INTRODUCTION to Language of the Soul: How Story Became the Means by which We Transform

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Welcome to season three of Language of the Soul Podcast. This season will explore the book that started at all: Language of the Soul: How Story Became the Means by which We Transform. This episode is devoted to the book’s introduction, in which author Dominick Domingo recounts the vivid childhood that made him who he is. More importantly, the worldview and sensibility it forged informs the premise of the book that became this podcast! From lying in the grass at Olive Park’s Creative Arts center in the 1970s listening to folk music, through landing a job at Disney during its famed ‘Animation Renaissance,’ to his time as an independent live action filmmaker and author, each formative step in his journey fueled a passion for not only the traditions behind Western storytelling structure, but its power to transform the individual and by extension, evolve society at large!

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Transcript

Story’s Power And Its Hijacking

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Language of the Soul. How story became the means by which we transform. Introduction. Everybody's got a story. I can't count the times I've heard the sentiment. From magazine shows highlighting the everyman on the street to reality show interstitials extolling contestants' virtues. From the mouth of my own mother, who will shoot the breeze for an hour if you let her, with every lone fisherman in a folding lawn chair along New Jersey's Passaic River. The great documentary is said to have an emotional hook at its core. A universal story that speaks to the human condition. Even those feel-good human interest stories on the news meant to balance the horrors of the preceding news hour, uplifting images of firemen rescuing kittens from the boughs of trees, all key into our innate human wiring for story, our intrinsic appetite for metaphor. As a filmmaker passionate about the power of cinema to transform, engaging not just intellect or emotion but all the senses, I've traditionally gravitated toward narrative over documentary. However, I quickly learned when seeking funding for my independent films that most grants go to documentary. As a two-time finalist for the Roy Dean Film Grant, I sat in on countless pitching and coaching sessions on selling a passion project in documentary format. What I learned is this: any agenda, however well shrouded in the guise of unbiased reporting, is secondary to our human compulsion to identify, to bond through our shared humanity. This is the very definition of story. The word story is thrown around incessantly in contemporary pop culture, especially in social media circles. The word has become synonymous with brand building and content creation. Along with terms like creativity, the law of attraction, and manifestation, the word story has arguably lost its nuance, if not its potency. These days, a great deal of lip service is given to telling one's story. One is shamed for not finding his or her authentic voice and contributing it to the collective. This is hardly an exaggeration. The fact that traditionally impractical institutions like art or story have taken the front seat as cultural values represents enormous evolution. The shift from a preoccupation with base survival needs to higher concerns. The problem is nine times out of ten, the virtues of story are being hijacked from their innate role in culture. In the same way, self-help gurus and life coaches use law of attraction principles to promise the manifestation of a yacht over that of contentment, harmony, well-being, or inner peace. The mechanics of story are being regularly appropriated. Rather than extolling their power to lend aesthetic richness to life, to shift paradigms or usher mankind toward human potential, talking heads usurp them as propaganda tools. In lieu of opening hearts and minds, advertisers dangle the carrot of story as a means to open pocketbooks. If not the Almighty Dollar, the desired outcome seems to be political persuasion, otherwise known as power mongering. In a tribal context, the biochemical mechanics of storytelling served propagation as bonding and affinity. In contemporary pop culture, rather than being founded in inspiration and contributing to the transformation of the collective, they're more apt to feed consumerism into little more. I may be in the minority, but I distinguish between story as transformation and story as commerce or propaganda. The power of story to provide catharsis for the individual and the tribe at large has been wired into us from day one. Far from masquerading as a work of art or a literary masterpiece, this book seeks to preserve the innate power of storytelling in its purest form. To explain my zeal, let me start at the beginning. I was a weird kid, let's be honest. At the age of six, I stood with my grandmother on the brink of a cliff overlooking the Owens River Valley. The vast barren desert stretched out before us, dissolving into infinity at some indiscernible distance. My mind had been grappling with the concept of eternity. Living forever, like the Bible promised, seemed daunting to me. More than that, the prospect threatened to be boring at best. Whatever would I do to bide the time? I'd finally gotten up the guts to ask the existential question that had been bouncing around inside my tiny six-year-old skull. Grandma, what would there be if we were not here? In retrospect, I'm not even sure what it meant. Did the we refer to her and I, humanity, or consciousness itself? On some level, I must have innately grasped that the universe only exists, arguably, through the lens of an observer with sense organs and a brain to interpret the stimuli they took in. But

