Interview with Timothy Albee, Artist, Author, Trainer and Consultant
by Wes Beckwith
Timothy Albee has been teaching visual effects for years now via books, and online training. His best selling book on LightWave 3D Character Animation has helped thousands of people setup, rig and animate their projects. You may know Timothy Albee from his independent film project, “Kaze, Ghost Warrior” which was featured in countless magazines and by NewTek at Siggraph 2004. You may have seen his work in Exposé, 3D World, or even here at CGFocus. Whether you like his work or not, whether you have read his books or seen his training, you can not deny the fact that Timothy is one of the most knowledgeable, driven artists today.
We got a chance to talk to Timothy Albee one on one and ask him a few questions.
CGF – Tell us a little bit about yourself, where were you born? When did you become interested in art or computers?
I was born in Michigan in 1970, and adopted into a family with a grandfather who was a retired designer for Ford Motor company, and who had since devoted himself to the theatre as an actor and director. My grandmother was an oil painter and member of the Northwood League of Artists. So, the influence of art, design, technology and stagecraft was probably a huge inspiration for me to blend all these things together into animation.
I was always interested in computers. I had my first experiences on a Mainframe at a local community college when I must have been about seven or eight. I drooled over the old Tandy computers at the local Radio Shack – the store managers being kind enough to let me just hang-out for hours in the display room, exploring and experimenting with the machines. I saved-up bottle and can returns for nearly a year and purchased a TRS-80 Color Computer of my very own when I was 10.
Like I did with all electronics I had, I took it apart. I read how to solder two banks of 32K chips on top of each-other, "Piggybacking" and re-routing a couple of pins to give that old, audio-cassette driven machine a whopping 64Kb of RAM.
I learned BASIC, and a bit of Assembly and Machine Code, typing in programs out of "Rainbow" Magazine, modifying bits and pieces to get the code to do things that the original creators probably hadn't thought of. One of my experiments stored phonemes recorded from the data-cassette drive's audio-in port in an unused page of Graphics RAM and coding a rudimentary phonetic look-up function to make a software-based Text-To-Speech program that sounded somewhat like my own voice.
As far as art goes, I was always interested in it... but it was quite a while before I was any good at it.
As Richard Schmid said in "Alla Prima," "The ability to paint is not born into the artist, the desire is."
It was actually through books, rather than in-person teachers, that I finally began to grasp an understanding of how "good" art came together. Everyone's mind works differently, understands the world differently. I've found that you can teach nearly anything to nearly anyone, if you first truly understand it yourself, and then find ways of breaking the "whole" into small enough pieces that any average mind can understand. Those pieces, once understood, can be begun to be assembled into a goal that may have seemed overwhelming at first.
Books, I've found, offer knowledge from teachers you may not be able to access in "real-life." But, through the wonders of a library, or online retailers, you can connect with these people, no matter where in the world you live.
