Star Wars—Wellspring of Life Outer Core 2012. Photographs by Tara Rueping
“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time…like tears in rain.”
Roy Batty’s final monologue in Blade Runner
What are the urgencies that drive us to search for adventure and meaning in the world of fantasy? How do stories satisfy that atavistic need to locate ideas, morality, values, identity, and community within our daily lives that help create purpose and significance as we negotiate our path through life? As Joan Didion states in her collection of essays titled The White Album, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
Tara Rueping works and thrives in a world that strives to give answers to those questions. Growing up in what she describes as a hyper-creative family (her father transformed the basement of their house into a pirate ship), she was also introduced to the surreal world of the Wisconsin Dells, where her family owned and operated a motel. Tara was intrigued at an early age with the idea of designing theme parks, taken with the joy of using her imagination to follow a career that engaged in both fantasy and entertainment.
Tara’s parents exposed her to a wide range of cultural opportunities: the Chicago and Milwaukee art institutes for visual art, theater events, music venues, and lots of movies, all of which fed her imaginative ambitions. She became fascinated with the questions: How was this made? Who were the people responsible for the visionary worlds and events she was witnessing?
After graduating high school, Tara still had no clear career path to her goals. But on the occasion of her father’s final illness, she made a promise to him that she would become an artist and build a career in the arts. She enrolled at Madison Area Technical College (MATC, now Madison College) and took a drawing class while simultaneously doing a series of academic courses. She was made aware of a college program at Disney World and MGM Studios in Florida working in the Animation Gallery. While there, she met Andy Harkness, an art director and illustrator of children’s books with credits in animated features for kids. Andy encouraged her to pursue entertainment art and suggested she attend the Columbus College of Art and Design (CCAD) in Ohio, which had strong ties to the industry.
Tara returned to MATC and took art classes in the Graphic Design and Illustration program as well as taking courses from a visiting instructor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. The faculty at these schools also recommended CCAD, where she promptly won a full transfer scholarship. In the summers, she returned to intern at Raven Software (Activision) working with Les Dorscheid and Brian Pelletier on the computer game Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force.
During the academic year, Tara returned to Columbus to finish her degree, subsequently coming back to Raven for two additional years of experience. While greatly benefiting from this work, she saw her future as a concept artist, so she excitedly accepted a position at Turbine Games in Boston, which had acquired the license to produce a game based on The Lord of the Rings (LOTR) books. Here, Tara had the opportunity to develop environments, characters, creatures, and costumes. When working on LOTR, she took inspiration from Tolkien’s own drawings in creating the look of Elven settlement Rivendell. She also accessed the art historical genius of J. M. W. Turner; American landscape painter Frederic Church; and Albert Bierstadt, the painter of the sublime western expanse, in order to add majesty to her environmental designs.
This experience brought Tara to Lucasfilm Animation studios as a full-time concept designer, where she concentrated on Star Wars: The Clone Wars, earning her first IMDB credits. Her time there was so successful that Lucas included a flying creature in the series called the rupings.
After a series of stops at various game companies and a partnership in a virtual reality game, Tara was called to her latest and most demanding opportunity. Steven Spielberg decided to create an animation series prequel based on his comedy-horror film Gremlins. The series, set in 1920s Shanghai, tells the story of two children taking a perilous journey to return Gizmo, a small creature called a Mogwai, to his family. In the course of their adventure, they face a plethora of perils, deception, and danger.
Tara was brought on board as art director, charged with bringing visual coherence and consistency to the overall look of the series. She was responsible for themes as broad as landscape and urban settings and as specific and detailed as studying and creating the phonemes that marry the shape of a character’s mouth to match specific, distinct units of speech, like the distinction between different vowel or consonant sounds.
As the production was a joint venture between Amblin’ Entertainment (Spielberg) and Warner Brothers, Tara had to lead and coordinate teams of artists located in India and France. She needed to ensure that the work of these studios, separated by both miles and culture, were stylistically complementary and consistent. She would deliver digital concept paintings to the showrunner (the person with overall creative authority) before they were presented to Spielberg for final approval. Tara created characters, fine-tuned expressions, manufactured storyboards, settled issues of scale and posture, determined the color keys that set the moods of the narrative, and even ended up doing the marketing images that graced the enormous promotional billboards on Hollywood Boulevard. As Tara puts it, “I had to be a Swiss Army knife, always ready to solve the next immediate problem.”
Most recently, Tara was asked to run an animation workshop in the Czech Republic for an international group of young animators and aspirants. Although this raised her global profile, for Tara, her proudest boast is still Secrets of the Mogwai. “We have a 100 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes.”
