Pedro D. Morales
News Reporter
As Radio and Television Professor Robert Musburger remembers it, Karen Dufilho never showed an interest in animation.
That's why she did not even take the animation course Musburger taught before she graduated from the University of Houston seven years ago.
"She was more interested in doing documentaries," Musburger said.
Naturally, then, he was surprised to learn that Geri's Game, an animated short film produced by Dufilho at Pixar Animation Studios in California, won an Oscar March 23.
"An Oscar is the most amazing bonus you can get for your work," Dufilho, 29, said.
Geri's Game, the sixth short computer-animated film created by Pixar's Research and Development team, is a simple story about a gentle-looking old man playing chess against himself in an empty park. The film represents the current blending of Pixar's state-of-the-art graphics technology with storytelling and animation.
Pixar, which released the 1995 feature-film blockbuster Toy Story, is used to receiving Academy Award nominations, but Dufilho said the true rewards are the technological advances in the animation field.
"We just do (the films) really for ourselves," she said. "We want to become better filmmakers, and this is a good way to do it."
Indeed, working for Pixar has given Dufilho the opportunity to work on the cutting edge of animation. She previously worked for Acme Films, where she produced her first piece, a public-service announcement on reading.
Later, she got a job with Duck Soup Productions, a Los Angeles post-production studio that specializes in animated commercials and movie titles.
Dufilho said she enjoys being in a creative environment, and the independence to be creative is what she remembers most about her experience at UH.
"UH gave you the room to do whatever you wanted to do," she said. "It is not really like a regular college campus ... there's an independent spirit about it."
While in school, Dufilho majored in RTV with a minor in journalism. She did not actively participate in school organizations or publications but excelled in most of her RTV classes, one of which was Musburger's Electronic Field Production, in which she learned about flexibility and problem-solving.
Dufilho emphasized the importance of developing contacts that might later prove helpful in breaking into any kind of field, particularly show business. She moved to California on her own and got her first job through a friend over a cup of coffee.
As for her short-term plans, Dufilho mentioned Pixar's upcoming projects: A Bug's Life, a full-length feature to be released in November; the sequel to Toy Story, scheduled for release in late 1999; and another short research film.
In the long term, however, Dufilho hopes to make the transition from animation to live-action movies, and to that end she is aggressively cultivating working relationships with other people in the medium.
And her plans in 10 years? "Winning some more Oscars," she quickly responds.