Creative Graphics

CorelDRAW® makes animated lifeeasy for The Gorilla“We’re just a two-person operation, but wehave outpaced shops with four or five people,
simply because we’re using CorelDRAW. It’s soincredibly fast and user-friendly. It’s perfectfor what we do!”Miguel "Gorilla" Lopez
GORILLA Enterprises

Name:
Miguel "Gorilla" Lopez
Occupation/Profession:
Animator, cartoonist,
Company:
Gorilla Enterprises
Location:
Los Angeles, California

Miguel “Gorilla” Lopez is an experienced
artist, cartoonist and animator, who has
worked on primetime shows like TheSimpsons, The Family Guy and the current
Warner Bros. hit The Xiaolin Showdown. “Iuse CorelDRAW for everything I do,” saysGorilla. “We’re just a two-person operation,but we have outpaced shops with four or fivepeople, simply because we’re using
CorelDRAW. It’s so incredibly fast and userfriendly. It’s perfect for what we do!”His birth certificate might say Miguel A. Lopez,
but everybody, including his mother, calls himGorilla.
“When I was a kid I used to love this TV Tomecartoon called Magilla Gorilla, and since myname was Miguel A., the other kids used totease me, calling me Magilla the Gorilla. For
some reason the name stuck, and now it’s just
who I am: Gorilla.”
His company is, naturally, called GorillaEnterprises and his Web site features plentyof animated cartoon primates.
Even as a young boy, Gorilla showed aremarkable talent for drawing characters andcartoons. He was introduced to drawing on acomputer when his father-in-law showed him
CorelDRAW 3 in 1990.
“I loved it instantly and in a few weeks I had
learned to master pretty much all the features.

®

In 1992 I started my own T-shirt company,Huango Wear, and I knew immediately how I
could use CorelDRAW to design the artwork
for my t-shirts. It has worked like a charm andwe now have distributors in US, Mexico,Canada, Australia and Japan.”As he started working as a designer andlayout artist, Gorilla kept using CorelDRAW toget things done faster than his colleagues.
“A lot of people used QuarkXPress for theirlayouts and Adobe® Illustrator® orMacromedia® Freehand® for their artwork, butI told them CorelDRAW does everything in
one package. The company I worked for
created ads for the Yellow Pages, and I
showed them how easy it was to use
CorelDRAW for the entire process.”
His family lived in Los Angeles, and as an
aspiring artist and cartoonist, LA certainly is agood place to be if you want to findinteresting work. But you have to be bothtalented and assertive to be successful. In
1998, Gorilla created a promotional flyer inCorelDRAW, showcasing his fluid drawing
skills, and simply walked into the big offices atFox Studios.
“I thought I’d just go in and shake a few trees
to see what might fall out,” laughs Miguel“Gorilla” Lopez.
What fell out was a job as Character Layout

“My main career isclearly focused on
illustration andanimation. And with
CorelDRAW in mytoolbox, I feelinvincible.”

Artist on Fox TV’s primetime hit The Simpsons.
Since then, Gorilla has also worked as aCharacter Designer on Fox TV’s The Family
Guy and several other animated TV series fromDIC Entertainment, Hyperion, Saban, etc.

Megan simply add new pages to the DRAWdocument they’re working on and by clicking
on Next Page they can flip the pages to see
the movements, just like you flip the pages ina book.

Currently, Gorilla and his business partner
Megan, are working on the Warner Bros.
animated show Xiaolin Showdown – amystical comedy that follows Omi, a giftedmonk-in-training from the Xiaolin Temple todestinations around the world with partners
Kimiko, Raimundo, and Clay to find andprotect sacred ancient objects that hold thekey to mystical superpowers.

Gorilla groups and un-groups the various partsof his characters to make a quick animation
possible.

Gorilla explains how he uses CorelDRAW in his
workflow: “For a typical episode we get roughpencil drawings from the company that we
copy by hand with ink on high quality paper.
Once the black-and-white ink drawings havebeen completed, we scan them into thecomputer. It’s easy to create vector illustrations
from these drawings by using CorelTRACE,
and for additional fine-tuning we bring thefiles into CorelDRAW. For 2D-animated shows,it’s very important to make sure that the linequality is the same in all the scenes. So we
adjust these lines, close a few gaps, and makesure things are symmetrical before we add
color. Essentially, we clean things up before
the images are ready to be animated.”
Gorilla has tried using tablets for his
illustration work, but as he explains: “I’m a big
guy and I like to use my entire arm when I’m
drawing, so I’ll stick to using a mouse. Works
for me.”
The two-person team that is GorillaEnterprises has even managed to use
CorelDRAW as a highly innovative animation
tool. For the animation sequences, Gorilla and“If you have a character in one scene and theonly thing moving is his arm, it’s so simple tocopy the whole character to a new page in thesame document, ungroup the curves, selectthe arm, click once to select it, and once again
to prepare it for rotation. I move the rotation
point to the shoulder, rotate the arm and savethe file. The best thing is that I use the Selecttool for everything. No trips to the toolbox torotate an arm a few degrees. This featurealone saves me a ton of time in every project. Ilove it!”
The animated gorilla on his homepage wascreated entirely in DRAW. It’s one CorelDRAW
document with 19 pages and it’s enough todo the basic pose, a beating chest animation
and a stretchy yawn.
As his nickname suggests, Miguel “Gorilla”
Lopez is a big man. At 6” 1’ and close to 350
pounds, this ex-college football player hastaken advantage of working in the epicenterof the movie-making world. He’s played abouncer in several movies, and also in thepopular TV-show King of Queens.
“Yeah, I heard a rumor about my shadow
once killing a small dog,” he says with a biglaugh. “But my main career is clearly focusedon illustration and animation. And withCorelDRAW in my toolbox, I feel invincible.”

Created By
The Adventures ofSporky

Miguel “GORILLA” Lopez
Developed By

Kyle Jolly
Miguel “GORILLA” Lopez

11305 Graham Pl. #18 Los Angeles, CA. 90064 310-575-1934 “Sporky” is the property of GORILLA Enterprises© all rights reserved.

®

To find out more about this product orany other Corel product, please visit
www.corel.com or call 1-800-772-6735.

© 2005 Corel Corporation. All rights reserved. 02/05 JB#2753-148