Today we’d like to introduce you to Pamela Hoogeboom.
So, before we jump into specific questions about the business, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.
I can honestly remember the exact moment I wanted to draw for the rest of my life.
I grew up in a family where all of my cousins were artists. Some painted, played instruments, performed in shows, essentially anything that fell under even the loosest category of art, they mauled into submission; However, I had one cousin who regularly kept her sketchbooks lying around my aunt’s house like a graphite graveyard. I can vividly recall her telling both myself and her sister not to touch them. Luckily we were absolute brats and didn’t listen, because one day her younger sister brought one of her sketchbooks into the bedroom and locked the door behind her.
Something snapped.
I knew people drew. I knew that when I watched cartoons on tv, they didn’t just magically appear on screen from nothing; However, seeing drawings exist in front of me, where I could touch them, see the textures, and feel them emotionally, gave me nothing short of a religious experience. I spent months copying her sketchbook pages whenever I could get a glimpse of them. Just trying to figure out how each line was made and how certain things seemed to jump off the page. Eventually, I got enough of a hang of it to start drawing my own characters, my own terribly embarrassing comics, and my own worlds.
One thing that never changed from the first time I saw my cousin’s sketchbook, to graduating an art magnet high school, and having no clue what to do with my life thereafter, was one simple fact: I fucking loved cartoons.
I never grew out of them. I never wanted to grow out of them. Cartoons were a blast in the otherwise dull and humid hellscape that was Tampa Bay. I had gone to college immediately after high school, and dropped out, unsure of what I wanted to do with my life, and especially what I wanted to do with my art. I worked an office job (“worked” is used very loosely here), where I drew comics on post it notes and terrorized my supervisor all day. It was during this job, and my favorite pastime of wasting the day on the internet, that I found CalArts.
EVERYONE who had made my favorite cartoons went to this school. It was jawdropping to see the talent that was just jettisoning out of there every year. I had made my decision, I was going to go to CalArts and work in animation! I struggled over a portfolio for months, send it in with fire in my heart and dreams in my eyes. After months of waiting, I received my letter…
“We’re sorry, at this time we will not be offering you admissions to California Institute of the Arts”
Well shit.
I had a direction again though. Which was something I lacked for a long time. Even if it wasn’t to CalArts, I was going to escape Tampa and somehow get into animation. I created another portfolio, sent it out to numerous art schools around the country, and sighed as I submitted it to CalArts again, knowing full well the heartbreak that would come. I got a number of acceptances back, no word from CalArts, and started making the decision of where I would attend instead. I submitted the $500 registration deposit to my backup school of choice. An hour later, I receive an e-mail…
“Congratulations, you’ve been accepted as a student for the Fall 2015 semester at California Institute of the Arts.”
I ran out of my office screaming bloody murder. My mom thought I was dying when I called her. My boyfriend at the time only got a text because I didn’t want him to know I was capable of making elephant seal noises in a fit of excitement.
Fast forward to a few months, I unpack everything I could fit into my car into my tiny, shared, dorm on campus. Here’s where I would spend the next four years of my life discovering myself as an artist, bettering myself as a person, making invaluable friendships and mentorships, and watching an absurd amount of weird cartoons. I couldn’t possibly fit all that CalArts was, and is, to me into a paragraph. It was a home, a psychiatrist, a nurturer, and everything I expected and more.
Animation is still just as exciting to me now as its been all my life, if not moreso. I’m currently working in Character Design and Visual Development, and am on the Development team at Warner Animation Group.
Has it been a smooth road?
My biggest struggle was dealing with my pacemaker, that I had implanted at 17. As a teenager, it’s not like “Happy Birthday, here’s your pacemaker!” is a common thing. I was also an awful teen, who didn’t care about herself, much less all my medical bills my mom was covering (sorry mom, when I strike it rich I’ll buy you a mansion). I was in constant pain because I was stubbornly not taking my medicine, and doing things I shouldn’t have been doing with an instant-death heart condition. I was also a very angry teenager, my dad had died from a heart attack and for a long time I just expected that I was going to die out of the blue with no warning as well. I felt cheated in a lot of ways.
I had a heart attack when I was nineteen, I was in the hospital screaming that the defibrillator side of my device was going to shock me (ask anyone with an ICD, you know well ahead of time you’re about to get blasted hard with electricity). A group of ten or so doctors came in and stood around my bed, ignoring me and staring at my monitor with unmoving pads of paper and pens. One doctor was starting at his watch unblinkingly.
I had seen the movies, I knew what this meant. I accepted there that I was going to die. A few seconds later everything went black.
I have no clue how much time passed, but eventually I woke up. Something had changed. I had honestly thought I was going to die, but here I was, breathing and kind of hungry. Before being rushed to the hospital, my mentality was “I’m going to die, so why bother” because of my heart condition and pacemaker. Afterwards, it was like a switch had been hit, now it was “I’m going to die, so why not”.
I don’t know if I would have had the guts to leave Florida to go to college in a state I had never been to, to drop my entire life for something uncertain, or to try a lot of the experiences I’ve had in animation without having gone through this. Losing that fear and melancholy about death opened a lot of doors. I try a lot of things and take a lot of chances now that I embrace the finite time I have to do them.
So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the Warner Animation Group Development story. Tell us more about the business.
Warner Bros is a great company to work for. It’s a lot of fun to grab lunch on the lot and see where so many notable movies were made. Development is even more fun though. Instead of working on one project I have my hands on numerous ones in the very early stages. I feel like I’m always on the move creatively and never know what the next thing I’ll get to try will be. I get to spend my entire day drawing and drinking industrial amounts of free tea, what more could I ask for.
How do you think the industry will change over the next decade?
Streaming is becoming such a big thing for everyone all over the entertainment industry. Animation especially though. Netflix has created an immense call for content that everyone is trying to follow suite with. Some studios, like Disney, are creating their own streaming platforms. Others, such as Dreamworks, partner with streaming services like Netflix to get their content out there. I know at WB we have some stuff in the works for streaming platforms, but it will be interesting to see how that expands.
Streaming is going to change heavily in the next decade, and a lot of it is going to depend on how companys make the adjustment from traditional media to such a broad and consumer controlled one now. I love the new competition, I love the new market and creative ways studios are going to have to find to develop successful content for it. There’s definitely the looming fear that it’s just going to become Cable 2.0, but I hope this is the chance to do something really interesting and new. A lot of exciting projects are being developed and I really want to see animation thrive in this newly charted territory.
Contact Info:
- Website: Pamelahoogeboom.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hoogedoom/?hl=en
Image Credit:
Pamela Hoogeboom
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