DigiPen instructors bring remarkable professional experiences to the classroom. In our Faculty XP series, we’ll zoom in on some of those fascinating career histories with focused Q&As.
After nine years on campus as a Department of Animation and Production senior lecturer, most students know Matt Brunner as a computer graphics guru — sharing his deep knowledge earned as an Xbox art director at the dawn of the original console; co-founder of his own studio, Airtight Games; and DigiPen’s resident Houdini expert. This summer, he also became the brand new program director of the BFA in Digital Art and Animation. What many students might not know about is that before he dove into the game industry, Brunner started his career working for the production company that literally trademarked the term “Claymation,” Portland, Oregon’s Will Vinton Studios.
Led by its mustachioed namesake animator, Will Vinton Studios was the driving force behind the explosion of Claymation characters, commercials, and TV specials in the 1980s — famous for creations like the California Raisins, Domino’s Pizza’s “The Noid,” and multiple collaborations with Michael Jackson. In 1993, looking to expand into the newly emerging field of 3D computer animation, Will Vinton Studios hired Brunner fresh out of grad school as its director of digital production, charged with creating and leading its brand new CG department. Among Brunner’s many commercials, films, and directorial projects during his eight-year reign at Vinton is one of the studio’s longest-lasting creations — M&M’s wise-cracking gang of 3D spokescandies, still starring in ads nearly 20 years after their 1995 TV debut.
Having recently hosted a screening of Claydream on campus, a 2021 documentary tracking the rise and fall of Will Vinton Studios and its dramatic transformation into stop-motion giant, LAIKA, we sat down with Brunner to talk about his clay days before the game industry.
What made you decide to pursue computer graphics in 1991 so early in its development?
I was a traditional painter and sculptor desperate to make a living doing something creative with my fine arts background, and I ended up becoming the art director for this live, educational, call-in TV show for kids that taught reading and math. I did all the graphics for it, the animation, the sets, basically everything visual on the program. It was a blast! At one point I realized I could film almost one frame at a time with our equipment and started doing stop-motion animation for the program as well. Then I remember seeing Tin Toy, one of Pixar’s earliest CG shorts, and going, “Wow, how can I do that?”
I started looking all over the country and only found a couple of schools barely teaching computer graphics at that point. The Texas A&M Viz Lab had been created the year before, so I applied to their program and got in. It was exciting! We were learning a lot using really rough, early versions of [3D software] Wavefront, Alias, and SoftImage. When I was getting ready to graduate from that program, one of the faculty members had been asked by Will Vinton in Portland to give him some advice. Will didn’t know much about computer animation at the time but was interested in it. So she went there in an advisory capacity, and when I heard she was going, I was like, “Just tell him my name! Drop my name!” And then I got an interview.
Were you a fan of Vinton’s Claymation work and the California Raisins at that time?
Oh, yeah! Something about Vinton and the job opportunity really fascinated me. I actually had two job interviews, one with Will Vinton Studios and another with Blue Sky — I would’ve been one of the first full-time CG animators Blue Sky hired. But the creative challenge of mixing physical stuff with digital stuff at Vinton, that was really interesting to me, more so than just being a CG animator at that time. I think I had six interviews with Vinton. They threw all kinds of budgeting scenarios at me. “What would you need to build a studio here?” I was literally making this stuff up on the fly as a grad student. But at that time there weren’t many people period who could even answer the basics. They offered me a job. I took it. I moved to Portland and started as the director of digital production, leading and setting up their new CG department.
Were the Claymation artists at the studio suspicious of you when you came in?
When I stepped into Vinton, all the stop-motion animators thought, “Oh my god, this computer guy is going to take over this art form that we love.” There was a small group who embraced it and a much larger group who looked at me like I was this evil overlord there to ruin their industry. It was a little dicey because of that early on. I tread lightly.
But of the small group who embraced it, there was one person who was probably the best animator there and the creative core of the studio, Barry Bruce. He totally embraced what I was there to do. Because he did that, a lot of people started to get into it, and it softened the edges.
What were the first projects you worked on there? When did you start to combine CG with Claymation?
The first full CG project we did was for Sesame Street, a goofy short called “Hammer Time!” based off MC Hammer’s song, “U Can’t Touch This.” We had this hammer dancing around with a bunch of other tools, hitting nails.
Then we did this really weird, kind of horrible music video for a cult leader who had this band called Zazen. The band had no idea what they wanted out of the music video. They were just like, “Do weird stuff, make it funky.” So, we did this total mishmash of 2D, 3D, and live action. I rigged and modeled the 3D characters so you couldn’t distinguish whether they were clay or CG. I was literally modeling fingerprints into the surface and making them look kind of lumpy. That was probably the first project we did combining the two.
But our Chips Ahoy ads were the first real commercial projects we did that fully combined the two mediums, Claymation and computer animation. I remember we struggled mightily trying to keep the chocolate from looking like poop! It was really hard to make that kind of chocolate surface look like it wasn’t poop with the shaders we had in that early 3D software.
Did those projects convince the clay animators that CG was an opportunity rather than a threat?
Yeah! They started seeing that they could get more interesting visual effects layered into their work. The special effects didn’t have to be fully physical anymore. They were really getting that, and it was much more cost effective in a lot of ways. We were still doing lots of practical effects, things like cloud tanks and real explosions in our back lot. But we were also combining them with a lot of CG effects, which was very powerful.
I think the first full-CG commercial we did was for Raid, and it was actually directed by Mark Gustafson, one of our best stop-motion directors. He went on to be the animation director on Fantastic Mr. Fox and co-director on Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio. He sadly passed away earlier this year. The ad was a satire of these high-end fragrance commercials that were everywhere at the time. We had bugs act very angsty, posing against walls talking about the smell of Raid, how it has no smell. I loved it! It was very tongue in cheek.
