Animation program alumnus Graham MacDonald is a credited winner of an Emmy at this year’s Creative Arts Awards.
The award is for his work at Mercury Filmworks’ as animation director on ‘O Sole Minnie’, a Mickey Mouse short film. He, along with a group from the Walt Disney Television Animation studio, went home with the Emmy for Outstanding Short-Format Animated Program.
“Part of the reason I think we have success here is because we keep our hands dirty,” said MacDonald. “We are constantly helping the animators with scenes, doing the poses or fixing any mistakes we see.”
He beat out other major animated television productions such as Adventure Time, Phineas and Ferb, Regular Show and Robot Chicken.
In 1991 Beauty and the Beast came out and for MacDonald that was it; he became hooked to animation.
“I heard about Algonquin, they had just started the animation program a couple years before,” said MacDonald.
“I credit having learned the basics during my time at Algonquin. I started with nothing and learned as much as I could, but two years isn’t enough.”
After graduating in 1995, MacDonald spent his time going from one studio to another, each closing and forcing him to find work somewhere else. He eventually landed at Mercury Filmworks where he’s been for the past 10 years eventually becoming a director.
This is MacDonald’s second Emmy nomination. He was previously working on a project called ‘Toot and Puddle’ as Animation Director in 2011. He didn’t win but the art director did walk away with a golden statue.
“It was actually Toot and Puddle that got us the contract for the Mickey shorts. I think it opened their eyes and they said ‘this is what we want animation to look like,’” said MacDonald.
The Mickey Mouse short films are a series that Mercury Filmworks has been working on for the past two years. Their involvement on the show includes a lot of the animation, effects, compositing and the additional background work that Disney doesn’t do.
MacDonald explained that the processes created early on have helped make the studio stand above others, along with what goes into each episodes planning process.
Having two daughters around the cartoon watching age has made MacDonald proud whenever they enjoy work he was involved in. The older of the two went out and got the first season of the Mickey shorts and watched them back-to-back.
MacDonald was happy to be credited on the shorts; he hadn’t thought it would happen that way.
“It’s nice to have my name in the credits because typically they don’t do that. The credit normally goes to their guys but Paul Rudish the director of the shorts pressured them to put me in it.”