Animation: A New World

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.”