A Child’s Questions And First Awe

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Graham was not big on heady conversation. Her hand squeezed tighter around mine, and her reply was guileless. Just try not to think about it, sweetie. Try not to think about it. It said so much about my grandmother and her generation, I later understood. No one who lived through the Spanish flu, the Dust Bowl, and the Great Depression could be bothered with the big questions. Around the time I started kindergarten, I found myself already pressured by the adults around me. When asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, my stock answer was Winnie the Pooh. My identification with the pudgy bear would only later reveal itself. In young adulthood, on discovering a book titled The Tao of Pooh, I would understand that Pooh's Zen disposition was what made us kindred spirits. Or more accurately, that by declaring my unconventional career goal, I'd been aspiring to all that Pooh embodied. I'd lie in the grass at Burbank's Creative Arts Center, the hippie haven where my Earth Mama made clay pinch pots interlaced with macrame, and her mentor Claude sculpted nothing but dragons and fortune cookies, and contemplate. Sprawled on the lawn, watching tiny molecules drift from the nothingness of space to settle on spongy grass, I knew I was not alone in pondering existence. Claude surely had similar thoughts bouncing around his imaginative skull. I half suspected his dragons had been inspired by a song that was getting a lot of airplay on mainstream radio at the time, Puff the Magic Dragon. More likely, Claude had been doing a little puffing of his own. The man's beard was bushier than any I'd yet seen in my six years, and he sported earrings in both ears. Claude was friendly with Ted, the Parks and Wreck gymnastics coach, who went home to Jesse, the male ballet instructor. The nature of their relationship was never explained. My Zen disposition extended to home life. Whether watching growing rocks take shape in a fishbowl, too slow for my taste, frankly, or gazing into murky waters watching sea monkeys materialize from crystals, I found myself reflecting on the abstract. Were those sea monkeys sentient? Aware of their own being? Oh, it was a given that they too had fallen victim to false advertising, little more than crescent-shaped specks the size of small fingernail clippings. They swam lazy circles in the dim beacon of my flashlight with its dying batteries, while the ones depicted on the packaging drove tiny cars and shopped, donning ti eras. Despite their fingernail-like appearance, I keyed into their awareness, awakened the moment they transformed from crystal to fingernail. That as yet mysterious electrical charge that made life of biological soup eons ago. Yep, I thought more deeply than any six-year-old rightly should. And yet, doing so was not a burden. It was an effortless inclination that made life rich. My relationship with the Noah Sphere was seamless. I was a fish breathing invisible water, unaware of its existence. No different than those sea monkeys or the lazy, fraudulent growing rocks. Flash forward 30 years or so. Midway through my stint in animation, I realized everything I've ever drawn, painted, or written, all of my personal works, were meant to illuminate what I saw that others did not. Like Horton in Dr. Seuss's Horton Here's a Who, I saw entire worlds on tiny clover blossoms, when no one else in my world seemed to. While working at Disney, I'd continued creating personal work and writing every chance I got. In an unexamined way, my creations shed light on the metaphysical level of life, the subtext in every moment. Sometimes in my writing, what I illuminated was psychological subtext, the subconscious neuroses or petty defense mechanisms that led to tragedy. Or other times the collective intelligence we call fate, moving molecules and mountains despite a character's free will. Still other times it was the historical baggage or preconceived notions a character unknowingly brought into an interaction that became self-fulfilling prophecy, or the energetic vibrational undercurrent of a moment when suspended. All the stories I had told, with word or image, centered on waking people up, inspiring them, or conversely, jolting them into looking at, well, anything but the surface of things. In 2021, getting awoke is the mantra of the day, if only folks were more practiced at it. I've preached seeing through the matrix of social conditioning, or the spell dream illusion, as Deepak Chopra and Native Americans might call it, with every breath. In my twenties, hubs compelled me to view those who lived unexamined lives as sleepwalkers. Growing up in a milieu of alcoholism and dysfunction, denial was par for the course, and I resented it. The blinders I saw all around me were distasteful. In my heart I knew that even the sleepwalkers had lucid moments in which the spiritual journey revealed itself. I knew that when they ignored its call, it only knocked harder to get their attention. I knew that pride and ego compelled many to put off spiritual work until their deathbed, when redemption was inevitably put on the fast track. Most people seemed to get good with God just before Final Curtain. My tolerance for dysfunction was dysfunctionally low. The byproduct was that I championed, and myself and others, the respect for life in oneself that drove him to strive for potential. If there was a spiritual journey, I saw it as the challenge to take the opportunities for growth laid in one's path. And yet, no matter how admirable my glittering generalities, my view of life was based in spite for all that had threatened me as a child, made me feel unsafe. At over half a century, I no longer see things in such stark terms. Somewhere in my 30s, I began to understand that we were all growing and learning the same spiritual and emotional lessons as one another due to our shared humanity, despite any appearance to the contrary. It was simply hard to recognize. We were all on unique schedules, the transformative lessons in a different order. Some people were lucid about the journey, possessing the meta-self that compels one to examine and share any wisdom acquired along the way. Others were tighter lipped, out of admirable humility. But we were all, I decided, growing and transforming as long as we remained above ground. The journey simply looked different on different folks. Regardless of my evolving views on the spiritual journey, one thing became clear. I had a vested interest in getting people woke, long before it was the trendy thing to do. In the same way I delighted when those sea monkeys unfroze their spiny microscopic selves from a crystalline state and began swimming lazy circles. I thrilled to the fantasy others and the world had the capacity to become the best versions of themselves. My epiphany about the nature of my work was a defining moment, no doubt. I'd taken my first oil painting class at the age of seven, at the same creative art center where Claude sculpted his dragons. I was given a typewriter for Christmas at the age of nine and

