Our May 21 guest speaker will be Greg Punchatz, Janimation’s Senior Creative Director. Punchatz received his early education in art at the elbow of his father, Don Punchatz, a famous science fiction illustrator and founder of the Sketch Pad Studio in Arlington, Texas. Like father, like son, Greg developed an interest in creating fantasy characters at a young age. Starting with clay, then moving to make-up effects with wax and greasepaint, he was making foam latex prosthetics by the age of 14. His first job at 16 involved making puppets and costume characters. By 18, Punchatz landed a job working for Mark Shostrom on prosthetics and stop motion animation models for “Nightmare On Elm Street 2.” He went on to work on the “Robocop” films and ran the foam latex prosthetic department for the “Beauty And The Beast” TV series.

Greg later moved back to Dallas and founded TXFX, his own makeup effects/animatronics studio which did commercial, TV and film work. He was involved in creating stop motion models for the “Doom” and “Doom 2” games. He turned down an opportunity to work on “Doom 3” so that he could focus on an opportunity to work with Janimation. Steve Gaconnier, founder of Janimation, gave Punchatz the chance to build on his considerable artistic skills and learn CG tools using Softimage. In 2000, he won 3D Magazine’s Big Kahuna award for his work on the Harrahs’ Casino turtle. Using his traditional makeup and prosthetics experience, Greg applied these techniques in texturing CG characters. This work was chosen for the Big Kahuna award over other notable entries by companies such as Blue Sky Studios.

According to Punchatz, everyone at Janimation is a generalist. In a small, high-powered shop such as theirs, everyone can be involved in some aspect of modeling, texturing, rigging, animating, lighting, compositing and editing. Janimation did the CG sea serpent creatures for Robert Rodriguez’ “Spykids 2” which Greg refers to as a tribute to legendary stop motion animator, Ray Harryhausen. Janimation has since done the cinematic for Midway’s “Area 51” game among other commercial, gaming and film projects./