ELKO — Adrian Ropp is a man of many talents, working as the head of story on franchise video games such as “Disney Infinity” and “Hogwarts Legacy.” He started as a hand-drawn animator, working on films such as 2002’s “The Princess and the Pea” and serving as the animation director for 2009’s “The Velveteen Rabbit.” He also has been an illustrator for “Archie” comics Ropp spoke about his colorful career and journey of personal growth at 2024 Elko Pop Con.
For working on the “Disney Infinity” games, which involve a crossover between various Disney characters via interactive figurines, Ropp said he faced the challenge of putting familiar characters into a video game while keeping them true to the reasons audiences adore them. “Every time we worked on a character, we researched them really well. We worked on everything from ‘Bolt’ to ‘Meet the Robinsons’ to ‘Hannah Montana,”’ Ropp said.
“When you have the opportunity to work with these characters that are so beloved, you have to take it very seriously. You have to really understand why they're beloved, and realize that once you finish a story, it goes out into the world and it's not your story anymore. It belongs to the whole world,” Ropp said.
“‘Disney Infinity’ has been canceled now for nine years, but I still have people coming to my booth and having me sign their figures and bringing me boxes to sign, and they say, ‘I still play this with my family all the time,’” he said. “I worked on the first through the third ‘Disney Infinity.’ I worked there until the very last day of the company, the day they closed us.
After they shut us down, for about three months, none of us had a job — and so a few of us, myself included, worked with the head of our studio to try to get somebody else to buy us. And that's how ‘Hogwarts Legacy’ got made,” he explained. “I came back and was the head of story for ‘Hogwarts Legacy,’ same desk, same window.
” Adrian Ropp's art prints for sale at Elko Pop Con 2024. For the game, which takes place a few generations before the events of the “Harry Potter” books, Ropp created the character Sebastian Sallow, who lives in the gray areas of wizarding society and questions why certain curses are considered unforgivable. Sallow ended up becoming a breakout favorite, spawning massive amounts of fan fiction.
“He's been very good for my career,” Ropp said. In order to make it far in the entertainment industry, you need to earn people’s trust and prove you can make good decisions, Ropp said. “I'm looking for my next big gig, and the way I present myself is, I’m a franchise guru, because I'm really good at getting approvals on stuff.
I care about it as much as they do.” Ropp said he fell in love with animation during his childhood in Blackfoot, Idaho. “I saw ‘The Jungle Book' when I was 6 years old, and I went to my parents, and I said, ‘That's what I want to do for a living.
’ And they looked at me, and the look on their face sounded like, ‘He's going to be homeless.’” But he pursued his dream. “It took a lot of work.
I checked out every book I could find on animation and art. My grandma was a librarian. I love librarians so much — she encouraged me to think outside the boundaries of my small town and reach for my dreams and do whatever I wanted to do.
" In his first week of college, Ropp read a newspaper article explaining how Mark Swan, “the head of the layout department for Don Bluth Studios — which did ‘An American Tail,’ ‘The Land Before Time,’ ‘All Dogs Go To Heaven’ — had moved to St. George and started his own animation studio.” He took that bit of news and put it to good use.
“I looked up his name and address in the phonebook and started mailing him drawings,” Ropp said. “He actually called me at my uncle's house where I was living and said, ‘I just have one question. You drew some characters from films that I've worked on that haven't been released yet.
How did you find out about those characters?’ I read everything. I read all the trades. I would go to the library, read Variety magazine, and they'd have articles about upcoming animated films and I’d draw the characters.
So it ended up being a really good friendship that we formed that way. And I went to work for him as his assistant. I worked my way up to eventually being the director of a film.
” When Ropp teaches a game-writing class for Salt Lake Community College and elvtr.com , he said he gives a certain piece of advice to students interested in a creative career: “When you want to do something in the arts for a living, you have to really love it. You need to close your eyes and say, ‘If I never did that again in the rest of my life, would I be happy?’ For my writing class, I say, ‘Close your eyes.
Now, imagine that for the rest of your life you never write another story. How does that make you feel? If you have a pit in your stomach right now, you're doing the right thing.” He said you just have to move forward, past all the resistance you encounter, because, “the world wants to knock you down hard and you have to go forward with positivity and gumption and just go for it.
” “About two years ago, I found out that I was in kidney failure. I was actually going to die. It's the reason why I didn't come to this convention last year,” Ropp noted.