The 1995 M&M commercial debuting the Red and Yellow M&M characters was one of the first CG projects the studio did that really exploded. Those M&M characters you developed are still everywhere! What was it like creating that classic?
They’re still around! M&M/Mars came to us because they saw we understood how to develop characters. The M&M brand at that point was kind of old and boring. Sales were dropping off, and they asked us to come up with some ideas to turn it around.
We started with my CG team and David Daniels, a director at the studio, and between us we began developing the M&M characters’ personalities and dynamics. We worked out who they were and what their life stories were long before we started actually building them.
When we had that foundation and Mars was still interested, we went, “OK, how do you make an interesting character out of a round shell? How do you animate it? Does it have arms? Legs? Do you put a face on it? How detailed should the face be?” The stylization of that was really important, because if you went too realistic, it got very creepy very fast. Even just figuring out how to do the eyebrows was a huge deal. Should they be part of the shell? Floating in front of the shell? Figuring all of that stuff out was very important to the longevity of these characters. I think we did a good job of finding that balance between an unreal character and also something that fit into a live-action world.
The first commercial that we did with Yellow and Red had John Goodman and Jon Lovitz as the original voices. And the whole thing blew up. I mean, it just blew up. It was incredibly successful. The candy started flying off the shelves. Mars was like, “Oh my god, let’s get this going!” And we ended up doing a bunch more ads. We even did a 3D film for M&Ms that went into their big flagship stores like the one in Times Square. Our studio was struggling at that time because Claymation was kind of considered uncool and a little old fashioned by that point. People were looking for something hot and new. So when we did this, it really fueled the studio and totally revived our finances. M&Ms was really important to the studio and all of us at that time. We ended up hiring a bunch of other CG specialists, and they came in and started really bringing up the quality across multiple projects.
Besides the M&M’s ads, are there projects or commercials you worked on during your time there you’re especially proud of?
We did a Marvin the Martian in the 3rd Dimension film, a 3D movie for a theme park. That was a real challenge! We had to hit Looney Tunes level animation with that Warner Bros. look, but do it in CG. At the time, that had never really been done before. That one I was really proud of.
Later when I started directing, I did all the direction for our 3 Musketeers candy bar commercials until I started looking to leave the studio for Xbox. I landed the account and did all the creative direction that built the story and motion template for the spots. I was really happy with those too. I learned a lot doing them. I combined CG into them sometimes if we needed it, but they were mostly all stop-motion.
How did your role evolve into directing?
With the M&Ms and other major client projects, the CG department grew over time to about 50 or so people. At that point, I found myself almost totally managing people and became more of a producer than a creator. I started getting really unhappy because of that. I told the studio, and they allowed me to hand off my producer responsibilities to become a green, brand new director. I did a lot of work on projects nobody else wanted, just to show them I could do it. Things like Athlete’s Foot commercials for Japanese TV. I did a number of others for larger clients like Chili’s and Clorox, and then the 3 Musketeers of course.
It’s very hard to get people to understand what a special place that was. I don’t think there was any place like it in the world.
I’d been doing that for a little under a year when the castle collapsed. That’s when The PJs and Gary & Mike, the studio’s two TV series, were both cancelled in the same week. We went down from a huge number of staff, maybe around 400 to around 80 in one night. It was horrible. None of us really knew if the studio would survive. I started looking around wondering, “What am I going to do next?” Vinton asked me to come back and run the computer animation department again, but I just didn’t want to do it. My heart wasn’t in it.
An animator friend of mine who did the silver liquid Terminator in Terminator 2, she called me up and said, “Microsoft is trying to talk me into being an art director for some new video game thing called Xbox. I don’t want to do it, but would you want to talk to them?” And I went, “Uh, not really! I don’t know anything about video games.” Maybe a week later, one of the other Microsoft art directors called me up and said, “Why don’t you go to Blockbuster, rent a bunch of games, play them for a week, and call me back.” So I did!
I went up to Microsoft, interviewed with them, and they offered me the job. I didn’t even know what I was doing in the game space except that it was still a CG environment, and I very quickly got wrapped up into games.
What was the transition to games like?
I realized we were on the cusp of getting much better graphics in games. That’s why I wasn’t interested initially! The graphics for games I had seen, they just weren’t interesting to me. They didn’t inspire me. Then when I interviewed, Microsoft showed me what the early Xbox could do, and I went, “Oh, this is changing quick. Game graphics are getting way more exciting.”
The Microsoft people were really open too. They told me, “We know you don’t know anything about this now, but we just want you to get started and you’ll figure it out.” Which is exactly what I did! I just figured it out. The first game I got assigned to was Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge. They asked me to oversee all the animation in it. It was fun! I ended up basically becoming the “experience director” on the game too, which wasn’t a title that really existed in games yet. I discovered I had much more creative freedom in the game space than I did in the commercial film space.
I know you screened Claydream for students on campus. What was it like for you to watch a film documenting Vinton’s dramatic rise and fall having experienced it firsthand?
I remember thinking, “Oh no, I’m going to tear up!” It was emotional and cathartic, because it’s very hard to get people to understand what a special place that was. I don’t think there was any place like it in the world — a studio that was a little bit rogue, really creative, gave people a lot of freedom, was doing physical work… and the place just constantly reeked of clay. There was this wall that was maybe 20 feet tall that separated the shooting studios from the clay working area, and every time people had clay that was a little too old or had lost its color, they would just chuck it at that wall. It was kind of like the gum wall at Pike Place in Seattle. It was this unusual, sentimental, extremely creative place, and I loved it.