Seeing Subtext And Waking Up

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told it should last me through college. The stern warning was relayed by my parents from no one other than Santa Claus, of course. As it turned out, Santa had been doing a little fantasizing of his own. The typewriter would be lucky to last through the following summer, let alone college. I quickly lost the E key when it popped off and plunged into the vortex where stray socks are held. Given that E is a popular vowel difficult to avoid, I continued pecking away at the sharp prong exposed in the key's absence until I developed a stubborn but useful callus. There were so many things to write about. All accompanied by highly rendered illustrations, of course. And a question and answer segment that Mr. Wilkins made sure to assign to the class. Needless to say, my intellectual curiosity and burging creativity did not win me friends. Suffice it to say, my writing and image making evolved hand in hand. And in the spirit of Renaissance men everywhere, or jacks of all trades as the case may be, I was voted president of the vocal music program at my high school. We competed regionally in the Southern California Show Choir Circuit, and I was awarded a scholarship to study with renowned vocal coach Seth Riggs. Having my hands in so many cookie jars was likely some naive version of considering myself an artist with various modes of expression, in quotes. The upside to having been raised with so much chaos and dysfunction was the immeasurable creativity that it birthed. To my parents' credit, they encouraged it. Neighborhood kids would come from blocks around to play with clay or make plaster molds and cast Halloween masks in liquid latex. It was not only okay to spill glue on our dining room table, it was encouraged. My mother owned a costume shop for much of my adolescence, which meant our living room was always crowded with sculpted foam rubber walk-around costumes for the ice capades or the entire cast of the latest community theater production she was costuming. It was the sheer looming of graduation and impending adulthood that led me to set my sights on Art Center College of Design. Though it's the nature of teenagers to think, on average, no more than 30 minutes ahead, somehow the pressure got in. That same pressure I'd rebelled against by declaring I wanted to be nothing less than Winnie the Pooh when I grew up. As luck would have it, Art Center would turn out to be one of the top design schools in the world. I characterize it as a stroke of luck for one reason. I did not investigate a single other art school. A friend had been given a scholarship to the college's Saturday High program and invited me along. A fire was lit for both of us, and not just because we got to draw naked bodies all summer. We felt we'd glimpsed a potential future that did not involve flipping burgers and paper hats. We were both inspired to meet with the financial aid counselors and an admissions counselor. Bringing my parents to campus for those meetings somehow made the prospect of attending the college real, within reach. As did my acceptance sometime later, a small miracle in itself. After Saturday high, while motoring through my general education, I'd taken the odd drawing 101 course in junior college. The portfolio I submitted had been comprised of cobbled-together figure drawings and a few bad illustrations inspired by Ray Bradbury's The Illustrated Man. Midway through my illustration program, I interned a Disney feature animation. It was summer of 1990, which meant Rescuers Down Under was in production and The Little Mermaid was the last animated film released. Beauty and the Beast was in early development. The internship was general. We interns learned the fundamentals of traditional animation as well as all aspects of the production pipeline. Despite its wide scope, the internship preened us for the entry-level position of in-betweener. As the production position tasked with helping animators generate the needed 24 frames per second to flesh out their key poses, the in-betweening position was the track to becoming a character animator. I scored well during the internship and was offered a job. Though some considered me crazy, I chose to go back to Art Center to finish up my degree program. Conventional wisdom held that a degree was little more than a piece of paper with little currency in the field of entertainment. But my completion issues demanded I go back and finish what I'd started. When I finally graduated, despite what I'd been naively promised by the internship directors, the job was not simply waiting for me. On the contrary, it took some hustling to get back into Disney. Repeated phone calls to my animation mentor and my in-betweening mentor and the internship directors themselves. I'd scored well during my internship, which reflected well on the program, and the artist development department that ran it. This meant they had a vested interest in championing me during review board sessions, the weekly lunchtime gathering during which portfolios were reviewed by the key players on whatever film was currently in production. Together they weeded through the work of the 20 or so applicants that made the cut, having been whittled away by artist development from the hundreds of portfolios that Disney receives weekly from the world over. After one of these sessions, I was given a background painting test with a week to complete it. It entailed executing a master copy of a production background from the film Bambi, matching hue, value, saturation, and technique as one would on production while maintaining on-screen continuity. The stars aligned. There just happened to be a budget for a trainee on an upcoming production. The background supervisor and art director with the power to hire me just happened to be in the room that day. They could just as easily have stepped out for lunch. Flash forward. I had $5 in my pocket the day I received the call to come in and start work as a background painter on a tiny film to become known as Lion King. I worked at Disney feature animation for 11 years on Lion King, Pocahontas, Hunchback of Notre Dame, Tarzan, Little Match Girl, and One by One. The normal production cycle of an animated feature, minus development, pre-production, and post-production, was 18 months. But in the case of Lion King, I was brought on 18 months early, during pre-production, to train. I kept my nose to the grindstone during training. I knew no different. I just burned the candle at both ends for three years in During Art Center's program, one of the most rigorous and demanding in the nation among private schools. I'd been the only one in my class to continue working and paying rent throughout graduation, out of necessity, and still managed to be one of two to graduate with distinction. The thing is, it didn't feel like work or drudgery. It felt energizing. The work was inspired, and though I didn't know it at the time, the universe conspired with me in the pursuit of my personal legend, as Paul Coelho would call it in The Alchemist. I had learned his terminology much later in life, along with a recognition of all the forces that had worked in my favor. About eight years into my 11-year stint at the mouse, Tarzan was greenlit. Just as I had on Lion King, I hopped on Tarzan in pre-production, eight months before full production began to help develop the look of it. I was one of two artists to help develop the alpha release of the groundbreaking deep canvas technology that gave the film its immersive

