Disney animator, Trent Correy, shared the story of how he grew to love animation to of a room full of animation students on Sept. 24.
Correy, who has helped work on multiple stories with Disney productions such as Zootopia, Frozen and Moana, is currently a supervising animator for Frozen 2 for the character Olaf at Disney Animation.
When Correy was a student at Algonquin College, he was just as busy. Back then he worked part-time on a varsity volleyball team while studying animation at the same time. He came into the animation program with the love of drawing while also having a passion for volleyball.
“He was always someone who had a lot of drive,” said Keith Archibald, one of Correy’s animation professors at Algonquin.
Archibald taught Correy during the school year but when summer came around Correy would ask for more homework to help improve his animation. With the feedback that Correy received from Archibald, he would then apply it to his drawing and show it to Archibald for feedback. This helped Correy’s skills grow and improve time after time.
Never in Archibald’s 18 years of teaching animation has he seen such dedication from a student, especially over the summer months.
“No matter what he did to his schedule, he did whatever he could to be able to put more in there and put more focus on whatever he was doing,” said Archibald.
Tom Cooke was another one of his professors who taught him the course, character design. He described Correy as talented and persistent. He knew that he wasn’t the type to give up so easily.
Correy would have to dedicate more of his time to one of his passions: animation or volleyball.
Archibald had to guide Correy to make a decision between his love of volleyball or animation. Correy had a goal to pursue a career in Disney Animation and ended up quitting the volleyball team.
After the tough choice, Cooke saw the improvement that Correy had developed over the years of being in the program. While in his third year of animation, Correy along with; Mayrhosby Yeoshen and Collin Tsandilis made a short film called Charged that was debuted on AWN TV.
“The one thing that Algonquin does is [that] their hard workers; they’re willing to work, learn and persevere,” said Cooke.”Failure is a part of the success and they just keep going and get better.”
