FSTVS - The Sandbox Sessions - JP Vine

“I had some very, very unglamorous jobs. Like, I was animating carrots.”
Jean-Philippe “J.P.” Vine joins the Julian to trace a career he describes as “completely haphazard and just kind of following my nose.”
JP studied theatre design at Central Saint Martins, drawn in by a GCSE drama project — a model First World War trench with working practical lights — and a childhood of model railways and French comics. Theatre proved hard to make a living from, and after work for the RSC and the Bristol Old Vic he was rejected by Aardman as a model maker for “not being technical enough,” finally getting in as a set dresser on Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. Watching the animators, he realised they were “having the most fun,” took a training puppet home and taught himself to animate from Richard Williams’ book — enough to earn shots in the film.
A storyboard test for Shaun the Sheep changed everything. Its non-verbal, hundred-shot economy became, he says, his film school, and boarding — “writing and directing and acting and drawing and designing all together” — became his craft. After four years at Aardman, spells in Jerusalem and one Pixar rejection, he was invited to reapply, threw a portfolio together in four days while teaching in Florence, and joined Pixar in 2012 on Inside Out, The Good Dinosaur and Cars 3.
He left Pixar to co-direct Locksmith Animation’s first feature, Ron’s Gone Wrong, uprooting three children from California to do it — and learned on that film the limits of pretending to know everything. His short Cardboard, about pigs in a Nevada trailer park, grew out of a family road trip and years of idle doodles; it was BAFTA-nominated and Oscar-shortlisted. Now Creative Director at Dream Games Animation, building a London studio from zero, he insists specificity of voice — Bluey, Pingu, Nick Park — is what reaches an audience.