Today we’d like to introduce you to James Mosley II.
Hi James, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
I was born in Detroit, Michigan. I’ve always been really interested in drawing and cartoons. The passion for drawing is something not a lot of people know about me because I now work so heavily on the production side of animation. My father is a mechanical engineer, and he taught me how to draw when I was about 4 years old. To this day, he is one of the most talented technical artists I know. I have the faint memory of sitting on his lap as a child and watching him draw an extremely realistic and beautiful portrait of my mother. In my early youth I began drawing everywhere: in church on tithe envelopes, on the walls throughout our house, even in school, on homework. I watched a broad range of cartoons such as Dora the Explorer, Proud Family, Clifford the Big Red Dog, Tarzan animated series, Buzz Lightyear of Star Command, Recess, SpongeBob, Hey Arnold!, various Disney animated series & movies, etc… The list goes on and on. I’d sit in front of the TV, imagine, and create my own characters for the shows/movies I was watching in real time.
I took a bit of a hiatus from cartoons and drawing during elementary school and middle school due to the basketball dreams I developed at the time. I played basketball for my elementary school in 4th grade, but I was never able to make it past the basketball team tryouts in middle school and high school at other schools. When I was cut from tryouts in high school the first time, I had to take an honest look at myself and admit that the result came from not working hard enough or having the discipline to work on my game religiously as others had. After that, I became very driven and regimented. I created a workout schedule and list of drills to do every day in my basement, many times the garage. That consisted of shooting 500 shots a day, running long distances around the neighborhood every day, etc., even on days that it was freezing outside. That experience set the foundation of the work ethic I’d apply to animation later on. Nonetheless, after all of that training one summer, I was still cut from tryouts for the high school basketball team a second time. I was pretty devastated, felt a loss of identity, and I really reflected and thought about what I wanted to do and could do with the rest of my life. Then I remembered my passion for drawing and cartoons.
When I was 16 years old, my stepfather and mother took me, my late grandmother, and my sister (and I believe her now husband) on a trip to Walt Disney World in Florida and I can vividly recall walking around the amusement park imagining that I was Walt Disney walking around the manifestation of my own dreams – it felt euphoric. I came back from that trip fired up. I also discovered Aaron McGruder and his work, The Boondocks at the time. That comic strip inspired me greatly. It was the first time I saw an African American cartoonist fusing black culture and hip-hop commentary into comic strips and it made cartooning that much more of a potential reality to me. I immediately started drawing comics for my high school newspaper because of him. Once The Boondocks became an animated series, I looked up the addresses of different animation studios and started mailing my comics and ideas to them in hopes that they would help me make an animated series. I received tons of rejection letters back. I now know that ideas aren’t taken so freely from people who just mail the studios (and for a good reason). To take matters into my own hands I started a YouTube channel and taught myself how to animate in Flash/Maya in order to start producing my own animated series. I animated, wrote scripts, voiced characters (along with my dad and friends), recorded voice-over audio in my closet with a basic mic, edited the voice-over, and even edited/composited the video/picture for my own animated shorts. I made these shorts well into my time in college and ended up making around 70 shorts at the end of that run.
My parents were divorced, and my father lived in Santa Barbara, CA, still working as a mechanical engineer. As soon as I graduated high school in Michigan, I moved to Santa Barbara, CA, in order to attend Santa Barbara City College and gain my Associate’s Degree in Animation and Gaming. I knew that if I was going to break into the animation industry, I needed to go to where the industry was. After earning my degree in Animation and Gaming at Santa Barbara City College, I moved to Fullerton, CA in order to continue my schooling. At the time, I researched that Cal State Fullerton had something around a 70% success rate for students landing a job at animation studios like Nickelodeon and DreamWorks, so that was no-brainer for me.
