Animation Conversations: Creative Producing Student Fernando González Ortiz

Animation Conversations is an interview series with Film faculty, students, and alumni where we discuss working as screenwriters, directors, and producers in the animation industry.

This week, we sat down with Creative Producing student Fernando González Ortiz about his experience working as a production coordinator on HarmonQuest, the part-live action, part-animated TV series by Dan Harmon, the creator behind such TV shows as Community and Rick and Morty. HarmonQuest is a comedic journey with Harmon and friends as they participate in a fantasy role-playing game.

Fernando González Ortiz is a US-based Latino producer, who was born and raised in Caborca, a small town in the Sonoran Desert of Mexico. He produced his undergraduate thesis short film, Entre Broma y Broma in 2014, which was selected by 15 festivals, including Cheries Cheris (2015) in Paris, San Diego Latino Film Festival (2016), and KASHISH Mumbai International Queer Film Festival (2016).

González Ortiz worked for several years in the Mexican TV and film industry as a production coordinator, prop buyer, and script supervisor for Desde Mexico Films, Faro Media Group, and LosFX, interfacing with a diverse roster of clients, including Bravo Network, MTV, The Travel Channel, Advertising Week, Cartoon Network, and Seeso. González Ortiz is currently enrolled as an MFA Film Creative Producing candidate in Columbia University’s Graduate School of the Arts on a Fulbright Scholarship. He is also a recipient of the 2021 CONACYT-CULTURA scholarship and a Columbia Alumni Association Scholar.

Tell us a bit about yourself. What were you up to before arriving at Columbia?

Fernando González Ortiz (FGO): My personal background is in communications and digital media, and I also minored in filmmaking during my undergraduate years. Before coming to Columbia, I was doing a little bit of everything. That’s very common for people who major in communications in Mexico, which is where I’m from originally. I was freelancing a lot, both with companies in Mexico and in the United States, including working on reality shows on MTV and the Bravo network. I also worked for LosFX on a freelance basis, which is a company that hires Latinx and Hispanic people to introduce them into the world of animation.

What drew you to the Film Program at Columbia?

FGO: I was looking for a program that would help me improve my production skills, which is what I love the most. I realized during my undergraduate training that producing calls to me because sometimes the idea is there, but you need someone to drive it home. It’s hard if you have just a director and screenwriter to make a complete film. You need someone who will focus on getting the resources to get it done. There needs to be someone who is a believer in the script who can help actually get the story to the screen. I felt that in Mexico, there was a lack of producers—a lot of people have great ideas, and there are a lot of scripts shelved, and I just wanted to help my peers make their movies. I think Columbia was the perfect program for me in that way. I also had a professor who had studied here, and I just knew it was the right option for me.

You mentioned how LosFX helped connect you to working in the world of animation. Tell us more about that.

FGO: LosFX was a company founded by a Colombian filmmaker who lives in San Francisco and a US producer and animator. The company is dissolved now, but they used to work with a lot of animation companies to delegate some of the animation work to help bigger studios finish their projects on time. It helped to broaden the spectrum of not only what can be done here in the US, but also what can be done in Latin America and in other Hispanic communities—not just in Europe or Spain, but also animation companies based in Miami that are mostly Latinx-based. I was hired by LosFx to be a production coordinator for a show called Harmonquest.

What is HarmonQuest?

FGO: HarmonQuest is a spinoff of HarmonTown, the podcast created by Dan Harmon when he was going through some hard things in his life. It was a creative outlet that was a free-form, improvisational, non-fictional recounting of his week. One time, Harmon wanted to play Dungeons and Dragons, or some kind of role-playing game, and it became its own show that they took on the road. Eventually, they had the idea of animating some of the fantasy bits. The show is mixed-medium. Each episode begins with Harmon and friends live at a stage in front of an audience as they play a session of the role-playing game. They play for an hour-long session, which gets cut down to a half hour, and then the most fantastical beats would be animated. This might be the character fighting a dragon, or rescuing a princess. Maybe the princess doesn’t want to be rescued. Things like that. It’s very comical. Very satirical. Similar to Rick and Morty, it’s dark, interesting, but also deep and emotional.

What does being a production coordinator on an animated series look like?

FGO: Production coordinator is essentially a project manager producing role in animation. I would check in with all the artists and studios that were working on the episode. I worked on episode four, season one specifically. I was responsible for making sure that everyone had everything they needed to do the animation work. At the end of the day, the teams working would send me however many seconds they were able to animate that day, and then I would create a cut of all our footage and send that to the client. The next day, I’d check in with the client to receive notes on the animation work that had been completed, as well as what had been greenlit and approved to move forward. Once a complete scene had been approved, I’d coordinate with the artists to move on to the next one. For this project, it was 2D animation done digitally through Toon Boom. There are several phases that a single shot has to go through in order to complete the animation process.