Disney Years And Craft Formation

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look. On Lion King, I'd been blessed with a mentor who walked on water in my eyes. I respected him as an artist, a gentleman, a leader, and a human being. My effusiveness has not waned over the years. I count it a blessing to have hit the ground running in this way. It was the same gentleman who requested me for his team years later when Tarzan was green-lit for production. There were many highlights over my 11 years at Disney feature animation. Among them rank moments like when Eldon John first sat down to the piano to pitch the songs he'd crafted for Lion King. It was the first time the directors were hearing them, along with the small crew that had assembled. Needless to say, the film became one of the top grossing films of all time and a global phenomenon. Eventually, the songs were published as sheet music. I'll never forget returning to my high school for a spring concert, the very high school where I'd been vocal music president. A true full circle moment occurred on hearing a medley of Lion King songs being performed by the very show choir that I'd led to victory in the competition circuit years before. During my 11 years at Disney feature animation, there were too many highlights, too many fond memories to count. There was the thrill of seeing that huge orange disc of a sun rise over the savannah for the first time in a real theater once Lion King was released. There was the time I brought my parents to the Pocahontas premiere in Central Park because my mom had never visited New York. The night before the screening, I brought my cousin Veronica from Jersey to the dinner in Radio City Music Hall's Rainbow Room. When our meal came, my cousin swiftly seated herself next to Roy and Patty Disney, not knowing any better. The couple have both since passed, but the picture of them with my cousin hangs on her refrigerator to this day in the Jersey countryside. During production on Tarzan, I spent several months working out of our Paris studio, lodged in an opulent apartment Disney kept for such purposes on the fringe of Place des Vosges. Most prescient to the spirit of this book, I was surrounded by artistic geniuses and master storytellers all day, every day. I sat in on every story meeting in which Lion King sequences were pitched to Jeffrey Katzenberg, and then later, of course, when sequences were pitched by story artists to Michael Eisner. I was privy to every note the two powers that be disseminated, and the discussions that ensued among directors and story artists after their departure. I listened to the likes of Stephen Schwartz, Alan Mencken, and Howard Ashman finessing lyrics to support the ever-evolving stories being bounced back and forth between writers and storyboard artists. This experience formed the foundation of my current understanding of story, the Western storytelling convention that informs screenwriting for cinema. Listening to the rationale of creative executives, directors, and the board artists themselves provided a myriad of perspectives. And seeing how all the discourse played out with regard to critical reception and box office proceeds taught me about the element of randomness. This book will address the intersection between art and commerce. The two are not mutually exclusive. Lion King represents the rare intersection in which literary value and artistic integrity are the very reason for the universality that translates into box office gold. Just as important as what I learned about Western storytelling structure was the visual storytelling that was my contribution to these films. The technique, the craft, and the conceptual basis of art direction, I was honing, was being folded into the mix of what made me an artist. Unexamined, I was beginning to see both word and image as the means by which we stir the soul. I left Disney over 20 years ago. Traditionally animated or 2D films were going by the wayside. Though many of the decisions on the part of corporate Disney have been proven short-sighted, at the time, executives attributed the success of certain CG films to the medium and not the message. To the fact that they were digital and not traditional. The truth is, the film's critical and box office success had nothing to do with the medium in which a particular story was being told. Only with the story itself. In any case, suffice it to say that the axe fell. Hundreds of artists were laid off in a single day in LA. The Florida studio was shut down entirely, and eventually the Paris studio. In advance of the decimation, many artists were given the option of making the transition to digital technology by taking classes at my alma mater art center. Instead, however, many chose to jump ship. The mentor whom I mentioned earlier that trained me for Lion King chose to pursue the gallery painting he'd dabbled in but never had the time to fully realize. He now shows in Tahiti and his home of Hawaii. I chose to accept a mutual separation agreement in order to benefit from a nice severance package and begin telling my own stories. Long story short, during a year-long sabbatical written into my final contract, I'd written a screenplay about a broken heart I'd recently endured. Writing it had been cathartic to say the least. Long before learning screenwriting by Osmosis at Disney, I'd taken plenty of creative writing classes in my general education. Writing was still in my blood. Even so, I was green as a screenwriter when I tackled that first extremely personal feature script. Whatever I lacked in craft was made up for by the truth my feature screenplay spoke. When I hosted a reading of the manuscript with Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman's Chad Allen and other professional actors, the consensus was the story that had poured out of me was more raw and poignant than most scripts they were normally handed. But the sabbatical came to an end and I returned to Disney for the final year-long option of my contract. For the duration of it, I found myself champing at the bit to make the film I'd written. I'd watched two fellow Disney artists make the plunge into independent live-action filmmaking as au tours, so I had a model for the risk I was about to take. During that final year, the writing on the wall foreshadowed the falling of the axe. The universe was telling me something. I made the decision to take the plunge. I'd begun teaching two years earlier at my alma mater art center at the outset of my year-long sabbatical. I'd purchased a home so I had a mortgage to pay. Since my sabbatical was unpaid, I figured I'd need some bread and butter money during my year off in order to keep a roof over my head. I'd also reached a point where I wanted to pass the baton and give back. At that point, I was nine or so years into my 11 years at Disney, but it had taken me that long to feel I had something to offer as an educator. I'd continue to learn and grow and perfect my craft on the job. I'm not sure I'd ever feel I'd become the best background painter or visual development artist I could be. Still, with 16 nieces and nephews but no children of my own, teaching would be my way of being bigger than myself. When I left Disney, I kept the teaching gig but not the house. I put it on the market in order to take the coming risk with a lower overhead. I immediately attended New York Film Academy, ironically here in LA, to learn the craft of filmmaking. After completion, I did what every last book on independent filmmaking says not to do. I spent my own money to finance my first short film. The investment was well thought out. This would be my real film school. Learning craft practically, in the trenches, meant it would really stick. The short film was to be a learning experience, beyond being a story I was passionate about putting into the world for art's sake alone. Further, being shot on 35mm with high production values, it would serve as my calling card, the reel that would lead to the making of the feature film I'd written. The story was about the anatomy of heartbreak, a subject I felt was too rarely spoken of. The feature was titled Giving In, and it still tugged at me. Financing the short film that was to be my calling card was not completely delusional. The student film that had been my thesis project at New York Film Academy had made it into several festivals. I dipped my toe in the water and, for good or bad, had been encouraged. The self-financed film destined to be my calling card was titled The Passerby. It did well in the festival circuit, winning several awards. It forged many fond memories and lasting relationships. I remain good friends with many of its actors and crew members to this day. But it did not immediately lead to the financing of giving in my feature. In the waiting, I was talked into writing and co directing a feature that garnered distribution with Lionsgate. A subsequent shortfall.

