It’s March 2007, and there’s Jacob Melvin, a senior computer science major at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He’s got a two-point-something grade point average, and he’s barely hanging on in a required class. He’s not worried about trying to land his dream job. He’s worried about graduating.
- DreamWorker!
He is 26 years old now. Some guys have all the luck, huh?
Actually, it wasn’t luck that landed Melvin the job. It was obsession. His grades in college were marginal not because he wasn’t interested in studying computers but rather because he was too interested in computer applications that weren’t in the curriculum. He liked video games—particularly the animation sequences between levels—and wanted to create them. These days, some 250 U.S. colleges offer majors in video-game design. Not so then.
He developed a strategy game based on the U.S. Revolutionary War. It was the first time he’d ever built a game end to end. Previously, he’d spent his spare time on small projects related to game design—he made a 3-D rain simulator, for example.
Meanwhile, for his senior project he was working with a local company designing a Web-based tool to convert still photographs into comic-strip art. Melvin wrote software to segment the photographic image, grouping pixels together to form objects. He found the task fascinating but had no idea where it might lead.
In March 2007, Melvin flew to Columbus, Ohio, for the National Society of Black Engineers’ career fair. He planned to hand out résumés and then not think about the job hunt again until he was sure he would be graduating.
Passing a booth, he picked up a brochure and started reading an article about the making of the movie Shrek. A man stepped forward to chat, asking him questions about his interests and education. ”I kept answering his questions, but I didn’t look up, because I was interested in the article,” Melvin says. Finally, he finished reading and only then noticed that the man was wearing a polo shirt with the Shrek logo. The lightbulb went on. ”This guy’s from DreamWorks and is interviewing me,” he thought.
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.
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.”
Source: Dream Jobs 2010: Jacob Melvin, Technical Director at Dreamworks Animation
