Ky. native Bill Wise finds a career (and Dory)

Bill Wise grew up in Lexington with a pencil or paint brush always within easy reach. He landed at Indiana University in the 1980s and studied painting, graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts.

Things got a little dicey during his last semester, however.

"I came to the realization that I might not be able to make a steady living from painting, and maybe that wasn't what i wanted to do for a living, anyway," Wise, 51, said. "So I got a job with the Navy, of all people."

But let's jump ahead for a second. Wise eventually found a career in art, and it's a pretty sweet one. He's been with Pixar Animation since 1994, when the company was making the game-changing "Toy Story," and served as a simulation technical director on Disney-Pixar’s “Finding Dory,” out this week. He worked on Hank, an octopus described by Pixar as its most difficult character ever.

Wise also worked on “A Bug’s Life,” “Monsters, Inc.,” “For the Birds,” "WALL-E," “The Incredibles,” and the Academy Award-winning “Brave,” for which he was supervising technical director.

In the Navy, Wise digitized illustrations for manuals. His work in the Navy fostered an interest in using computers to make art. He read an article about making photo-realistic images, bought an Andries van Dam textbook about computer graphics, and then taught himself BASIC, a simple computer language.

"I wrote my own little 3-D program, and the day I had this cube rotating in 3-D, with perspective - what a triumph!" he joked. "And to show what a complete nerd I was, the minute I had that program working I sat down and graphed out the Starship Enterprise so I could replicate one of the opening sequences of 'Wrath of Khan'."

Wise, at the time, did not realize the potential of his newfound interest.

"I wish I could tell you that I totally saw the intersection of special effects and the movie industry and how computer graphics would become this huge thing, but I didn't," he said. "I just thought it was really cool and I wanted to know how they were doing it. I didn't know how to make a living at it."

By being "mouthy," Wise met some Pixar employees at a graphics convention, and they invited him to an interview where Wise immediately launched into a lengthy rant about CGI's inability to adequately capture lighting effects, which he had studied at IU.

In classic movie fashion, they hired the brash, self-taught beginner and threw him in with the sharks (and astronauts, robots, ants and fish).

"The bar gets higher and higher every year, but the challenges are always the same," Wise said. "It's, 'How do we accomplish this effect? How do we make this look believable?  ... The challenges never stop, which is what makes it fun."

 Reporter Jeffrey Lee Puckett can be reached at (502) 582-4160 and jpuckett@courier-journal.com.