Before he was a Judge student, Nick Kondo grew up in Salt Lake City with an interest in three worlds: cartoons, dinosaurs, and magic. Kondo had a fascination with dinosaurs, which were the frequent subjects of his childhood drawings. The first thing he wanted to do growing up was be a paleontologist. And growing up in the Rocky Mountains, Kondo was no stranger to the outdoors.

“I did a lot of camping, a lot of hiking all throughout the desert area. And then in 1993, a movie called Jurassic Park came out. And that ended up shifting me away from wanting to dig up dinosaurs and more into the realm of wanting to bring dinosaurs to life.”

Kondo’s initial interest in dinosaurs and fictional creatures fueled his imagination, and in Jurassic Park, he saw the real world meet his fictitious one.

“That desire to dig dinosaurs up, put them in museums, and build the models that help you visualize what they might have looked like was similar to what I was seeing in “Jurassic Park,” except they’re moving in there. You’re telling stories about them, and that’s when I moved from the ‘science world’ into wanting to work in entertainment.”

At Judge, Kondo continued to draw, going through a series of graffiti and graphic design phases. There was one memorable class that influenced him, an English class taught by Mr. Sloan.

“We just had an opportunity there to make short films as assignments. I don’t really remember how long we had or what the criteria was around it, but I do remember having a lot of fun with those. And then the excitement of getting to show those to an audience – the classroom – was really exciting. And even the next year or two, when that assignment came around for friends that I had in the lower grade, I ended up helping them make their movies and then sitting in their class and watching it with them, too.”

Kondo pursued his passions, but he knew little of his future. He didn’t know how his interests in filmmaking and drawing could materialize into a career or what the world of computer animation was.

“So in high school, I didn’t know what I was going to do. And then my mother who had moved to Washington, found a college (the DigiPen Institute of Technology) outside of Seattle that was teaching how to make video games.

“At the time, there was a lot of talk about how computers were going to be the next big thing and ‘Toy Story’ had come out a couple years earlier. And so, I was like, ‘Well, I want to be an artist and I do like video games.’ And some of the alumni from that school had gone on to work in film. So, I just followed that route, but at that point I didn’t know what it really meant to be an artist or an animator on film or video games. I was just jumping in because that seemed like what I should do.”