Leaving 2D, Finding A Voice

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Dear to my heart, Outpost, also won awards in Garner distribution with TLA, the largest distributor of LGBTQ short film collections at the time. During my live-action filmmaking days, I continued freelancing an animation and teaching several classes in the entertainment track I'd founded at my alma mater art center. The modicum of security allowed me to take creative risks. One day, I woke up to realize the original screenplay credits I'd garnered on SAG IMDB films with distribution constituted a writing resume. This, of course, keyed into my lifelong love of writing, the one that had never left me since first popping a key off that manual typewriter at the age of nine. Having been raised in LA, I knew just how many aspiring writers would have killed or died for my accolades. I'd stumbled into screenwriting credits simply in order to tell my stories. I'd hosted no burning desire to be a screenwriter. It's just that I saw the two, writing and directing as inseparable. At that point I had no desire to direct the stories of others, nor did I really have any desire to hand off my own unique stories to other directors. They'd hardly know what to do with them. I suppose my singular vision is what makes an auteur, a writer-director, or a walking cliche as the case may be. All I had to do was look around at all those aspiring screenwriters pecking away on their laptops at Starbucks. With their two-year make it or break it plan or their five-year plan to realize the value of the resume I'd stumbled into, I immediately put my writing on the front burner. Truth be told, doing so was also fueled by the fact that I couldn't rub two nickels together to get a film made. There's a conventional wisdom that one must have a rich uncle to get an independent film made in Hollywood. I found it to be true. I had precisely one rich uncle, but any money he could have brought to the table would have been dirty money. Mafia money. Instead of going the organized crime route, I'd been resourceful and industrious pursuing financing. Though I'd underwritten my first short film myself, the second one, Outpost, involved investors. Involving them turned out to be more of a headache than it was worth. My films had all entailed ambitious shoots. The first broke a martial law for green filmmakers with its inclusion of horses, a baby, and no less than 60 extras. Frankly, I was tired. Writing was a solitary pursuit I could do at coffee shops, to the smell of brewing Sumatra and chocolatey desserts, with no hundred-man crew to worry over. Writing literary fiction for the publishing world sounded like a soothing bomb. And so it was I cracked my laptop and began haunting coffee shops. I had recently discovered David Sideris. This revelation happened to coincide with a milestone in aging, the awareness of mortality that drives one to leave a mark. Like Sederis, I'd spent time in Paris and endured my own comically tragic language foibles. This fact, combined with my impending midlife crisis, nudged me to embark on writing narrative nonfiction essays from my own life. I began performing them in spoken word events around Los Angeles, even founding one of my own. A few of the crowd pleasers got laughs, encouraging me. Oh, I was no stand-up comedian, let's be clear. I don't have the constitution for that. If I ever fell flat or heard crickets from a back alley, I could always fall back on the premise that I was reciting literature. Several of the essays were published in their own right and included in anthologies. In keeping with a recurring theme, this encouraged me for good or bad. I continued teaching at Art Center, which allowed me to continue indulging the craft of writing every chance I got. In 2012, I wrote my first novel in a matter of months. Oh, it had been germinating for a while. A lifetime to be precise. I had carried a long-standing desire to write a through-the-rabbit hole fairy tale based on the hero's journey. I'd always loved stories like The Reluctant Dragon, Bridge to Terabithia, Phantom Tollbooth, and Indian in the Cupboard, in which the protagonist, usually a loner, encounters a mythological creature in an unexpected place and follows it to an alternate realm through some kind of portal. I grew up on C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, among others, and found myself returning to the worlds they created time and again as an escape. During my general education, when my first niece was in Pigtails, I'd begun such a fairy tale for her, but it never saw completion. Twenty-five years later, when Twilight Times Books picked up my novel, The Nameless Prince, I dedicated it to that same niece, who now had a growing family of her own. The publisher marketed the book as urban fantasy, a subgenre I didn't previously know existed. I launched the book at Roman's bookstore in my college town of Pasadena, the very bookstore I'd frequented since attending Art Center in the 80s. I'd always admired their artful and literary lists, so seeing my book displayed on NCAPs next to heroes like Shell Silverstein and Roll Dahl was a dream come true. I commented to a cashier that they'd surely ordered the book for my upcoming launch at the store. He denied it, assuring me they'd ordered it after simply seeing it in the catalog and being intrigued. After the launch, I learned the ropes of book promotion. Readings, signings, guest blog spots, podcasts, and talk radio interviews. The sequel, The Royal Trinity, launched in 2016. Both have maintained stellar ratings and reviews, but have yet to make me the next J.K. Rowlings. Suffice it to say, I have no Learjet on my landing pad. For that matter, I have no landing pad. I've continued to win notable awards like the Writer's Digest competition and Kraft Literary. I've continued to find publication in anthologies and collections. However big or small the circulation, it's satisfying to share my stories with the world and create a legacy. The most rewarding moments, those in which I feel the completion of a circuit, occur when I know the work has landed with someone. It's usually a complete stranger in the way of the shoemaker's children. During personal testimonials, the particular way in which my work has spoken to a stranger makes all the risk-taking and investment worthwhile. One would think working on the top grossing animated films of all time would have held some water with my 16 nieces and nephews. If my occupation had any currency at all, it was kept secret from me under the guise of playing it cool. Other than giving myself the moniker Uncle Disney, the guy who could use his silver