“Last July, on July 9, my whole family had been disqualified as donors. I was going to die. My doctor told me I had about six weeks left to live.
And then on July 9, I got a phone call from the donation center, and a friend of our family's husband had passed away in a horrible accident. He was brain-dead, but he was a perfect match for me for a kidney donor. So I rushed to the hospital.
“I'm still recovering a little bit. My stamina is not where I used to be, but I'm alive, and I have a lot of life left to live,” Ropp noted. Adrian Ropp talks about his career in animation and video games at Elko Pop Con 2024.
“The fact that we get anywhere in life is a major accomplishment,” he said. “I feel like my life became much more positive after I went through that near death experience,” he said. “I can't help but want to inspire people to have that positivity in their lives as well.
” Ropp shared his perspective on what the experience of crafting animated movie magic looks like. “Obviously, it starts with the script,” he noted. “We don't animate before we have the words.
We start with the script. We do a script read, where they get a bunch of people around a table and we all choose parts and play the parts up and we read through the script to see what feels good. Then, after that gets locked down, we go into what's called the story workplace.
And that's where they make basically a comic strip of the entire movie, panel by panel.” It's all about the planning. “We do a lot of planning so that we don't waste money in animating all these things,” Ropp explained.
“That's called the animatic process. We usually do that a bunch of times. I've been at Pixar a few times when they’ve done screenings for movies.
The first time you screen a movie, it's the worst movie you've ever seen in your life. But nobody at Pixar thinks, ‘Oh, that guy's looking to lose his job.’ They go, ‘OK, this has some problems.
How are we as a team going to figure out how it works?’” “The ones that feel like, ‘OK, this is good enough,’ they’re going to go to animation,” Ropp noted. “And then they give those to the layout department, who designs the background needs. Right now in CG, they have set builders, because you don't do paintings anymore for backgrounds — you do 3D models.
So they have set builders who actually populate the entire set for what your storyboards are indicating. And it goes to the animators who then animate everything.” Newly developed tools make the process easier, he said.
For instance, in Pixar’s “Elemental,” the main character Ember has hair made out of fire, with flames which constantly move around onscreen. This effect was achieved through an AI software Pixar created to react to the animators’ work, Ropp explained. “Before you start the animation, you do the final voice recording, and then you animate to the voice recording.
Then animation goes on for the longest part of production — usually about 11 months for a feature — and then they do the soundtrack and the special effects." It's not quick. “Typically, something like a Pixar-quality movie takes about five years from start to finish,” Ropp said.
“When I was working on ‘Hogwarts Legacy,’ that took 71⁄2 years.” It's a little different for video games. “The number one rule about writing the story in video games is that the player is one of the writers.
You can't write the entire game and say, ‘Hey, do this and then do this and then this,’ because then, they're just watching a movie. You have to say, ‘Here are some opportunities on what you're presented with. What are you going to do with that?’ And you have to write it three different ways or more for each scenario,” he said.
“That's one of the reasons ‘Hogwarts Legacy’ works as well as it does.” Player autonomy is key, he said. “They need to have the ability to make choices and tell the story that they want to tell.
And you have to let go of wanting to tell the story you want to tell. It's not your storytelling. You're just creating interesting scenarios.
” Ropp said it took him a while to rewire his brain to understand video game storytelling principles. “But the fantastic thing about it now is I can apply that to comics and movies and TV, all the other story development that I do.” In response to a question as to whether he is worried about AI-generated art taking jobs from animators, Ropp said, “I'm not currently, because every time I see a piece of AI that has a hand in it, it has six fingers.
What I'm worried about is that people aren't going to start taking it seriously enough, because it needs to be legislated.” He said labeling AI products with a watermark “is a really good first step.” “The other part that I’m worried about is that they train AI to do things using people's art and so it's already stealing all of our art.
It's a major legal conundrum,” he said. “I think all the people that are important in the government right now are starting to get it, why it's a big issue. AI can do some pretty fantastic things, but it needs some fences around it to just keep it from getting out of control.
” Ropp said his career has brough him great pride and joy. “It has done so much good for my life and so much good for people's lives that I can't imagine ever getting to work on something with so much impact again,” Ropp said. “Life is short.
Shine as bright as you can. You owe it to yourself,” he said. Receive the latest in local entertainment news in your inbox weekly! Reporter {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items.
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