Originally published on wtop.com May 21, 2020 by Jason Fraley
George Washington University graphic design students are in for a real virtual treat.
DreamWorks animator Radford Sechrist will give a remote lecture on Tuesday at 7 p.m. for Corcoran School of the Arts & Design students and alumni that’s open to the public.
“DreamWorks came to me and was like, ‘Would you like to give these lectures at different colleges around?’ and I thought that’d be a lot of fun,” Sechrist told WTOP. “I love any chance I get to kind of teach and talk about storyboarding and animation with students.”
Sechrist is the creator of the Netflix animated series “Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts,” which delivered Season 1 back on Jan. 14 and will soon roll out Season 2 on June 12.
“It’s kind of like ‘Walking Dead’ but instead of zombies, everything trying to kill you is adorable,” Sechrist said. “It’s like a fun post-apocalyptic show where animals mutated.”
Expect plenty of crazy creatures along the way, some voiced by celebrity guests.
“You’ll come across this group of cats that talk and are like 6 feet tall and wear plaid shirts and carry axes [or] a group of wolves that [are] really into science,” Sechrist said. “We actually got GZA and John Hodgman to play the wolves and they rap about the universe.”
The animation approach is more of an animé style similar to “Spirited Away” (2001).
“I was drawing on a placemat at a sushi restaurant in Burbank with a friend who was showing me the way he drew on ‘Road to El Dorado’ or something where they all learned this different way of drawing where it was that more scratchy, sharp kind of style,” Sechrist said. “I was just like, ‘That kind of looks cool! I should start drawing like that now.'”