Filmmaking Risks And Writing Path

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past to get up to five people into Disneyland at any given time, I may as well have been a concrete salesman or a CPA. At one point, I so overdosed on all things Disney that I found myself driving to Anaheim to get my relatives in Disneyland's gates, then turning around and driving home. One can only take so much of the happiest place on earth. It's usually an Uber driver, a grown man, who tells me Lion King was his favorite movie as a kid. When I let slip, I worked for a little company called Walt Disney. I feel blessed to have been part of a moment in time when the stars aligned. The window of time I spent with Disney feature has become known as the Renaissance of 2D animation, and it was a wave we all rode as far as it would take us. I still have lunch on occasion with Roger, one of the two directors of Lion King. We regularly reminisce about a shared moment in time, a magical one in which the stars aligned, allowing an unlikely family to put stories out into the noosphere that changed the face of culture. Since the Renaissance ended, along with indulging my writing, I've continued to teach and keep at least one foot in animation. The visual development work I was able to do at Disney by jumping onto films in the early stages meant I had visual development experience on leaving. The bulk of the work I do now is as a visual development generalist. I have worked in that capacity or as a concept artist in both 2D animation and 3D or CG and television animation and feature both as well as in gaming. Over the years I have illustrated middle grade books and books for young readers for all the majors Putnam, Random House, Harcourt, Penguin, Hyperion, etc. I've worked as both a freelancer and an in-house independent contractor. What this means is I have had the opportunity to glimpse many different cultures at many different studios, different production pipelines and methodologies, different protocols and practices. Though many traditions and conventions remain universal and consistent across the board, the spirit of the work and the intention behind it can differ vastly, as can the business model. The intersection between art and commerce is a tricky one. I've never been so blessed as I was at Disney when it comes to respect for artistry. Most crucial to the spirit of this book, the conversation around word and image, the language of the soul. The breadth of my experience and the privilege to have crossed so many genres and formats in my career, so many mediums, means that I have become intimately acquainted with the trappings of each. All storytelling formats have different, quote, rules. It's said that film is a feeling medium, one in which one must show it, don't say it. There's nothing worse than using a character as a mouthpiece for needed exposition, and we all know it when we see it. One must demonstrate a character's essence through his or her actions, rather than spoon feeding it in dialogue. More importantly, showing through action rather than narration is what, among other things, keeps butts in the seats. It's said that literature relies more heavily on inner dialogue, and theater ventures into very cerebral territory that would be a snooze fest in cinema. When it comes to art direction and design, the look of a film is largely story-driven in both animated and live-action film. See Chapter 4, Image and Story, worth a thousand words. But in gaming, story be damned, it's all gameplay. Design is not driven by the visual reinforcement of thematic content or even a linear story arc that can be supported with color palette. It's driven by what's cool, what's trendy, and what best suits gameplay. For example, when a player reaches a given level in a game, Silent Hill comes to mind for which I designed many characters around the release of the movie. A sound cue might alert the player that the big boss of that level is in the vicinity. That sound cue might motivate a design decision like an axe that can be dragged across the floor of the burned-out abandoned hospital. I joke that having been spoiled by artistic genius at Disney, I often want to tear my hair out in other cultures. In gaming, the most thought-out bit of art direction I received on Silent Hill was put a hook on it, dude. Man, that would be sweet. Regardless, I feel blessed to have been able to explore different modes of expression, different mediums, and the unique way each touches hearts and minds. The final chapter of this book, Finding Your Voice, speaks to the ongoing journey of discovering one's personal flair and empowering the work with it. The lifelong artistic journey tends to feature universal milestones like discovering why one has chosen a given craft in the first place. My relationship with my personal work has evolved concurrently with my life journey, if not with the technique I perfected in my professional career. My own authentic voice, the one that most closely reflects what I uniquely have to say in the world, has infused itself in my writing. My voice as a writer is far more mature than any voice I might apply in the fine art world. Not to mention it's been married with a sense of purpose. The production art I produced in animation, an illustrator by trade and a visual development artist slash background painter in the animation industry, provided a skill set and a living I would not trade for the world. But the understanding of story I learned in animation is what I've carried forward. And what I cherish most. My love of story, my passion for the role it plays in culture and the power it possesses to transform individuals and change the world at large is what drives me now. The thread has remained unbroken. From the moment I watched those sea monkeys break out of their crystalline state to swim lazy circles in the dim beam of my flashlight. Through the moment in my twenties I realized what all my creations had sought to accomplish throughout life, to the unapologetic now or never fire that fuels me since a recent brush with death. Threading it all together is a deep desire to illuminate, to inspire. I continued teaching at ArtCenter for 20 years after leaving Disney. The electives I initially pitched, the first entertainment offerings in the illustration department, became the basis of ArtCenter's entertainment track. The program has since diverged into today's entertainment arts and entertainment design tracks, and effectively spun out of control. The good news is entertainment is not going anywhere anytime soon, nor is the fundamental human drive to tell stories and partake in them. My classroom experience, witnessing the various relationships my students enjoy with the creative process and the lifelong artist's journey at large, has taught me more than anything I could have read in a book. That experience, along with my own journey, forms the basis of the perspectives offered in this book. When I first began teaching, I was hesitant to impart anything definitive. Or to own it anyway. It was much more comfortable for me to share conventional wisdoms, schools of thought, or existing principles that could not be characterized as my opinion. This convenient escape hatch was based on an understanding that art and beauty have remained elusive and ineffable. I was not going to be the first to define the concepts or claim that there was a right or wrong way to approach them. I regularly qualified my content by reminding students to be judicious and synthesize all perspectives to which art school exposed them. I was simply there to offer existing schools of thought, perhaps in juxtapositions that might inspire them to draw new conclusions of their own. I was there to expose them to tools they might not have otherwise

