Today we’d like to introduce you to Kelli Bixler
Hi Kelli, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
Born on the south-side of Indianapolis, Indiana and raised by the best parents in the universe. My two incredible sisters are 12 and 8 years my senior. I was a surprise and my parents’ last hope for a boy. In fact, I was Michael for 2 days after delivery because my parents hadn’t picked a girl’s name. A nurse suggested Kelli, which they liked and my mom thought it’d be swell to spell it K-E-L-L-I. To this day, everyone spells it wrong. I’m not the greatest speller myself so I don’t mind. Our family home was on 12 acres of woods with pastures and a creek. I swung on tree vines and built a 3-story tree house with the neighborhood boys.
From the womb, it was an unspoken creed that I could do anything I set my mind to, actually anybody could. Our household was full of love, laughter, and support. There was an emphasis on the golden rule, honesty, a solid work ethic, and the belief that possessing those qualities gave you the ability to seek, find and create doors to open. In other words, the world is what you make it so make it good.
As a lover of animals, trees, and the outdoors in general, it’s funny that television and movies captured my heart and passion. At six I was lining up my cereal boxes in front of our console tv on weekend mornings so I could pretend I was in cereal commercials. Popeye and The Rocky & Bullwinkle show were my favorite cartoons, which is kind of odd. Popeye, really? When I wasn’t watching tv, I was directing variety shows with my friends and charging family members, neighbors, and anyone else I could coerce to watch. As a third grader, inspired by The Flintstones, my best friend and I started the Flint Rubble Double Club Yay Yay Yay. There were five of us girls in the club and one Halloween we transformed the loft of our barn into a creepy, terrifying hay maze and made a killing charging 75¢ admission.
The older I got, the later I could stay up and watch more TV on school nights, shows like Mannix, It Takes a Thief, Laugh-In, MASH, even 60 minutes were must-see. My movie-going experience was blossoming as well, from Saturday afternoons of old reruns like Random Harvest, Swing Time and Sabrina, to the incredible movie-making decade of the 70’s. My sister and I went religiously, seeing anything by Hal Ashby, Francis Ford Coppola, John Cassavetes, Woody Allen, and Sidney Pollack to name a few.
Writing for the high school paper led to an interest in journalism, but by my sophomore year at Indiana University I realized journalism wasn’t for me. I’d always loved advertising, (there’s those cereal boxes again) so I transferred to Syracuse University’s Newhouse School to write, produce and direct commercials. In other words, I got serious about television and film production.
Falling in love with my college sweetheart got me to Chicago after graduation. That relationship didn’t last, but my love for Chicago did and it has been home since 1982. The economy in ‘82 was in a severe recession with the unemployment rate higher than any time in post-World War II history. I couldn’t get a job. Feeling very sorry for myself, I watched reruns of The Big Valley every afternoon and, after several depressing months, my dad suggested I might offer to work for free if there was a promising position that caught my eye- “to get your foot in the door.”
I’d had a great interview with an independent Producer/Director in Skokie, but he needed a typist. I typed with two fingers and, if you remember, I’m not a great speller, so I didn’t get the job. But, taking my dad’s advice, I offered to work for free as a production assistant and he took the bait. After 3 months, Gerry Rogers, my boss and mentor, gave me an Associate Producer title and pay to match. Working for Gerry is where I learned to produce. At that time, all you needed to produce was a phone, phone book, map, and chutzpah. We made 35 & 16mm chemical dependency films and educational videos. Eventually I began directing what Gerry didn’t want to and got to work with local talent before they became famous like John Mahoney and Fred Savage. In 1985, Gerry graciously gave me a boat load of his clients and I opened my own live-action production company, Bixler Picture Shows.
In 1988, I found true love, married, and was accepted into the directing program at AFI in Los Angeles, CA. That year in Hollywood opened a whole new world of opportunities for me and my husband. However, right before graduation, my dad went under the knife for a quadruple heart bypass. So, back to Chicago we went to be closer to my parents in Indianapolis. I continued to produce and direct and, for six years, I went back and forth to Hollywood, pitching my ideas for live-action feature films and television shows and getting nowhere.
In 1995, I was directing a series for Playskool where live-action kids needed to match action with 2D animation characters. I noticed the 2D animator, Greg Lontkowski, was sculpting little creatures during lunch and we started a conversation. Greg explained that for fun he created characters and produced stop-motion animation in his basement. “You mean like Gumby?” “Yup”, he replied. That got my wheels turning, I had a hundred ideas for live-action that were getting no traction in Hollywood, but if I produced them in this fascinating medium of stop-motion, particularly clay animation, that would be visually unique and possibly give me a better shot at getting my ideas made. So, I asked Greg if he’d be willing to work with me (for free) on an idea I had for a series called Ad Gab, a Siskel & Elbert-inspired show with two clay-animated, highly-opinionated females and their pets that dished on real tv commercials, (not just cereal commercials). Ad Gab never got made as a series, but the demo I produced opened Hollywood doors with Disney and Dick Clark Productions.
Bix Pix Entertainment officially opened in 1998. With Greg as my animation director, I began to focus exclusively on producing. Our first long-form production was adapting my favorite children’s book, Dorothea Warren Fox’s Miss Twiggley’s Tree, into a stop-motion animation short. The short won several film festival awards and got the attention of new talent and new clients.
