Steven G. Lee

As a Director, Storyboard Artist, PreViz, Animator, Steve Lee has always found inspiration from his personal experiences to create dynamic animation. Beginning in his childhood, Steve studied martial arts for several years in San Francisco's Chinatown where he developed an understanding of the ways in which the body moves. He has pored over thousands of movies, cartoons, and superhero comics (and still does to this day) to study the different styles that illustrators have used to show action and acting. Steve has studied fight sequences, character acting, frame by frame to inspire him in his animation. That vast knowledge of motion coupled with Steve's love of illustration made animation a natural career choice. After leaving the military in 1987, Steve attended the prestigious California Institute of the Arts in Southern California to study animation with the industry's best instructors--most of them famous animators from Disney. Just days after Steve's graduation from Cal Arts in 1990 where he earned his B.F.A. in animation, he was recruited by (Colossal) Pictures to return home to San Francisco to be an assistant animator. During his next four years at (Colossal), Steve rose from being an assistant to a full-fledged animator on spots for Nike, Converse, Kelloggs's, Intel, Coca-Cola, and Pepsi--just to name a few of the high-profile spots he's animated. He also pitched in to do some work there as a layout and storyboard artist. Steve even got his first chance to be an animation director on an Ameritech commercial followed up with some directing work on some smaller spots. Steve relocated to Redmond, WA in 1994 to join the brand new Interactive TV team at Microsoft as an animation director and character designer where he was responsible for creating new content for the launch on Microsoft Network. Steve was a key creator of an original interactive comic called "RE-man" for MSN. He designed all of the characters, and single-handily illustrated every issue. Steve also worked with the "RE-man" writer to help develop some of the story-lines. While at Microsoft, Steve developed an interest in the growing 3-D animation industry. After leaving Microsoft in 1996, Steve went back to the Bay Area to work for Industrial Light & Magic. It was here that he began his career in 3-D animation working on films including Star Wars: Episode 1, Mars Attacks!, Flubber, Small Soldiers, and Jack Frost. Steve continued his 3-D work on commercial and feature effects at PDI/Dreamworks in 1999 on such features as Mission Impossible 2, Minority Report, and Evolution. He also worked on commercial animation for Intel, Sega, and Coca-Cola while at PDI. Before Steve left PDI in 2002, he got his introduction to video game animation when he was "loaned" to Electronic Arts to help out on the the game, "James Bond: Agent Under Fire." Realizing that he enjoyed the action sequences he animated, Steve made a move to work on more games at Sony Computer Entertainment of America as a senior animator on the Jet Li action game, "Rise to Honor," as well as the follow-up to that game. He also served as a storyboard artist on both games. Steve left Sony and landed at LucasArts for the next several years. He served as a Senior Animator on small R&D jobs before going over to lead the Storyboards on Star Wars: The Forced Unleashed! 1 and 2. He was also lead Storyboard and Previsualization Artist on the Star Wars Kinect game for Microsoft's XBox through LucasArts. LucasFilm was bought out by Disney and LucasArts was dissolved. Steve went over to LucasFilm Animation and became a Director on Disney's new Star Wars Rebels Animated series. Being an Artist in the film, TV, and Videogame, industry, there are many options and opportunities that will rise up and smack you right in the face, so when the chance to work as a Storyboard Artist on Guardians of the Galaxy Animated series, he jumped on for the inaugural season! Being a big Marvel fan, it was a dream to finally work on a Marvel property after over a dozen years working at Lucasfilm. Following that, Steve went to freelance on many other projects. His latest was DC's Injustice 2 Videogame. He considered that project one of the most fun he ever had on a project! Steve looks forward to his next adventure and creating much more dynamic Animation and Storyboards. Take a look at all of his work and you will see that Steve Lee is a Director/Animator/Storyboard/PreViz, who loves what he does and has fun doing it!