Huh. Hah. Come on! 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 field is computer graphics. And she showed me her center
and walked me around. And I could see all of 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. One of my favorite things to do with
my student work was to understand how signals could overlap each other to create
different looks in 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
a saturated and a desaturated 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'd 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 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 Xenakis. 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 resumé, there was
a line that said "Hobbies." And in the line that 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 sew. Do you know there are 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 resized some of the characters,
and they needed their outfits refitted – which is perfect intern 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 Disgust
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 on camera. If this is a field
that's interesting to you, or if there's any field
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 ok. 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 a cat. [Laughter] There's a cat. Oh God, there's a cat. [Women laughing.]