A lasting claim to fame was when Saturday Night Live’s Robert Smigel called around Thanksgiving in 2005 asking if we could produce a music video for a TV Funhouse segment in time for their Christmas show airing December 17th. We said, “Sure!” And Christmastime for the Jews was born and, with a song sung by Darleen Love, the sketch has since become a Holiday tradition airing every December.
After my mom’s passing in 2006 (my father passed in 1998), we got a gig to produce a television special. So, my husband and I made the decision to move Bix Pix to Los Angeles, still keeping our Chicago three-flat, of course. The television special, Holidaze, The Christmas that Almost Never Happened, starred an adult Fred Savage (who I’d directed as a 7-year-old in Chicago just months before he began shooting The Wonder Years), which brought my newfound animation career full-circle into my pivotal years working with Gerry Rogers.
In the last eighteen years and several studio sizes later, Bix Pix Entertainment has grown into a multi-award-winning American animation studio, internationally known for our high-quality stop-motion animation. A million connections, stars aligning, and the help of a slew of kind & cranky human beings made this happen. Along the way, these 3 factors kept my head in the game:
1. Falling in-love every day over and over again and again with stop-motion and, most importantly, the truly gifted crafts people who love it as much as I do. (There is no community tighter than the stop-mo community and that’s a good thing.)
2. Showing up, never giving up, always ready to roll up my sleeves, and consciously being fearless (or at least attempting this feat).
3. Finding FUN, even when plunging a toilet with a co-worker (the job is so glamorous) or treating the team to Veuve Cliquot after an award show when we didn’t win.
A little about Tumble Leaf…. a young artist, Drew Hodges, walked through my door in Chicago circa 2002. Drew shared his idea of a little blue boy with me in 2007. I liked it and we grew his idea together. In 2012, we sold it to Amazon. Tumble Leaf, a preschool series, proved my and our studio’s collective goal to deliver quality content with exquisite production value matters. Its four seasons of 105 episodes was translated in 17 languages, nominated for 35 Emmys and won 16 Emmys, 3 Annie Awards, a BAFTA, an Annecy International Animation Festival Jury Award, and was a Peabody Finalist.
Tumble Leaf is one of those rare projects that came from a pure place… Love. The kind of love that brings out the very best in every individual that it touches. Fig (that little blue boy who is now a fox) and his joie de vie are infectious (as love is) and enabled us all to meet the incredible challenges of that production.
Thankfully, Bix Pix got the rights back to Tumble Leaf just in time to celebrate the 10-year Anniversary of the series on Amazon Prime. And earlier this year we announced that Tumble Leaf, The Movie will be produced by me & Drew Hodges, with Drew penning the screenplay and directing the feature.
Bix Pix currently has 4 family-friendly feature films on our slate at various phases of development, along with the development of three television series for kids and adults and our bread & butter work-for-hire gigs that pop up miraculously when needed, thank goodness!
I think the first movie I saw at a theater was The Sound of Music. My whole family went and, on the way home, Dad said that he could have bought a new set of tires for what he spent that night. But what I remember the most from that night is what I felt when the lights began to dim and the curtains opened, revealing a huge screen (they did that in the 1960’s) and the whole theater got quiet. Then, the 20th Century Fox logo came up with that magnificent score. It was so loud and thrilling and I was completely immersed into the world on the screen. To this day every time I go to the movies, right before it starts, when the entire place is dark and quiet, that same excitement, anticipation, feeling of sheer joy of being ready to be swept away by a good story, incredible actors, beautiful music, dynamic cinematography, costumes, design, direction, production value…still rushes over me, through me… I’m hooked.
I’m a producer, which means I must take responsibility, action, create, schlep, trust, listen, lead, communicate, communicate, and again communicate. I dance with chaos and love every minute, I’m the luckiest gal on the planet and that’s my story.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
The number one challenge of working in the entertainment industry is that the work is not consistent. You can be completely immersed in a production for 26 months and when that ends you may not have more work for another 8 months or more. So, you have to plan for lean times and use that time wisely, not only to keep creating and developing but to keep building more human connections.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
About Bix Pix —
Bix Pix Entertainment is a multi-award-winning studio, internationally known for their high-quality stop-motion animation. Based in Los Angeles, Bix Pix was founded by Chicagoan Kelli Bixler. In addition to the studio’s success with Tumble Leaf, the Bix Pix team is behind stop-motion episodes of Fox’s Bob’s Burgers, Cartoon Network’s Adventure Time, a perennial holiday cult-favorite Christmastime for the Jews for Saturday Night Live’s TV Funhouse, and a Twitter-trending Google Doodle celebrating Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. More recently, Bix Pix produced Shape Island for APPLE TV+, the series was honored with a 1st Jury Prize at the 2023 Annecy Festival and has received 1 Emmy nomination, 1 Emmy win and 2 Annie nominations in its first season.
Throughout the studio’s 26 years of creating content, it remains nimble with over 100 creative individuals (with 13 Emmys awarded for their individual skills), who obsess over tiny buttons, philosophically discuss cloud shapes, and look forward to homemade cookies hot from the oven each week.
The crisis has affected us all in different ways. How has it affected you and any important lessons or epiphanies you can share with us?
Pick the one thing you will not compromise on, just one. Everything else is not worth ‘dying on the hill’ over.
And always, no matter what take the high road.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.bixpix.com
