the wall, the cups on the tables, and the salt and pepper shakers on the table – all the little fine details. We start set dressing and art directing that from an artistic standpoint. Then, the scene becomes complete, and the character animation team comes on and starts blocking the characters and giving them life, doing all the facial animation. Then, the lighting team is working “in parallel.” They bring all the shading to set up the reflections and the shadows and the textures to give the scene the look of film.




What does your new job (as Senior Editorial Technical Director) entail?

SIXKILLER: Nine years ago I was fortunate enough to help design the process we still use today, so I know it like the back of my hand. That process is how the editorial department interfaces with production and how production delivers movie content back to editorial for them to cut and edit – streamlining those tools that processes that workload so it happens transparently to the artists. When editorial creates a shot that is 30 frames long, production gets the right timing to know that that particular shot is 30 frames long, and that the animator doesn’t animate one more frame than he needs to.

What do you hope the audience gets from Madagascar?

SIXKILLER: I hope they really appreciate the artistic diversity of the film – how it’s different from Shrek. Most people think that all we know how to do is Shrek. I think this will really open the public’s eye that this is an artistic company.

I really like what’s going on in the storyline – the fact that Marty (the Zebra, voiced by Chris Rock) and Alex (the Lion voiced by Ben Stiller) are best friends in the zoo. Then, they wind up in this really bizarre predicament of being in the wild and there are all these exterior things that are affecting their relationship as friends. In the end, they still prevail; their friendship is as strong as it ever was. I think that’s powerful to say, as a message for a story to carry, that true friends are true friends for good and for bad – to stick it out with your friends. I really like the message that the story pulls off.

Thank you, Marty. Madagascar arrives in theatres, Friday, May 27, 2005. All of DreamWorks Animation’s earlier feature length computer animated films are available on home video and DVD. Visit Negromancer.com for reviews of over 500 short and feature-length films.

Last Updated: August 31, 2023 - 08:12