Christopher Janney

From the Roaring Fork Valley in Colorado all the way to current day in Pasadena, California, there have been a couple things along the way.  My mother was a painter and a sculptor, and my brother is an architect.  I've always loved creativity, writing, painting, drawing, but I got into computers for the first time in fourth grade.  We built a Heathkit computer with a tape drive.  I learned to write basic by copying games from printouts.  Moving down the road, we pass by some years in boarding school, moving around the country, eventually getting kicked out of boarding school (hi Ivan!  Remember that day?), moving to LA to live with dad (a truly wonderful man, I promise you, and not just because he let me in the house after getting kicked out of school).  I didn't have a computer of my own until high school.  It wasn't anything cool like the apple or commodore 64.  An Evrex 8086 with CGA display, color graphics, baby.  All three colors.

A friend's mom (Cheryl Langer, I love you) was teaching computer art at the science center in LA, and invited me to come down after I was done with classes at LACC (no idea what I wanted to do, none...) and I got to play with what I now realize was an early Quantel Paintbox.  You painted on the screen with a metal stylus with a cable attached, but you could do all these great things...well..Cheryl could...she's a wonderful artist.  Then a friend I met working at a frozen yogurt shop in West Hollywood (R.I.P. Glenn, way too soon my friend) and an Amiga 500 computer he ran a BBS off of (yeah, we're still back there a ways).  He showed Delux Paint to me.  HAM graphics!?  I could paint on the computer!  I talked my parents into helping me get an Amiga 2500 with a video toaster (hey, I chipped in $300), and I got DPaint as well as Imagine 3D (Scott K, I still geek out that you used to work there, so cool!)

I was working for Columbia Pictures in the HR department ("oh, you know computers?  We have a job for you") when they were bought by Sony.  I think most of my paycheck went to electronics at the Sony store (Is that TV on B stock??), but I added hard drives, and a DCTV to my Amiga, and also took some 3D classes at the Cyber Cafe in Venice and started to learn about light and shaders, surfaces.  I put together a VHS of some 3D and brought it to Cal Arts.  They were kind.  No one laughed, and I appreciate that.  I did not get in.  Nonetheless, I wanted to do this computer graphics thing, so off to Minnesota to go to school, and to freeze, and fight giant mosquitos with Skin So Soft, and a badminton racquet.  After my sophomore year, I got a call from my old boss at Sony, "There's a new department over in the Tri-Star building doing computer graphics stuff.  Do you want an internship?"  Do bears steal picnic baskets in the woods?  I left the next morning, which was a Saturday, and got into LA Sunday night, and at the Sony lot Monday morning.  Anthony Ceccomancini introduced me to Frank Foster (thank you Frank, truly and completely), and thus started my career in visual effects and three amazing years at SPI with some really fantastic people, and a ping pong table. I met so many amazing people there, who are also members here.  If I learned anything, it's important to drive your life than to drift with the flow.  I left SPI for a job with a hardware company that was fighting to compete with Intergraph, the leader of PC computer graphics at the time (PC vs SGI that is).  I got involved with them working on a short with some folks from different studios, and the brain child of Steph Greene called "The Physics of Cartoons", where I also met my friend Doug Cooper and many other very talented people.  I took the bate and the hardware company folded about four months after I joined.  The lesson, don't fallow the money.  Money runs out, so go for passion every time.  I'm a slow learner...

On to the dot com chapter.  Cool stuff happened, a lot of stock options changed hands, none of them worth the paper they were written on, but I did mean the woman who is now my wife and mother of our three boys.

As the dot com wave was crashing, but not totally out, I started taking classes at Gnomon (Pam!!) to learn Alias Wavefront. About half way through the one year program, we switched to a new software from Alias called Maya.  After the dot com was dot gone, I took my maya skills to Max Ink Cafe (Thank you Jen and Todd!), then to LookFX, Motion Theory and then for a looonnnggg time at A52 (Andrew W, Kirk, so many others).  When I started at A52, I was really intrested in FX animation, particle systems, smoke and what not (I know, I know, I should have taken up Sandy's offer to learn Prisms at SPI's training center all those years ago, stop laugh Ivan).  This lead to a lot of scripting, and while scripting for myself and my problems, I started solving problems for the other artists around me.  Eventually I became a pipeline TD, by way of the boiling frog.  Then I freelanced, looking for creative problems to solve, and you know, there are a surprising number of creative problems to solve.  Now I'm with a new family at CoSA FX (Thank you Laura, really appreciate it, and thank you John C. for bringing me in).

My family has been amazing, all this time, both joining in the fray and being a part of it to some degree.  Our first son was born while I was at Max Ink Cafe, and the twins while I was at LookFX.  As I write this, I realize they are 20 and 18 years old now.  Amazing.  I just marvel at their creativity; all of them into music, two actually producing music, two drawing and writing, one wants to go to art school and work as a tattoo artist, and they all give the *best* hugs.  This is a team sport.  I have a fantastic teammate in my wife.  She is wonderful and amazing, and a true Valkyrie.

I'm learning to drive my life a little better now.  I've hit a few curbs, and still have issues staying in my lane, but that's the creative part, right?  I'm still helping friends with their short films, working on passion projects and helping my family in any  way I can.

Let me know if you have a passion project and you need some help.  If I don't have the bandwidth, I'm sure I know someone who does.

Role with the VES

I'm embarrassed to say, I was a bystander in my prior years as a member of the VES, but I want to help.  Put me in coach.  I would hope to mentor students in high school or younger, help the disadvantaged.