A local girl has swapped the Cheddar Valley for her dream job near the Silicon Valley – working for the makers of Toy Story 3.

Jude Brownbill, 27, of Cheddar, sacrificed a successful career and circle of friends in London to spend the last 18 months at home getting an extra animation qualification through an online course.

The short film she produced wowed Pixar Animation Studios so much they invited her to an interview and gave her a job in California.

Jude, who went to Fairlands Middle School and Kings of Wessex School, said: "Every time I walk under the Pixar sign on my way into work I am still amazed I am here and I am doing exactly what I dreamt of doing for the last 10 years.

"I had seen Toy Story and been blown away by it like everyone else, but after realising it was possible to work on films like that as a job and that you could do a degree in it – I knew straight away that's what I wanted to do."

The animator moved out to work at the small city of Emeryville in California in early May and is now finishing her training and getting to grips with software and character rigs.

She is one of the first English animators to be employed by Pixar and the 15th female animator to be hired there.

"I am the only Pixarian from Cheddar," she said.

"It's nice to be able to tell people where I am from and have them recognise the cheese, even if they don't know the place.

"I even had 1kg of cave-matured Cheddar shipped over so the animators could taste authentic cheese from Cheddar.

"I think everybody enjoyed it a lot."

Jude's job is to look at the story boards of upcoming projects, listen to the audio to understand the character's personality and decide how they will move, react and deliver their lines.

Even the number of times they blink is planned.

Her long path to Pixar began in 1995 when she was just 13 years old and won a design and technology award at Fairlands.

Three years later she won the Lanes Award for Design and Technology at Kings.

She intended to become a graphic designer until she spotted a degree course called Computer Visualisation and Animation.

After an art foundation course at the London College of Printing she went to Bournemouth University in 2001 to do the degree that had caught her eye.

She graduated in 2005 with a Masters Degree in 3D Computer Animation.

This led to work with Bird Studios in London on BBC Digital Radio adverts for TV.

Next came six months with Blue-Zoo Productions, animating on the Nickelodeon children's TV series Those Scurvy Rascals.

The show was nominated for a Children's BAFTA and won two awards in 2006.

Jude was hired full-time by Blue-Zoo as their lead animator and over three years she was the animation director on the BAFTA and British Animation Award nominated children's show Stitch-Up Showdown and animation supervisor on the quiz sections of the BBC HD children's show Kerwhizz.

However, Jude took a risk and returned home to Cheddar to live with her parents while studying online for a diploma in Advanced Character Animation from AnimationMentor.com.

For 18 months she and students from all over the world had weekly lectures, assignments and question-and-answer webcam sessions with a mentor.

She described her bond with her online colleagues as "stronger, closer and more supportive than any school I have ever attended." At graduation she won two awards – Most Entertaining Video Reference and Mentor's Choice.

Her graduation visit to San Francisco led her to the meeting with Pixar.

Her favourite film from the studio is Monsters, Inc for its "really nice balance of heart and comedy" and her favourite character is Dory from Finding Nemo.

However, with the release of Toy Story 3 in the UK from Monday, she promised there were a few hysterical characters in the new movie that will be remembered for a long time.

On getting her dream job, Jude said: "It is a really tough market to get into – animation is hard.

"There are a lot of talented animators out there and it's difficult to just keep up, let alone stand out from the crowd and be noticed.

"It's also a slow process – doing six seconds of feature film quality animation could take weeks to finish.

"But it's rewarding to see what was a motionless character on the computer screen come to life and think, breathe and make decisions, all because of you."

See page 43 for more details on

Toy Story 3

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