Creative hiring: How Laika is turning weavers, carpenters, tailors and welders into animators

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Laika Inc.

Jessica Lynn didn’t think her background in theatrical design — and her one experience designing a wig for a stop-motion animation commercial — would be enough to qualify her for a job at Hillsboro-based stop-motion studio Laika Inc. She was surprised when they thought otherwise. “They looked at my portfolio and saw applicable skills,” she said. “They just said, ‘you’re a creative person, you have those abilities and you seem interested. Let’s go for it.’” Today she is the head of “hair and fur” in the puppets department of Laika, where she has worked since 2008.

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Erik Siemers

Managing Editor- Portland Business Journal

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As a costume designer, Jessica Lynn's body of work was largely human-scale.

If that seems like an unorthodox description, it's only in comparison to the decidedly small-scale work she does now as the head of hair and fur in the puppets department at Hillsboro-based stop-motion animation studio Laika Inc.

Eight years ago, when Lynn first heard of an opportunity to work with Laika, she assumed her limited experience of working in miniatures made her under-qualified to work at the film studio.

She assumed wrong.

"They looked at my portfolio and saw applicable skills," she said. "I was honest about how much stop-motion work I'd done. They just said, you're a creative person, you have those abilities and you seem interested. Let's go for it.'"

As we conceived of this week's cover story about how industries are finding creative solutions to talent shortages, my thoughts first drifted toward Laika. This fall, as the company prepared to release "Boxtolls," its third feature film, I recalled several people telling me about how difficult it's been to build a workforce.

The issue wasn't so much with the lack of applicable talent. There's plenty of that. The trouble was in getting that talent to realize their skills could apply to the work of a stop-motion animation studio.

In September, CEO Travis Knight talked at length about how computers had largely destroyed stop-motion animation until studios like Laika emerged to bring the art form back to life. That means the talent pool of people who have worked in the field is pretty low.

"We absolutely have had to go way outside of the realm of those who have direct experience in stop-motion," said Suzanne Johnson, Laika's head of human resources. "We have had to be really creative. And Portland has such a rich bed of artists and crafts people. It's proven to be really successful."

Erik Siemers is managing editor of the Portland Business Journal.