Serrano’s surfin’ USA (sort of)

In Sony Animation Studios’ Surf’s Up, the lead character — a young penguin and wannabe surfer named Cody Maverick — initially does the menial job of gathering fish until opportunity knocks and he gets back on track to fulfilling his dream of riding the waves.

Coincidentally, Armand Serrano, a Filipino who is one of Surf’s Up’s visual development artists, had a similar situation. “It was a classic scenario: I wanted to take up fine arts as I loved to draw,” Serrano recalls during our brief phone interview, “but my parents wanted something more practical.” So the then Quezon City resident took up engineering at the University of Santo Tomas, specializing in civil engineering since it involved technical drawing. He struggled but finally completed the course, after six and a half years, in 1989. Shortly thereafter, though, Serrano got the opportunity to fulfill his dream of drawing professionally and bade farewell to a civil engineering career.

Starting in May 1990, Serrano worked as an in-betweener then, after 10 months, as a layout artist for Fil-Cartoons, Inc., a Hanna-Barbera subsidiary based in Mandaluyong. There he contributed drawings to 12 US-based cartoon series including Captain Planet and the Planeteers and Johnny Quest. In January 1994, he transferred to the Makati-based Philippine Animation Studios, Inc., becoming a layout supervisor for the Fantastic Four and X-Men TV series and for the music video to Prince’s MPLS (a.k.a. Minneapolis). In spring 1996, he moved to the US, settling at California to work as a layout artist at the Glendale-based 7th Level, Inc., working on the CD-ROM games of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, Monty Python and Virgil Reality. He finished a course in layout visualization and background design at Associate in Arts, a Sherman Oaks, CA, school.

In February 1997, Serrano began working for the mother of all animation studios, Walt Disney Feature Animation, which hired him as a layout journeyman for its Orlando, Florida, studio. “It was my goal to get into Disney once I got to the US,” he confides of the gig that he earned through both his experience and portfolio of commercial and personal drawings, and which made him and his growing family move to Burbank. He went on to work for four of Disney’s big-screen projects: Mulan (for which Lea Salonga lent her singing voice), Tarzan, Lilo and Stitch and Brother Bear. As a layout journeyman, Serrano did “2D art, drawing and designing background scenes…bringing the storyboard sketches to full-size life.” He adds that, “We at the layout department were the cinematographers of our movies, and we drew the background for every single scene: 600 backgrounds for the average 600-scene movie.” He fondly recalls working on Tarzan, “Our studio was at the back lot of MGM Studios and whenever I worked late, I would take a break at 10 p.m., grab a chair on the patio and watch the fireworks display.”   

 Our artist-countryman spent a good eight years at Disney until a transition period forced the company to shut down its Florida studio (as well as its studios in Canada and Australia). “There were about 200 of us who were laid off,” he recalls. Thankfully, Sony Animation Studios beckoned, hiring Serrano in April 2004. “I was one of the pioneers there,” he says, adding that Sony managed to recruit other experienced animators like him in the same period.

When Serrano joined Sony, Surf’s Up was still just a storyline. (Last year’s Open Season was Sony’s first animated feature.) He was assigned to the visual development department, specifically as an environmental designer, whose main job was “to conceptualize, design and build the locations where the story takes place. We had to come up with believable images from scratch, like the booths in the circus scene. Anything you see in Surf’s Up other than the characters, I have my handprint on it.” (He is one of Surf’s’ seven listed visual developers.)

Surf’s Up happens to come out after last year’s other animated-penguins flick Happy Feet, which itself was preceded by the acclaimed documentary March of the Penguins. “Surf’s Up is very different from those other ‘penguin movies’,” Serrano asserts, relating that Sony’s project, which tells its story in a reality-show manner, was more influenced by Rob Reiner’s 1984 cult hit This is Spinal Tap. “It was directors Ash Brannon and Chris Buck’s idea to adopt a ‘mockumentary’ approach.” For good, lifelike measure, “We added grain to the movie, to make it look more live-action than animated.” And while Serrano does not surf, he, along with other crew members, “received surfing lessons from Quicksilver at Zuma Beach in California, at a surfing day sponsored by Sony Pictures Animation. A year earlier, we took two research trips: to Sea World in San Diego to be up close with a variety of penguin species, and another for the creative team — which included the production designer, art directors and myself — to an international surfing competition in San Onofre.”

While Serrano jammed “a lot with the production designer and the directors, and we had creative pressures and deadlines,” work on Surf’s Up “was very relaxed. I just tried to lay back and have fun.” He also relished “the weekly production meetings, (since) I sat in the same room with some of the best artists in the industry.” And, given the advent of computer-generated animation, Serrano is able to work ambidextrously, so to speak, able to make 2D and 3D art alike. (For the record, he is right-handed.) “For traditional drawings, I can use whatever is available,” Serrano divulges. “I even use a thick, black Sharpie and a yellow pad for sketching thumbnails. For digital drawings, however, I always use Adobe Photoshop on a Mac.”

Serrano, a devout Christian who turned 40 last February, lives with his wife Bing Deogracias-Serrano (a UST alumna who earned her Communication Arts diploma in 1990) and their three kids in Canyon Country, CA, which is north of Los Angeles. After Surf’s Up, Serrano is now at work on Sony’s 2009 release, the curiously titled Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. “It’s a fun disaster movie,” he describes it in a nutshell. However, Serrano — who counts The Incredibles and Princess Mononoke as favorite animated flicks — is able to do other work on the side. “I teach basic drawing to kids for a couple of months at the Santa Clarita School of Performing Arts. My wife is also an associate producer at the school.” Serrano, who has a loaded website (armandserrano.com) and digs the original Star Wars trilogy and The Ten Commandments, longs “to direct my own epic live action movies, especially the ones that my wife and I have written.” On that note, Surf’s Up’s signature motto comes in handy: “Never give up; winners always find a way.”

Surf’s Up is showing in theaters nationwide.