Novels, Teaching, And Legacy

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considered in their own work, tried and true conventions plucked directly from centuries of perspective or light logic, from Gestalt Studies or Chevrolet's Laws of Color Theory. I was there to orchestrate conversations between peers and start dialogues. To me, asking the questions and dialoguing about them was as important as answering them definitively. Adding to my distorted reticence, of which I have since cured myself, life is short, I was a big fan of the Socratic method. I knew that anything definitive one could say, starting with the sky is blue, could ultimately be disproven if enough questions were asked. Flux, perspective, and semantics would always win out over the realm of black and white, quantifiable quote, knowledge. Needless to say, I'd painted myself quite literally into a corner. The hard truth was, no matter how many times I reminded students of the above, the sheer passion with which I delivered material said otherwise. Being Italian, I could discuss a hangnail with the same zeal as the second coming of Christ. And so it was that I eventually let it all go and stopped monitoring, editing myself. With the exception of one grandiose speech at the top of the term about perspective, semantics, and flux. The speech inevitably ends with the plea that students never, for a minute, imagine I consider anything that comes out of my mouth the ultimate truth, no matter how convicting my delivery. In conclusion, my Italian-American father was raised Catholic, and my waspier mother comes from a long line of Mormons, some practicing and some not. Needless to say, no religion or belief system was forced on us. Still, in the third grade, I was the first of their four children to attend church on an invitation. It was Methodist, and I ended up going regularly and becoming involved in the youth group throughout grade school and junior high. But for much of my adult life, in addition to every denomination of Protestantism and Catholicism, in small doses, I've explored many ideologies. To say I was a spiritual seeker would be an overstatement, not to mention a cliche, as there was nothing deliberate about it, nor was there a void to be desperately filled. I was simply curious and open. I tend to resonate more with Eastern philosophy and its religious offshoots than Western, it turns out. For that reason, I've practiced yoga, chanting, and meditation for much of my adult life. I've attended synagogue with Jewish friends and even Kabbala or Jewish mysticism. In my twenties, I dated a guy who is now a Reiki master. He was studying Chinese medicine at the time, which meant I became the guinea pig for every hot oil third eye massage in his curriculum. Not a bad gig. When it came time for acupuncture, however, I put the brakes on. You get good at those needles, I heard myself say. Then you can stick them in me. Somewhere in there I attended what was called Chinese Church by the friend from Disney who'd invited me. I don't remember much more than that, and the fact that it was on the upper level of a strip mall in a busy corner. It's important to know I had been practicing yoga for years by this time. Details are fuzzy, but I recall a series of stretches with a bit of chanting thrown in for good measure. The guru told us repeatedly we were simply preparing the body for meditation. We were also told that doing so was a long process, one that takes years. I came away with the distinct impression that, according to the guru running the service, one's body temple is not ready for meditation until it has one foot in the grave. Though I respect tradition and understand the sentiment to a degree, I have never liked the idea that nirvana, enlightenment, or even self-actualization is unattainable. The damning characterization the guru leveled on us reminded me of the approach of a vocal coach who came regularly to our high school. In the same vocal music program I presided over, which grew eventually to become the one after which Ryan Murphy modeled Glee, the coach would drill weak captive high schoolers with a strange mantra: posture, breath support. Posture breath support. The diaphragmatic breathing technique that was her religion required that a great deal of attention be paid to posture, and the hideous sneer she assured us was essential for resonance. With such a fixation on physical comportment, few ever graduated beyond proper breath support. Performing a song with any expression whatsoever was out of the question, for sheer terror of falling short of perfect posture, breath, and support. When I redeemed the aforementioned scholarship with Seth Briggs Studio, I was encouraged by Dale, the young protege who was assigned to mentor me. It was a positive experience I wouldn't trade for the world. But years later, when I sought vocal training on my own dime, I had a different experience. Granted, it had been a while, read years, since I'd sung regularly outside of my shower, I was out of shape. The well-recommeded vocal coach