"The Hollywood Reporter"   January 21-27, 2003

HOT SHOPS
These innovators represent the cutting edge of television's new toon renaissance.

ROUGH DRAFT / Gregg Vanzo

These surely are the best of times for Gregg Vanzo, who in 1991 founded the red-hot animation production house Rough Draft Studios and the following year co-founded Rough Draft Korea with his South Korea-born wife, Nikki.

Operating from a massive 30,000-square-foot "crib" in Glendale and a 500-person facility in Seoul, Rough Draft is an industry unto itself. The two divisions have had a hand in some of the hottest animated shows of the past decade, including Fox's The Simpsons, Nickelodeon's SpongeBob SquarePants and Cartoon Network's Powerpuff Girls and Dexter's Laboratory.

But it is on the Fox series Futurama, which has four seasons in the can, that Vanzo and Rough Draft truly have come of age: He and his U.S. team have producer and director duties on the space-age animated comedy, guiding storyboards, layouts and designs. The triple Emmy-winning Futurama has been bolstered by some of the most progressive 3-D computer animation work in the business.

"We have always taken the approach of 3-D being a tool, not a focal point," Vanzo says. "It takes a lot of energy to make the 2-D and 3-D blend seamlessly; we invariably work really hard to 'dumb down' the 3-D software in order to get the 2-D look."

While having divisions based in Southern California and South Korea seemingly should streamline the complex animation process, Vanzo says that is not really the case.

"All of the technology that was perhaps developed to save time and money has simply made the process more complex and painstaking that ever," he says. "But it's painstaking in a good way that allows us to produce more exciting, interesting and entertaining projects."