Michael Langan grew up in Montgomery, Alabama, where he began his artistic career as a professional stage actor.

He returned to his New England birthplace in 2003 to attend the animation program at Rhode Island School of Design, completing Doxology as his thesis film.

Doxology has since won 12 awards and screened at over 50 film festivals worldwide including the Ottawa International Animation Festival, Crossroads Film Festival, ASIFA-East Animation Festival, and the Animation Block Party.

Michael is currently the director of video and animation at Upper Playground in San Francisco, where he has directed over 400 short promotional films and documentaries. He continues to produce experimental animations independently.

His latest film titled Dahlia is a fast paced, visually and musically charged live action animation that will debut at Slamdance in early 2009.

Nate Wragg is an renowned artist, illustrator, and animator.

He left home after high school to study character animation at Cal Arts.  Nate received an animation internship at James Baxter Animation Studios after his 3rd year of school, followed by an internship at Pixar Animation Studios in the art department on Ratatouille leaving school early.

He has designed, developed and art directed the end title sequence for Ratatouille and was the Production Designer on Pixar’s animated short Your Friend the Rat and was a character designer on Toy Story 3.  He left Pixar to move to LA to work as an artist for Dreamworks.

He illustrated the feature children’s book for Ratatouille called Too Many Cooks along with plans to develop his own books.

Nate’s other illustrations include a short story in the collaboration comic Afterworks 2 and for the art book The Ancient Book of Myth and War. 

He was accepted into the Society of Illustrators 50th Annual Showcase in New York City and was recently part of an charity art auction called the Totoro Forest Project at the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco.

Producer and animator Timothy Schultz and John Grigsby joined us for this week's episode.

Tim Schultz went to college to study film and journalism at the University of Colorado before starting Bullhead Entertainment, LLC in 2005. Bullhead recently produced The Cave: An Adaptation of Plato's Allegory in Clay and is currently in production on the feature-length documentary
Chasing the Shadows, which follows Tim's journey into the
world of ghosts and the afterlife.

John Grigsby’s recent animations entitled, An Introduction to Lucid Dream Exploration was painstakingly created on etch-a-sketch.  He is also a musician and recently toured the world as a bassist with blues musician Otis Taylor.  John is the DOP and animator for The Cave: An Adaptation of Plato's Allegory in Clay.

The Cave has brought Plato's pedagogical story to life by shooting over 4,000 still photographs of John Grigsby's wonderful claymation. It has screened in many film festivals worldwide and has won awards including won 1st Place Animation at the USA Film Festival Short Film and Video Competition of 2008.  It has also screened in the 2008 MergingArts Short Short Story Film Festival.