When Daniel Abramovici moved from New York to Los Angeles with his family in 2020, he intended to start a projection mapping business. He’d discovered projection mapping a few years earlier with a friend, exploring it for fun using his personal artwork as a base. But the pandemic brought that plan to a halt. With everything shut down, he took up surfing, and these days he’s back on land as the CG Supervisor and Co-Showrunner of a to-be-announced Nickelodeon series.
Abramovici’s journey to this role has been a natural, if not eclectic, progression. For most kids, Saturday mornings mean activities like dance classes, piano lessons, or soccer practice. For Abramovici, who was raised in Toronto, Saturdays were for going to his neighbor’s house. That’s where Mrs. Elliot—he never knew her first name—would instruct Abramovici and five or six other kids from the neighborhood on the fundamentals of art.
“I remember one of my first classes with her, she was like, ‘Here’s an apple. Draw it,’” Abramovici says. “I thought to myself, ‘This is so simple.’ So, I drew a picture of an apple, and she quickly corrected me and showed me how complicated it was to actually draw an apple in real life: all the nuances and shadow and light and sculpting it with just a pencil.” It was his first awakening to the realization that “art is really involved,” he says.
Abramovici’s musician father and interior designer/florist mother signed him up for Mrs. Elliot’s classes because they recognized early on that he had a passion. Abramovici family lore, he says, is that “as soon as they put a pencil in my hand, I was always drawing.” His mother would also routinely take him to museums. He calls himself a very “spongy kid,” and he fell in love with Impressionism and German Expressionism. “I just liked the dark palettes and the really heavy strokes,” he says of the latter. As a teenager, he went through a self-described “punk rock phase” with an adulation of Neo-expressionist street artist Jean-Michel Basquiat.
Because art was the only subject that interested Abramovici in high school, his parents let him take several weeks off school to put together portfolio packets for art-focused colleges. He attended Ontario’s Sheridan College, where—thanks, in part, to Mrs. Elliot—he was able to skip the first year’s courses of art fundamentals because he already understood introductory topics.
Abramovici entered the university to study illustration and moved onto photography, mostly so that he could learn how to showcase his work. This led to painting and, eventually, computer animation and technical directing. “Connecting painting, the [camera] lens, and computer graphics—I knew that there was something there. [But] I didn’t know how it all came together,” he says. His computer animation class was where he figured that out.
After graduation, Abramovici joined the Toronto-based film and TV animation house Nelvana. He did camera layout and character work there for about four years, but his goal was to move into visual effects. He fudged his way through an interview with Disney to get hired as a compositor on The Wild, and when that contract was up, he moved into live action with the horror film Silent Hill.
He calls Silent Hill a real eye-opener because he had to create Z-depth passes with Rotoshape, a free-hand rotoscoping tool. After taking some time off to produce a showcase of his own art, Abramovici joined a friend in New York for a compositor role that was supposed to only keep him in the country for three months. Instead, it segued into more permanent employment in the states that included more than a decade at animation house Blue Sky Studios, where he met his wife, Ashleigh Abramovici.
With credits that include Burn After Reading and Rachel Getting Married, Abramovici says he’d never planned to focus specifically on live action or animation. “It was always the role [itself] that looked interesting to me,” he says. When one such role with both creative and technical work opened up, he was inspired to try something totally different from the compositing and live action he’d done previously. This turned out to be stereoscopic work on a range of films including Rio and Ice Age: Continental Drift.
Abramovic isn’t one to sit still, though. With others he developed patented projects like a 3D contact sheet that let animators look at scenes in stereo and quickly see if the shots were consistent with each other. He worked in the virtual production pipeline space, assembling a team of coders who developed a virtual reality tool set that would allow cinematographers and others to “enter” a CGI project the way one would a VR game. He also oversaw a team of artists who helped transform the Ice Age short film No Time for Nuts into a 4D theme park ride that would appear at places like New York’s Central Park Zoo and The Adventuredome in Las Vegas. This meant turning a 10-year-old film that had not been made in 3D into one that not only had 3D components, but also had those components timed to appear when the ride introduced elements like moving chairs, lasers, and water.
As for what Abramovic does in his spare time—yes, he does have some—he never lost his love for drawing and painting. A recent TAG exhibition showcased works that spanned more than a decade, an exploration of ethereal creatures using linework to mirror the organic flow found in nature. He also enjoys watching animated programs with his kids. “Every time they watch a cartoon, they ask me if I worked on it,” he says. “They think I leave the house and then things [just] show up on Netflix and Disney.”
If they only knew—his job is as deceptively difficult as drawing an apple.
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