David Herfindahl has a busy Hollywood life, working on such big budget blockbusters as Alice Through the Looking Glass, Independence Day: Resurgence and Avengers: Age of Ultron. You’ve seen them or at least heard about them.
What none of you has seen is Herfindahl himself, only his hand. Well, not really his hand but the fruits of his handiwork. His mastery of computerized graphic animations is what remains on the screen. You could see Storks, a new animated family movie this weekend and see what I mean. It’s based on the myth of storks being the deliverers of newborn babies. Of course, things go awry in comical ways and this animator said it’s sure to please.
Having grown up in St. Albert, he offers much credit for his early start to his junior high school teacher Lawrence Kenakin at Lorne Akins.
“That’s pretty much where I started my path to get into animation and arts like that,” he said.
The young student would often be sketching or doodling and Kenakin, an avid arts supporter, would engage him in conversation about art, encouraging him along the way.
Herfindahl said Kenakin guided him to pick up some classes at Gene Prokop at Pro’s Art in Edmonton. Herfindahl transferred to Eastglen High School and took art classes at the same time.
While still in high school, he took summer school animation classes in Vancouver, falling more and more in love with the work.
After graduation, he did what any young animator-in-the-making did: he enrolled at Sheridan College in Oakville, Ontario to further his studies. That was in the mid-’90s, right when Toy Story was about to make a major mark on the cinematic world. Classical animation, he explained, kind of died out.
“That was a time when Lion King and those big classically animated movies were coming out. That’s what I wanted to do. There wasn’t really work any more at that time. It was a choice for a lot of us animators: ‘Where do we want to go?’”
“The people who didn’t really have any love for it just bottomed out and found another career path. For me, I was still learning because I was young. I went to Ontario when I was 17, 18… I didn’t really have any time between high school and college. At that time, I was slowly getting into 3-D animation, learning myself.”
Learning 3-D animation led to his first animation job with a direct-to-DVD release and he’s been on a good run with bigger and bigger work ever since. There was a Disney 3-D animated series called Get Ed, and other projects kept coming.
“I just kept doing TV series like Backyardigans,” he said, noting the wealth of production work that was available in Toronto at the time.
“It’s not the best type of animation to be doing but it was a job. You start learning the craft more. Then I got a feature job for a film called The Nut Job.”
That project kept him occupied for about two years before Mune: Guardian of the Moon came along. While the French production still hasn’t received a theatrical release here in North America, it signaled a period of constant work that Herfindahl is still in the middle of.
There was last year’s Avengers: Age of Ultron, a $250 million movie that was one of Marvel Studios’ flagship superhero films of late. Herfindahl did some VFX animation on robots and on fight sequences, including one where Black Widow somehow has Captain America’s shield, a scene that was used in one of the movie’s trailers. That was pretty cool, he said.
There was Ben-Hur and Max Steel, Alice Through the Looking Glass and Independence Day: Resurgence. Now in Vancouver where “there’s more work … more cool work” like the upcoming Emoji film entitled Emojimovie: Express Yourself that is set to come out next summer.
Every production is different, he said, but he still has fun even when the work is stressful. Storks was a special project because co-directors Nicholas Stoller and Doug Sweetland made it more “artistic driven and more artist friendly.”
And more family-friendly too, from the sounds of it. He ended by saying that he took his young daughter to Pete’s Dragon but they walked out because he thought it was too violent. She was too scared during The Secret Life of Pets and Finding Dory too.
“Storks is probably one of the coolest movies I’ve worked on for animation purposes and the story’s really good. It’s just a really heartfelt story … I think audiences will really like it. I wouldn’t compare it to a movie like Monsters Inc. but there are some similarities in that the monsters realize that laughter is more powerful than fear.”