In one single episode, we could have two to three companies working on the animation work, divided by sequences. As a production coordinator, I delegate which sequences are assigned to which companies in a way that makes the most sense. Part of the work is sending emails and sending notes to the different studios and artists. The work is also creative, because you slowly learn which artists and studios are more in tune with certain characters. Some are better at animating action, others may be better at animating linear movement. I put on my creative hat to figure out which teams align best with certain sequences. 

What were the creative challenges you faced in that role?

FGO: I think one of the biggest challenges is reminding the artists that while they are working on something creative, they also need to keep their head in the game and deliver the seconds of animation that they had to by the end of the day. One of my favorite creative challenges was anticipating the artists’ needs or potential struggles so that I could be proactive and get ahead of the game.

What was the most rewarding part of working on that project?

FGO: I was a big fan of Dan Harmon already, and it was amazing to work on a show of someone you really admire as a writer and a creator. It felt like a fulfilling prophecy to me, because I almost went into animation as my major in undergrad. I realized my skills were not in drawing or the graphic part of animating. When I made the decision not to pursue being an animator, it was hard for me because it was a field I always wanted to work in. Having this opportunity to work on HarmonQuest in a way that drew upon my producerial skills of organizing and managing a team of creatives, it was amazing.

How did working on HarmonQuest differ from the live-action productions you’ve worked on?

FGO: It differs a lot. It’s almost like an office job. You’re at the computer, reviewing things, helping get things done. Although live-action does require a lot of pre-production, there is even more required by animation. It’s very funny, because when you’re in production on an animated project, you’re doing pre-production, production, and some of the post-production at the same moment. In animation, this very non-tangible thing becomes real because all of these parts assemble together at the same time, and you can be there as it takes its shape. 

I remember there was a scene in HarmonQuest that I worked on that happened at night, and the characters have different color schemes at night because the temperature of the digital light is different. It took us three or four days to realize that the sequence had been colored the wrong way. We were able to go back as soon as we realized this and redo that animation. If you were shooting live-action, you might have to wait much longer until someone in post-production finds something wrong in the footage, and then it would take a lot more labor to go back and reshoot it.

Are there any lessons you took away from your experience on HarmonQuest to your general philosophy as a producer?

FGO: A lot of things that we do can be automated or made easier for us. Sometimes, it pays double to take a second and really look at a problem. Maybe you’ll realize, “I’m having this problem every day. Is there any way I can fix it?” You can then look into it and create a solution that best serves you and your team. At HarmonQuest, for example, I was able to automatically generate a cut of all our footage at the end of the day without ever having to open editing software. 

When I face a task that I know I’ll have to do repeatedly, I always look into the possibility of automating it. I know that may not sound as creative, but it frees your mind to work on other things that demand more from you. Here at Columbia, I try to do that. A lot of tools that producers use have these kinds of processes in place. Sometimes they are taught to us, and sometimes you have to stumble upon them yourself. I always try to find out what is the best use of my time: should I take two hours now to figure out a problem that will never bother me again? Or is it something I just have to manage? 

Another thing I took from that project, having never properly worked in animation before, was that even if I cannot animate, I can understand the software that the artists are using. Sometimes, when there was a minor problem, like maybe some of the layers of the animation are in the wrong order, I could use my knowledge of the software to fix it myself, instead of wasting time sending it back to the artist to create another take. 

What are you currently working on?

FGO: I’m working on a couple short films for my thesis here at Columbia. One is called The Lion and the Firebird. We were very lucky and received a Sloan grant. Daniel Byers [student], the writer/director, has been doing a lot of anthropological research to get this piece right. As a producer, the film mixes historical accuracy with some fantastical elements, which I really like. We may use some kind of visual technology to accomplish visual backgrounds, but we are still in the pre-production process. 

As well as that, I’m working on a short film called The Devil on the Screen with my collaborator Felix Van Kann [student], a short film all about the devil trying to corrupt humanity by inventing the first social media website. As usual, this will also include some technology elements that we are really excited about.

More related to animation, I’m working on an animated feature film script that is based in the Sonoran Desert [of Mexico] and follows two rodents: the kangaroo rat and the round-tailed ground squirrel, which is a kind of desert squirrel. The story combines the legends associated with the animals of the Sonoran Desert with actual ecological and biological behaviors and phenomena.

Do you have a favorite animated work that’s been an important touchstone for you?

FGO: There are a lot of them [Laughs]. One that I go back to a lot is Fantasia 2000, the revival of Fantasia that Disney did for one of their major anniversaries. I remember getting that DVD as a kid, maybe nine or ten years old. It’s not a traditionally narrative film, and for a kid it’s hard to watch because it’s little shorts that are animated to sequences of classical music. I remember watching it so much. I’d put it on and fall asleep. Wake up, watch more. Fall asleep again. [Laughs]. It was so beautiful and mesmerizing. I think that’s what draws me to animation—the possibilities. Fantasia 2000 encapsulates that for me—beauty not just for beauty’s sake, animation that has such depth and thoughtfulness.