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22nd June 2018 Rex Grignon: from DreamWorks to Nimble Collective
Annecy, June 15th 2018: enthusiastic, passionate, open-minded, this is how Rex Grignon looks like while talking about his new activity at Nimble Collective, the first animation platform bringing animation industry to the cloud.
As the head of Character Animation for DreamWorks he has worked side by side with animators and realized that they have to manage many different technologies, with continuous updates which eat a lot of time. Learning, updating, installing, integrating: a long process keeping artists from creativity. Together with Jason Schleifer (Lord of the Rings) and Scott LaFleur (How to Train Your Dragon) he experienced repeated frustration with how animation is currently created and how animators are taught in the U.S.
That’s why he decided to open a virtual animation studio together with his co-founders Schleifer, LaFleur and Bruce Wilson.

Nimble Collective is a cloud-based animation infrastructure and workflow platform, whose headquarters are in Silicon Valley, the hub of tech innovation in the U.S., which removes the tech barrier by handling the deployment and installation of all backend technology.
Founded in 2014, Nimble Collective includes workstations, professional workflow, storage, and more, all accessible via browser.

Recently, Nimble announced a partnership with a talent marketplace, Zerply, so studios can tap into a vast network of creative professionals to staff their projects with quality animators quickly. Moreover, on June 14th, at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival, Nimble announced the partnership with Toon Boom Animation, driving innovation through accessibility in the global animation market.
Working together, Nimble Collective and Toon Boom Animation are bringing Toon Boom’s industry-standard digital solutions to Nimble’s cloud-based production platform – giving studios, animation production teams of all sizes, and educational training facilities the power to achieve world-class storytelling at lower costs and with shorter production times.
The partnership between Nimble Collective and Toon Boom Animation is perfectly timed to meet surging global needs for animated content.
In 2017 Netflix announced that they will be investing $8B original content in 2018, and a significant portion of this investment will be dedicated to animation. Additionally, social media platforms and tech companies are also getting into the content game (see: Facebook Watch, YouTube Red, Apple.)
According to Francisco Del Cueto, co-president and chief technology officer at Toon Boom Animation, “These SVOD and social media platforms are seeking to create original content for regional audiences who want to see their cultural stories told – and the Nimble-Toon Boom partnership will empower artists everywhere to produce this work in Toon Boom’s global-standard animation software.

But who exactly is the CEO of Nimble Collective?
A Canadian-American animation director and entrepreneur, Rex Grignon is a wealth of knowledge on children's animation having been the lead animator at Pixar and DreamWorks.
He had previously worked in Europe as animator and Art Director for early 3D commercials and broadcast graphics. Then in the U.S. in 1988, he worked as a Senior Animator for Pacific Data Images (PDI) and co-founded their Character Animation Group with Tim Johnson.
He then joined Pixar to animate on Toy Story in 1995.
After PDI was bought by DreamWorks animation the following year, Grignon returned to the newly formed PDI/DWA as the Head of Character Animation on many films, including Antz and the Shrek and Madagascar franchises.

The animation software Premo developed at DreamWorks, which Grignon was the lead designer for, won a Technical Achievement Award from The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2018.
But Grignon also got several awards for his career in the animation field. And in 2006 he was accepted into the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for his contributions to the field of animation.

A really busy, challenging, exciting career, who brought him to the new venture in the digital field, having passed from commercials to movies with the animation as a constant landmark, just being … Nimble!
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