Trent Correy graduated from Algonquin’s animation program in 2009 with high hopes of working for Disney. It took only three years for that to happen.
He was on the animation team for Zootopia, Disney’s newest feature animation coming out at the start of March. If you’re familiar with the title, you’ve probably seen his work. He worked on the DMV scene with the sloths seen in the trailer.
The animation team at Disney is usually pretty large for each feature, and Zootopia’s is no exception.
“We have about 65-70 people working on Zootopia,” Correy said. “So you can imagine like 65 people, 90-minute movie; that works out to about a minute and a half each.”
Those are just the animators, who are in charge of character and mouth movement. It’s a completely separate team in charge of lighting and setting up the scene.
Correy spent a year and a half working at Mercury Filmworks in Ottawa, contributing to TV shows including Toot & Puddle, The Doodlebops and Kick Buttowski following his studies at Algonquin.
Correy moved to California in late 2012 and joined Disney just as production for Frozen began. He mostly worked with the loveable snowman, Olaf.
After Frozen, he went straight into tests for Big Hero 6, and began animating scenes for the film shortly after.
While he spent most of his time animating Fred in the test shots, most of his scenes in the film featured Hiro and Baymax.
“With a character team, the way it works is kind of organic,” he said. “It’s ‘oh you did really good on this shot, so we’re going to keep giving you this character’ or ‘oh yeah, maybe you didn’t do so great with this character, but maybe you’ll be good with this one.”
For any animation students with a specific goal, Correy said to always keep that in mind. Picking jobs that you think will help you get to your end goal will help you a lot along the way.
Correy also mentioned that he never stopped trying to learn new things, despite being finished school.
“I always tried to do online courses. It was important to me after college to continue my learning and continue to grow as an artist.”