GLOBAL — Unless you have been living under a rock, you probably know (and love) Baymax by now, the humongous, cuddly robot from the award winning film, Big Hero 6.
This cry-fest movie is about an extraordinary friendship that bloomed between a boy and an inflatable health care robot created by his brother. And when a series of unfortunate events hit the city, Baymax and Hiro, together with their nerdy friends form an unlikely group of heroes.
One of the brains behind this movie about dreaming big is a Filipino animator who did—he’s Armand Serrano, visual development artist at Walt Disney Animation Studios.
Serrano started out as kid who liked to draw but already knew that it was something he would want to do and make a career out of. However, when he got to college, he took up engineering because his parents told him so. They thought it was the more practical path Serrano should take.
Despite a degree in engineering in the University of Santo Tomas, Serrano couldn’t help but heed the calling to be in the arts. So, instead of looking for opportunities as an engineer, he headed over to Fil-Cartoons, a subsidiary of Hanna-Barbera Studio to submit a portfolio of his drawings and then went on to work with cartoons we know very well from our childhood such as Tom and Jerry Kids and (Yo) Yogi Bear.
Now, Serrano have gone a long, long way, lightyears away to be accurate, from snatching up that first job as a layout artist. He matured as an artist at Philippine Animation Studio, working on projects like X-Men and Fantastic Four.
Several rejections and training classes to sharpen his skills after, Serrano found his niche in Walt Disney Feature Animation Studios in Florida and had a hand in some of Disney’s classic films like Mulan, Brother Bear and Lilo & Stitch.
Serrano would later on find himself choosing the then rookie animation department of Sony Pictures over the more established ones, “If I signed up with Dreamworks or Blue Sky, I would have been one of the guys, a face in the crowd. At Sony, it was new, I had a chance to build something for myself.”
He spent nine years of his career in Sony, producing some of its biggest films like Surf’s Up, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, Arthur Christmas, Escape from Planet Earth and Hotel Transylvania.
In 2013, he accepted an offer to go back to where his global career started to work on a Disney movie that would win the Oscar Best Animated Feature Film two years after.
Armand Serrano was one of the judges during the 2014 adobo Design Awards.
