Getting to know Fran Kalal

huh-ha come on okay so one of the mentors that was really important to me in deciding that I wanted to go into computer graphics was Maria palazzi she was the director of the Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design at Ohio State University and she met with me as a high schooler and I talked to her about my interests and she said there's a field where you can use your love for art and design and your love for science and coding and that feels computer graphics and she showed me her Center and walked me around and I could see all the cool things that the graduate students there were doing and I thought this is my place so this is some of my student work that you're looking at um one of my favorite things to do with my student work was to understand how signals could overlap each other to create different looks and a shader network and so this is a lot of me playing with shader networks to see gosh can I change a high frequency fractal and can that alternate between saturated and a D saturated version of this texture and I thought that that was so cool that you could use these relatively simple signals to combine complex texture Maps and get these interesting looks in the end what I loved about doing this work is that every time I would write a piece of code or make a connection I could see a visual result right away from what I was doing and that's how I loved learning how to code to have this visual result from the work that I was doing was so rewarding and for me I was a really active learner and so it was really helpful to see a result as soon as I made something another reason I went into computer graphics instead of live-action film is what was happening at the time I was so inspired by the short Bunny I thought it was one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen I've always been so moved by bringing animals and characters to life and that's something that you can do with puppetry quite well but that's something that computer graphics does exceptionally well it is just the right format for those things and ratatouille had just come out and I found out that Pixar was going to come visit our campus and I could not wait to talk to the people who made the delicious looking food but we had a really good conversation and and they liked my work and so they asked if I would come to Pixar and do some shading so I did and my boss was the lady who made the beautiful food in ratatouille Athena's in Equis it was amazing when I showed up and got that assignment on the first day I just could not believe my luck I was so excited and on my resume there was a line that said hobbies and in the line it said hobbies it said knitting playing piano and sewing and one of the supervising technical directors looked at that line and said wait you can understand how to use computer programs and you can so you know there's jobs for people that do that at Pixar and I said no and he said do you want to come and try that and I said yeah so they found a spot for me on wall-e we had just gone through getting some notes back from an audience preview and the characters weren't a size that made the audience happy so we resize some of the characters and they needed their outfits refitted which is perfect in turn work and then they gave me Ellie and they asked me to dress and tailor Ellie and I just could not believe my luck she is the most amazing and wonderful character she's outgoing and she's fun and she's smart Ellie went well they liked the way she looked and I was happy with it too so they asked me to work on Merida which was really awesome and that went well so then they asked me to work on discussed and Riley and all Riley's mom's clothes which was a lot of fun and now I'm working on something I totally can't talk about a camera if this is a feel that's interesting to you or if there's any feel that's interesting to you and you look around and you see not a lot of people in that field look like me it's okay you're gonna find your people just go into it get some great mentors make some great friends and just believe if you want to be there bad enough it's your place kitty I'm sorry there's cat there's a cat oh oh god there's a cat