Today we’d like to introduce you to Carter Goodrich.
Hi Carter, 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.
After attending Rhode Island School of Design, I wandered down to NYC and began illustrating anything I could get my hands on. There were a lot of trade magazines at the time, and they provided a steady income, along with the flashier magazines that got my name out there. In fact, after my first NYer cover came out, I was contacted by DreamWorks and ended up coming out here to LA to work on Prince of Egypt as a character designer. My first gig in animation. After a while, I gave up thinking LA was just temporary lodgings and that I’d head back east as soon as I could, where I felt more comfortable. The work kept coming, and I hopped from one movie to the next. Pretty soon, the years turned into decades, and I bought the house in Silver Lake that I still live into this day.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
No road is really smooth. And if it is, it’s probably not the right one to travel on. Especially if you’re involved with the arts. That being said, I’m still amazed to this day how things progressed for me, and even though I knew nothing about animation (and I still don’t, to be honest), I kept getting asked to work on new projects. The struggles I had were with myself, wondering if I should keep drawing character designs or move on and pursue other creative endeavors that were always floating around in my head. But I liked the community I found myself in, and I’ve made some lasting friendships with some of the folks I worked with. Still, I made sure that I was keeping up with “my own” work by writing and illustrating children’s books and submitting cover sketches to the NYer, as well as taking an occasional freelance illustration job. All in all, I think I’ve been extremely lucky.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
Well, I’ve kind of backed away from doing visual development work (character design, to be specific) for feature animation. It was a good run, but I feel like it’s time to move on. When it was dominating my time in my studio, it was kind of all-consuming. I was usually invited to work on a movie very early on in the process, which I think was the best time to be contributing to the look of an animated movie. It was wide open at that stage, and that meant there was a lot of freedom and experimenting involved. I was basically being asked to offer visual suggestions and possibilities as to how the cast of the movie might look, and who they might be, and how they might move. The more fully realized as a specific individual I could make them, the better. I could even offer some characters that weren’t yet written into the script. To be honest, that was my favorite part. I rarely followed the initial drawings that I delivered with information sheets (turnarounds and such) because that was dull work, and I wasn’t any good at it anyway. I loved the freedom of conjuring up a character from scratch and, when it went well, being surprised by how it felt like it had an actual soul. As a producer friend of mine once told me, I designed my characters from the inside out. What a wonderful compliment that was!
What sort of changes are you expecting over the next 5-10 years?
A.I. And I’m sorry, but I think that’s a massive tragedy. But the studios won’t have to bother with all those troublesome artists anymore. And they’ll save lots and lots of money. And the movies they make will have all the appeal of the cold, non-entities that will be making them. What an age we live in.
Contact Info:
- Website: cartergoodrich.com
Image Credits
Carter Goodrich