In 2014, during my 4th year in college, I earned an internship at Nickelodeon on the Dora and Friends preschool animated series as a Production Intern. Working at studios like Nickelodeon, DreamWorks, Warner Bros., etc. as an artist is similar to a basketball player being able to play at the NBA level. Storyboard artists, for example, draw a mind-blowing amount of incredible drawings in a short amount of time. I learned how animation was made by industry standards, and it became clear to me quickly that I was not a major studio-level creative talent. I realized that I would have more success as a producer due to my ability to understand pipeline and connect with people, so I recalibrated my goals in animation. I wanted to become the best at the business and management side while still being able to be around all of this great creativity. On the Dora and Friends show, I made the commitment to Animation Production and decided to try working my way up the ranks on the production side. After my internship I went on to work on the animated series Pinky Malinky as a Production Assistant, then was promoted to Production Coordinator by the end of the show. On the show Cleopatra In Space (DreamWorks), I worked as a Production Coordinator, Santiago of the Seas as a Production Coordinator, We Lost Our Human (Netflix) as a Production Supervisor, an Untitled project at Hello Sunshine as a Production Manager, Wolfboy and the Everything Factory (Bento Box/Apple) as a Production Manager, Merry Little Batman (WB/Amazon) as an Associate Producer, and now I’m a Line Producer at Driver Studios (in New York, and I work remote from LA) working on various animated projects for high-quality brands.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
Ha, oh man, where do I start? I’ll do my best to be succinct since this isn’t a novel. I’d need a 700-page book to detail every trial, tribulation, and triumph, but I can say that it’s been a long, rigorous, exhausting, and equally joyful & rewarding journey. As far as struggles, there are times I’ve been overlooked, underestimated, been discouraged, made public mistakes, been possibly discriminated against at times, downright humiliated and disrespected in front of people in meetings, had too many late nights to count, had to be innovative and find solutions to problems that were bigger than me – probably any struggle you could name. Every time, however, I managed to find the motivation, inspiration, and opportunity in every obstacle and was able to capitalize on it at the end of every saga. Whenever I’ve had setbacks, I reflected, reassessed, learned from it, had good support around me and got back on the horse, so to speak. I’ve learned that the individual who stays in the race the longest has the greatest chance of success and it’s worked out well for me, I think. Every dream is a marathon, not a sprint, and “to the victor belong the spoils.” It also helps that I deeply love what I do, and so I can take a lot more adversity than others and keep going. I’m married to the animation game, and that means that I take the good that comes with the bad. I don’t plan on ever stopping. I’m here to be great, so the industry can bring on whatever it’s got for me. I’m ready for it, and I may bend from time to time, but I’ll never break. I will come out on top at the end of all of this.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
Producing animation is the only thing I’ve known for a long time, and I believe it’s what I’m known for by friends and family. Currently I’m a Line Producer for a company titled Driver Studios. In short, I create the schedule, budget and process for animated shorts, and I help make sure everything is on track and running as planned (as much as possible at least). If problems arise, I try to find a way for us to identify the best solution, whether that solution comes from me, other people, or all of us. I supervise the production, delegate, connect departments, strategize, project plans, implement technology/software, and initiate the hiring of employees and facilities as necessary for different stages of production. I’m most proud of witnessing the growth of the people on my team and somehow positively contributing to their understanding or outlook – on production and/or life. Also, connecting team members and departments where I see gaps makes me happy.
What sets me apart? Might be a silly answer, but maybe it’s my big laugh. I notice a lot of animation producers are far more reserved than I am as far as showing their emotion, but I take pride in being able to laugh and be a bit more easygoing during stressful times. On a serious note, I’d like to think I have a high emotional intelligence so I’m able to connect with people fairly easily, but you’d have to ask someone from my team to confirm. I’d hate to be that guy that says, “I’m humble” if you know what I mean. The person who says they are humble can’t really be the judge of that.
Risk-taking is a topic that people have widely differing views on – we’d love to hear your thoughts.
I think risks are necessary for just living and moving forward as a human being because nothing in this world is for certain, but you can’t become stagnant knowing that. Every day that you walk out of your place of residence, you are taking a risk because you could potentially get hit by a bus or something, OR you could have a great day, live, and make it back home. From a working professional view, you have to make decisions that aren’t completely supported in their potential for success just to keep things moving. Even when a risk you took fails, you learn from that failure, and there is the opportunity to do better next time. There is no progress or innovation without taking risks. However, I believe I am a very calculated and cautious risk-taker. I weigh the pros and cons of every decision or attempt as carefully as I can within whatever time I have to take that risk. In addition, I try to get the counsel of my relevant team members before I pull the trigger on taking a risk. The last risk I remember taking was on one of my production manager gigs, where we were dealing with hundreds and hundreds of retakes to finish before each episode viewing every week. I wrote up a plan on how to delegate them all between various overseas animation studios and our internal animation team (based on strengths, weaknesses, efficiency, nature of the notes, how much each entity/individual was capable of doing per week, etc.) each week and we were able to get them done in time for each episode viewing. Did I know if it would work? Not 100%.
Contact Info:
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Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/
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Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/
jamesmosleyii/mr.mosleyii@ gmail.com
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