Full Sail Stories

Lee Anderson’s career is all about marrying artistic abilities with technical skills, and the Full Sail Computer Animation grad has brought creativity and polish to everything from visualization work at engineering and construction firms to environment art on movies and video games. He credits his experience in the degree program with helping him bring artistry to the jobs he’s had since graduation.

Lee’s using both his artistic and technical skills at his current job – an Environment Artist at HypGames, a mobile sports game developer. He helps create environments for the company’s pool game, Ultimate 8 Ball Pool. He makes digital pool tables and everything surrounding them, creating fresh environments for different themes (including a recent downtown Tokyo-inspired environment). He spends most of his days modeling, animating, and lighting, plus meeting with other artists at the company to talk about each other’s work and progress.

Lee has loved animation since he was a teenager, when he started experimenting with animation software as a hobby. As an adult, he decided to seriously pursue animation by enrolling in Full Sail’s Computer Animation degree program, then started working as a Visualization Specialist at POWER Engineers shortly after graduation.

Lee’s team at POWER used visualization and animation tools to create materials that helped big electrical engineering projects become a reality. He worked on photo-accurate digital recreations of future energy infrastructure projects, many of which were used in public outreach videos to inform people about engineering work in their area.

“For example, if there was a power line being built in your backyard, we would create a series of animations to show the construction process of what that's going to look like while a power pole is being installed. Or if it was a completely new power pole, we would take a photo and then make a simulation of what that new electrical line would look like,” Lee explains.

Doing that type of visualization work took a lot of technical skill, but Lee and his team worked hard to bring artistry to their projects.

“The POWER team, we started out as just a basic engineering visualization studio, but by the end [of my time there], we were incorporating a lot more artistry into the work that we did. I attribute a lot of that to the training that I got at Full Sail,” he says.

Throughout his tenure at POWER, Lee had additional opportunities to inject artistic flair into his professional projects. He did freelance work at Red Sky Studios as an Environment Artist on the movie Woodlawn, taking laser scans of a football stadium and recreating them in 3D for the movie’s background shots. Lee also briefly left POWER and worked as a Visualization Coordinator for Layton Construction, creating visuals of construction plans that the company used during presentations for potential clients.

After returning to POWER, Lee became the Team Lead for the company’s 3D Animation & Rendering team. Some of the public outreach videos he worked on during that time became award winners: One received a Silver Telly and Silver Collision award; another video won a local advertising award.

“I think that there were some skills that I had learned at Full Sail that kind of gave me a leg up [in the visualization world],” Lee says. “For example, the compositing and rotoscoping and motion tracking skills, I would say that I ended up using all of those things in visualization.”

Lee’s career has turned out differently than he first imagined, but he thinks that keeping an open mind about what type of professional animation work he could do has helped him find fulfilling roles – and that mindset can help aspiring animators, too.

“I used to really strive for [working for a big special effects or game studio], but now I think that my dream is just continuing to be able to do what I like to do,” Lee says. “It doesn't matter what project I'm working on, as long as I'm doing the kinds of things that I enjoy, which is lighting and creating beautiful art… The flashy work is really fun and it's really cool to say that you worked on it, but I think that you can find creatively fulfilling work outside of the entertainment industry and still be happy with the direction of your life and still make a decent living.”