on our first lesson had me execute 45 minutes worth of vocal exercises. None of the scales were unfamiliar, but the intervals he chose were the more challenging ones I knew. Only after 45 minutes of vocal gymnastics did he prompt me to perform the song I'd come prepared to sing, complete with recorded accompaniment. Of course, my vocal folds flipped. They were not only fatigued but spasming due to the abuse. The song I'd sung dozens of times at home went quickly south. I sounded like alfalfa from the little rascals, after swallowing a bullfrog who'd ingested a pipe whistle. I was in my 30s at the time, no spring chicken. Even on the ride home, it was clear as day to me. The man's approach was strategic. The taxing exercises without warm-up came before the lame performance for a reason. This is the kind of instructor who makes you feel broken. That way you need him and you come back for much-needed lessons. I've seen it a million times since, even among guest speakers I've invited to my art center classroom. My young students are sharp. I can sense their resistance when patronized, pandered to, or manipulated. I vowed never to be that kind of instructor, one who relies on another's brokenness, lack, or insecurity to increase the value of my content. The good news is it's the furthest thing from my nature. And now the caveat. The book you hold in your hand may introduce you to potential pitfalls you may not have thought of. The goal is never for the power of suggestion to introduce insecurity into your journey. Medical student disorder, a form of hypochondria, is the phenomenon in which med students fall ill with each disease or condition they study. An education in the arts surely has its own equivalent, but I want no part of it. During my own schooling, I was hyper-vigilant about deflecting external voices of doubt or insecurity to a fault. When we students were assigned letters to a young poet and told it was the artist's handbook, I enjoyed it. But I was suspect of more than one romantic notion it proffered. At the tender age of 19, I had no desire to sign up for a lifetime of suffering for my art, harboring angst, or even indulging the solitude the book deemed the only true source of inspiration. I have since come to understand the tenets with greater perspective and less resistance. But at the time, the defiance that springs eternal in youth compelled me to categorically reject, hook, line, and sinker, what I did not wish

Art And Commerce: Hard Lessons

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to hear. The ideas at which I truly bristled did not come from that little handbook, so much as certain instructors I was sure were projecting their own experience as gospel truth. In one case, a fairly miserable drawing instructor warned us in no uncertain terms that we were, in essence, paying top dollar, our tenor is one of the most expensive private schools in the country, to sign up for a life of depression. Inspiration, he explained, only strikes after an inevitable cycle of depression. At 19, I did not want to hear this. Yet again, a few decades of life experience has given me the perspective to accept the truth in the statement. With one small revision, I replaced the man's projected characterization depression with the word germination. Any pitfalls, challenges, or downsides to the artist's journey mentioned in this book are conditional. Many things in life are universal, despite how unique we all wish to fancy ourselves. But varying conditions and circumstances assure that shared milestones and rites of passage play out in unique ways. If a suggestion is made in this book that does not resonate, just let it roll off and continue on. If a particular challenge is mentioned with which you do not identify, count your blessings, dig in your heels, and strengthen your resolve to remain vigilant. This book is meant to be inspiring above all else. In 20 years of teaching, I have learned more from my students about the creative process, various relationships with it, and the artist's journey at large than I ever could have in a book. My own journey has proven a great source of learning, and I will freely share anecdotes from it, but I will limit myself to those I find universal when compared with other testimonials and the data I've gathered interviewing and polling artists. My greatest wish is to plant a seed, to light a fire, wherever you may find yourself on the artist's journey. It is, after all, synonymous with the life journey, the spiritual journey we all share. Those of us called to pursue a craft have been given a unique gift, the opportunity to hone our craft as a way of getting good at life. The artist's journey and the spiritual journey go hand in hand. Whatever your creative gifts, my hope is that you will value them above all else by coming into alignment with the immense power of storytelling and art. That you will accept the call to realize your capacity and contribute to our collective evolution. That you will accept it as a birthright, a gift, and a responsibility.