In The Post: Feargal Stewart

After apprentice jeweller Feargal Stewart first stumbled across silicon Graphics in 1994, life would never be the same again. The jewel in the crown at Sydney post house Animal Logic tells Laura Swinton about love at first sight

“When I was a kid, my ceramicist introduced me to the potter’s wheel. That didn’t work out so well so I started making a little T-Rex. I was devastated when she said ‘you’re going to have to scoop out the middle otherwise it’ll explode in the kiln’.”

From a young age, Feargal Stewart was going to do something creative with his life. Years later the small Irish boy, who moved to Australia at the age of four, is now head of 3D for commercials at Sydney post house Animal Logic.

Before stumbling across 3D animation and post production, Stewart had a more traditional creative industry in mind. After graduating in Fine Art in 1994, Stewart began an apprenticeship as a jeweller to support his artistic pursuits.

Everything changed when his college opened a Silicon Graphics lab. Stewart decided to try using the technology to aid his jewellery design. As any rom-com will tell you, love happens when you least expect it.

“I’d studied sculpture, painting and screen printing at uni, and I found it hard to choose just one speciality,” he recalls.

“When I found 3D I just fell in love with it instantly because it meant I could use all of those skills in the one field.”

After testing the waters with a 30-hour introductory course, Stewart quit his jeweller’s apprenticeship in 1998 and signed up for a six month college course. Oh, and took out a $20,000 loan to purchase his very own Silicon Graphics O2.

The problem was that there wasn’t anyone qualified enough to teach him. It was only 1998, after all, and the current industry-standard software, Maya, had only just come out.

Ensconced in the college’s computer labs, Stewart taught himself Maya by working through every instruction manual he could get his mitts on, emerging only for his evening data-entry job.

The college invited someone from Alias|Wavefront to train Stewart up, and sent him to work in the industry for six months, including a four-day stint in London. A year after applying to study on the 3D course, Stewart ended up teaching it.

Teaching for a couple of years helped furnish Stewart with other, less technical skills useful in his current role. “Dealing with people and their concerns is quite an enjoyable process,” he explains. “We’re all constantly learning. Just knowing how to do deal with different people and their different approaches is interesting. And it’s great when you manage to pick something up or pass something on.”

Every job presents opportunities to learn and Stewart enjoys finding new tricks as well as drawing on more traditional art forms. For instance, when creating a cardboard world for Dael Oates’ promo Under the Cherry Tree at Animal Logic, Stewart fished out an old screenprinting trick to line up textures and models.

Like any Renaissance man, Stewart’s artistic streak is balanced by an equal affinity with the sciences. He studied maths and physics at school and his self-motivated training has left him a dab hand at programming. He’s constantly on the look out for references from the natural world. He visits the zoo and aquarium a lot with his two young children, always with a camera on hand to capture movements and textures.

“We’re constantly using scientific means to come up with beautiful imagery and using numbers to generate the randomness you see in nature,” says Stewart of the interplay between science and art. His first professional break came when he wrote a character rig programme for Aussie kids’ entertainment phenomenon The Wiggles. Since then Stewart has helmed the 3D on a number of high-profile spots. Toyota Kittens, for example, coughed up a number of problematic furballs, which Stewart and his team dodged to bring the karate cats to life. But he’s most proud of his work on the Noam Murro-directed Comcast Rabbit. It’s the spot that he carries with him on his iPhone.

So what challenges lie ahead for Stewart? The development he’s most excited about is stereoscopic commercials. The team has already put together a number of tests. The challenges, he says, aren’t necessarily technical, but things such as composition become more complicated when you have two cameras involved.

Listening to Stewart enthuse about the future of 3D, it’s hard to dispel the image of the traditional artisan hunched over his handmade jewellery and to marvel at the journey he’s been on. “At uni I didn’t like computers,” he confides. “I thought they were a terrible way to make art.”