Dream Jobs 2010: Jacob Melvin, Technical Director at Dreamworks Animation

He gave the DreamWorks rep his résumé. The next day, he met with several more managers. By the end of the weekend, the DreamWorks folks told Melvin to expect a job offer in the mail.

”I would say my senior project helped to get them to take me seriously,” Melvin says. ”And I told them that ever since high school the only option for me was graphics”—that he’d always intended to use everything he learned studying computers to do something with graphics.

Today, as a technical director, Melvin works with a team of animators. On a big movie—with 50 or more animators—he’ll be one of two or three technical directors. The animators are often trying to do things that have never been done before, and that causes problems. Melvin’s job is to fix those problems so the movie can get made, on time and within budget. He might rewrite old code, build a new software tool, or create a graphical user interface to let an animator work faster.

Melvin cites a recent example from How to Train Your Dragon. The character Stoick has a complex beard that needs to move naturally. This movement had to be simulated to make sure that the beard didn’t bump into things in the scene, but simulating Stoick and his beard took up to six times as long as it did for a simpler character. To make things worse, the existing software ran the individual character simulations sequentially, so Stoick’s appearance in a scene slowed the whole process down dramatically. Melvin rebuilt the pipeline to run multiple character simulations in parallel, so by the time the computer completed running Stoick, all the other character simulations were complete as well. ”Future movies will be better off because we have tools in place for these kinds of setups,” he says.

Melvin intends to stay in the movie industry but may branch out from his current role; he’s intrigued by crowd programming and by character rigging, which basically involves writing the code that defines how an animated character moves.

For now, though, at age 26, he’s pretty pleased with his career. ”Kung Fu Panda and How to Train Your Dragon, I think, are movies that will be classics. My kids will watch them. Which means that there are millions of other kids that are going to be watching those same movies over and over. And I was actually a part of them.”

This article originally appeared in print as "DreamWorker."