FROM HOLLYWOOD TO NUCLEAR FUSION:

Animator Jake Long’s (‘00)

Passion Began at LCS

Written by Diego De Jesus

ccomplished animator Jake Long has had a long career full of notable projects, including work on “Hemlock Grove,” a TV show nominated for an Emmy Award.

Long grew up in Lakeland enamored by video games and the visual effects behind them, especially fighting simulators. He started his journey into technical animation in his mechanical drawing class with his teacher Dean Johnson at Lakeland Christian School.

“He was professional, and he treated us like professionals. He was really knowledgeable and funny and treated people like adults,” Long said. “And I think that’s when my brain started thinking. I didn’t know if I wanted to get into mechanical drawing per se, but the wheel started turning like, ‘Okay, there’s something here’.”

Johnson’s class pivoted Long more toward computer animation on the end of the spectrum where he not only coded but where he would also exclusively work with computers.

Long calls himself a “technical artist” sitting between making computer and traditional animations look realistic in a real-life environment. Long puts himself in the middle since he frames animation on a spectrum between traditional and technical or hand-drawn and digital.

He works in digital visual effects at a time when traditional hand-drawn animation, like the golden age of Disney, is becoming increasingly rare.

“Once you get into computer animation, a lot of it, when you’re starting off, is kind of finding what you gravitate toward. And for me, that changed over time,” Long said. “I thought I was going to get into video games and just sort of went through a bunch of different stuff and am still learning new things that I enjoy doing.”

After graduating from LCS in 2000 and Full Sail University in 2001 with an AS in Computer Animation, Jake started animating at Visual Book Productions in 2001. He brought biblical stories to life in a project called illumina alongside long-time friend and college roommate, Corey Kinard, who initially introduced him to the studio.

A supervisor asked him to work on a movie in California. He was supposed to be working as a freelance animator for two months but ended up staying in the Golden State for a decade.

The film that got him in the door to Hollywood was Tim Burton’s “Alice in Wonderland,” and he also worked on visual effects for the Universal ride “Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey.”

Jake’s career skyrocketed, and he eventually worked on 30 television shows with some movies in between. The Netflix original “Hemlock Grove” was nominated for an Emmy in 2013. The experience of bringing his family to the Emmy Awards and the red carpet was magical; however, “Game of Thrones” was the other nomination for the award, and that show won the Emmy that year.

While he had considerable success as an animator in Hollywood, Jake was ready to step away after a decade in the spotlight. He shared why he wanted to make the change.

“I was ready for a better work life balance,” Long said. “It was a really cool experience. But the hours, especially in the TV industry and film industry, can get pretty intense. Your nights and your weekends, your whole life starts to revolve around that work schedule.”

Now he works as an animation specialist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California’s Bay Area or the “East Bay” about 45 minutes from San Francisco. The laboratory conducts groundbreaking research for a slew of scientific fields but recently they made a new discovery in nuclear fusion that Long was able to animate in a digestible way.

At the National Ignition Facility Laser and Target Area Building, on the laboratory’s premises, scientists were able to achieve ignition through fusion by firing a laser onto a pellet that burned hotter than the center of the sun. This discovery paves the way for new clean fusion energy and for humanity to no longer solely rely on fossil fuels.

Long’s team essentially rebooted an old animation from a decade ago since facility staff thought this achievement would’ve been done by then; his team worked on it for a year. It was pure happenstance that they were able to finish the animation two months after completion.

The animation was used all over the news to portray the discovery for the average person, and renowned scientists like Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson used the animation.

With all of these accomplishments under his belt, Long still considers Lakeland his home and credits LCS for building a rock solid foundation of values and principles that has given him a compass that can always find center.

“I can’t draw a straight line from faith to an Emmy nomination, or any other success, but I think it does bring us a strength in a lot of things, sort of a way of being,” Long said.

He plans on continuing to contribute to the advancement of the sciences by using animation to portray complex discoveries for people to understand.