“It was not on my life bingo card to be a sourdough bread baker,” says TAG Storyboard Artist, Background Designer, and Art Director Patrick O’Connor. Starting out as a political cartoonist, he later found his way to animation, and he now bakes loaves of sourdough in his home in Burbank, feeding a local hunger for high quality, unprocessed bread under his Fatherdough label.
Back in 2015, O’Connor moved from working on Mickey Mouse shorts to a project at DreamWorks. At this same time, he also quit eating bread because, he says: “I’d look at the packaging, and there would be all of these ingredients [like] xanthan gum, riboflavin.” But he balked when a friend said he should make his own. Then he discovered Tartine by Chad Robinson. Much like The Illusion of Life is considered the animation bible, he says Tartine is the bread bible. He embraced its method of making sourdough, explaining: “I just wanted to have good bread.”
Since sourdough bread is made of only flour, water, and salt, O’Connor believes that the better and fresher the ingredients, the better the quality of the bread. Coincidentally, at that time, Grist & Toll opened in Pasadena, offering freshly milled flour. He started combining different types of flour and impressed his friends with his first loaves. The next ones, though, weren’t so good. “It took a long, long time to get consistent results,” he says. He started giving away extra bread to colleagues and neighbors. Soon the neighbors started requesting it, and his friend suggested that he sell it. “It’s not really my life’s calling,” he thought. “I’m a cartoonist and an animator.”
“That’s what I love the most, just being with people and watching them try my bread and having that relationship—that’s really meaningful to me.”
In fact, for as far back as he can remember, O’Connor has loved to draw. While studying at Kent State, his cartoons were syndicated, and after graduating he worked as a political cartoonist at the Los Angeles Daily News drawing five cartoons a week. After nine years, O’Connor saw the writing on the wall for newspapers and started taking classes at The Animation Guild’s former American Animation Institute, which happened to be across the street from where he lived. In 2011 he got his first gig as a Storyboard Artist and has since worked on shows ranging from Phineas and Ferb to Curious George.
O’Connor sees similarities between the breadmaking process and the filmmaking process. In both, he says: “There are a lot of steps, and at every point of every step you really can’t cheat. If you cheat, it will fall apart.” The many choices in each stage of development, from writing to animating, all influence the final product, as do the choices in breadmaking, from the starter quality to temperature. “The starter is alive,” he says, “so understanding its rhythms is important.”
Times are tough for animators, and O’Connor hasn’t had steady work in the industry for over a year. He has needed to find ways to make ends meet, and it was this that changed his mind about selling his bread. He acquired a county cottage food operators permit, and he recently bought an oven with steam injection that allows him to bake 12 loaves at a time. As for his artistic skills, they are currently used for promotion. His logo is hand-drawn, and so are his pop-up menus. With the ink brushes he once used for caricatures, he writes “Fatherdough” on each bread bag, and he posts cartoons on Instagram to announce where he’ll be selling his bread—on Saturdays, it’s at Three Sisters Coffee and Tea in Burbank.
Running a business has been a sharp learning curve. “It’s totally new to me—having a customer base and having people that show up every Saturday morning to buy my bread,” O’Connor says. “I’m usually there around nine or ten until I sell out.” It’s a ton of work, and the challenge is staying organized when dealing with so many variables. But he enjoys the process and working for himself. It’s also fun getting immediate feedback from customers—unlike working on a feature when “four years later, someone laughs at your joke,” he says. His ultimate reward is hearing people tell him: This is the best bread I’ve ever had.
As for future plans, O’Connor is eager to get back to the animation work he loves. In the meantime, when it comes to his bread, he can see himself hiring a couple people, expanding a little, perhaps one day having a small physical location where he could enjoy his favorite part of the experience: interacting with customers, discussing sourdough and how it’s made. “That’s what I love the most, just being with people and watching them try my bread and having that relationship—that’s really meaningful to me.”
O’Connor’s bread can be found at Fatherdough.com.
