Meet Gabrielle Capili

Today we’d like to introduce you to Gabrielle Capili.

So, before we jump into specific questions, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.
I was a marine biologist first!

I went to a high-achieving high school and drew on all my homework papers, and one of the teachers pulled me aside and told me that maybe art school would be the right choice for me. All my friends were going to Berkeley and Stanford and Harvard, so I got angry with the teacher and went to study oceanography in Santa Barbara.

Within two weeks I called home to tell my dad I was wrong. He told me to get a degree or I couldn’t do art.

So I worked through summers and got my first bachelor’s degree at 19 years old.

Then I moved to France and studied art for a year, then I applied to the best art school in the world and got in on my first try.

I had no idea that CalArts was an animation school–I only wanted to draw. I came in with no knowledge of film or animation, and I left four years later with the highest award the school offers. My name’s engraved on a golden plaque in the Character Animation office.

Art for me has always been about self-expression, and now I run an interactive comic online for an audience of ten thousand people (and growing).

I value my agency as an artist above all. I reserve the right to make whatever I want, whenever I want. That includes mistakes. And I make a ton of those. But art, for me, has always been something I do to make myself happy. And when I act on that, I see success.

Has it been a smooth road?
It’s never a smooth road. I’ve had huge stretches of time where I’ve pretended to be someone else just to try and get a job, or to make friends, or to find an audience who will appreciate my work. I’ve had huge stretches of time where all I ever hear is, “This is nice, but it’s not what we want.” It’s never a good feeling when you don’t fit.

But I realized recently that achieving my goals as a fake version of myself is fake success.

I’ve been knocked down a ton of times, but I couldn’t count the amount of times I’ve failed. You can’t pay attention to that. I think, as an artist, you have to set your eyes on the goal in front of you and run for your life. You’ll get scraped up along the way, but that’s why you’ve got to keep what you want in your heart so you always know what you’re running for.

We’d love to hear more about your work and what you are currently focused on. What else should we know?
I love to surprise my audience. It’s my favorite thing ever. I love telling a good story in an unexpected way. For my senior thesis at school, I ran up on stage in front of an audience and did a theater performance with my animated character behind me.

Currently, I’m running a comic where the audience plays as a collection of disembodied spirits in an Ouija board.

I’ve been experimenting with YouTube lately and with how to break the fourth wall to tell interesting meta narratives on that platform.

I love to mess with the audience’s reality. I love to build a story and then flip it on its head. In the future, that’s the main thing I want to improve at. The unexpected. There’s so much we can do if we can learn to think differently.

How do you think the industry will change over the next decade?
If I have anything to say about it, the industry will move more towards audience inclusion. It’s time to bring the viewer into the story! And now that VR is here, we can do that in ways no one before us ever could. We’re witnessing one of the most exciting times in history for artists. Anyone can publish anything. The tools are here at our fingertips, on our phones, on our computers.

I’m so excited to see the future of storytelling unfold in front of us. And I’m even more excited to be tackling it for myself.

Contact Info:

• Website: http://instagram.com/gabbycapiliconde
• Email: [email protected]
• Instagram: http://instagram.com/youarejeb

Image Credit:
Gabby Capili Condé

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