As the Technical Director for numerous big-budget Disney movies including Wish, Strange World, Encanto, Moana, and Frozen II, Norman Joseph has worked on a lot of stories with motivational messaging. He particularly loves the themes from his 2021 film, Raya and the Last Dragon. As the movie’s titular warrior princess struggles with how to fix the world, her dragon friend Sisu tells her: “It may feel impossible, but sometimes you just have to take the first step, even before you’re ready.”
Behind the scenes, Joseph’s job also comes with its own opportunities for this kind of encouragement. “Being a Technical Director, you have a lot of power in the pipeline,” he explains. “If something is going wrong and artists cannot work on their shot and they are panicking, they look at me to get support and to tell them, ‘Don’t worry. It will be taken care of.’ If they see me panic, then all hell will break loose.”
But Joseph’s history of delivering help and advice started long before he joined Disney. Born and raised in India, he caught the entertainment “bug” early. He and his brother and sister appeared on the children’s TV series Phulwari Bachchon Ki, dancing to Bollywood movie songs and teaching valuable life lessons about bullying, interacting with friends, helping around the house, and more. Neither of his siblings parlayed that “stardom” into more jobs in the industry (his brother works for Bank of America, his sister for the Consulate General of Israel in Mumbai), and it didn’t necessarily look like Joseph would, either.
Joseph has a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering from University of Mumbai and a Master of Science in Computer Graphics Technology from the College of Technology, Purdue University. While getting his undergraduate education, Joseph created his own rudimentary computer game as a group project. He noticed a professor using it and realized that even a simple game like that, with no fancy graphics, could entertain people for hours.
“That’s when I was like, there is something here: I enjoyed making it, and people enjoy using it,” he recalls. But after he graduated from Mumbai, he went a different direction, taking a job as a Technology Consultant with Tata Consultancy Services. His years at the international company took him from India, where he worked on projects like a customer interface system for Avis Budget Travel, to the United States, where he developed an online financial tool for the investment group Vanguard.
In 2009 he joined the graduate program at Purdue, where he made a fun discovery. During the last year of his master’s program, a company he’d never heard of called DreamWorks Animation SKG was holding a recruitment fair on campus. He went home and researched the organization, a move that paid off. With his years of experience as a Software Engineer and Technology Consultant, he was the only one of his classmates selected to join the company as a Technical Director at that time.
Joseph was at DreamWorks for nearly two years, serving as a Technical Director for the surfacing department on The Croods. “A Technical Director is the liaison for the pipeline,” he explains of why this work interests him. “We make sure that data is getting passed from one department to the other, making sure that the departments have all the tools to build or do their art. We are basically in between the artist and technology teams to help coordinate.”
It’s a job that is evolving quickly because of the rapid advancements in computer and graphic programming. He says this means he and his team must always be ready to create “inventive solutions to problems that arise in production [and be] the first line of support for technical production issues.” Joseph has to be the first to know about all of this so that he can be the one to explain it to his staff and co-workers.
Joseph left DreamWorks for Walt Disney Animation Studios in 2013, working first as an Assistant Technical Director on the Oscar-winning feature film Big Hero 6 and eventually becoming a Technical Director known for his expertise in overseeing and organizing pipeline development among Animators, VFX Artists, Production Supervisors, and Production Engineers.
He says he’s also given the freedom to build and suggest new products to bring into the workspace. For Big Hero 6, he developed a virtual window shader, which created an illusion of geometry and light sources inside building windows using only pre-baked textures, which are previously created sets of images that, when used together as textures, can represent 3D geometry. This strategy allowed the production team to render building interiors with reasonable parallax effects and was cheaper than if they individually modeled each room in every building.
While Joseph’s two young kids haven’t followed in their dad’s childhood acting footsteps, they can still learn similar lessons from the films he works on—and from his life as well. Being curious and open to new opportunities can take you on a rewarding path you might never have imagined.
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