Interview with Dave Jerrard, 3D Artists
by Wes Beckwith

We recently got a chance to catch Dave Jerrard and ask him a few questions. Dave is not the easiest person to get a hold of these days, he is very busy!

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Dave Jerrard is a veteran of the CG industry working on various projects from Roughnecks: The Starship Troopers Chronicles, Max Steel to Maximum Velocity, The Last Samurai and Because of Winn-Dixie.

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CGF - Tell us a little bit about yourself, where were you born? When did you become interested in art or computers?
I was born in the gloomy depths of the deepest, darkest jungles of the Great White North. Ok, maybe not so deep, dark or gloomy, but it does get cold and white up there in the winter. I was born in London, Ontario (not England, or the other 6 London’s in the US - but the one in Canada), which isn't big, but not too small either. I grew up just outside of that city in & around a small town on the shore of Lake Huron, with a population at the time of about 800. Obviously, with a population that small, and the fact that for half of the time we lived outside of that town, there really wasn't much to do. We literally lived on the border of a provincial park for several years, and our nearest neighbors were a good five-minute walk away.

I spent most of my time building models & drawing, and when the reception was good, watching TV. Just a few days before starting high school we moved back to London, where I focused on arts and technical classes. For the first time I was also exposed to cable TV, including TVO (the Ontario equivalent of PBS) and PBS, which would show a lot of science programming, like “Cosmos.” Those early computer animations always entranced me and I'd seek them out wherever I could. I had no idea how they were done though I figured I'd never understand the math that was used to create them. I was right. I still don't.

We got our first computer around 1981, the old Radio Shack TRS-80 Color Computer. I wrote a few programs on it, mainly adventure games, and it wasn't until a couple years later that I saw a cool paint program on it called Max Paint. There was also a vector based flight simulator for it that ran at a whopping 1 frame per second, which was just amazing. Almost like BattleZone in the arcade, but this was 3D at home!

After high school, I still had no idea what I wanted to do, but my brother bought an Amiga and I got hooked pretty quick. Now we had SHADED 3D graphics at home! It wasn't long before I started dabbling in the new software that starting to appear, like Sculpt 3D. I was rendering out realistic 3D images at home while I was learning antiquated GEM-Draw in college... That's right. I was doing far more advanced stuff at home than was available in college.