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Leading
a Dream Team
Academy
Award®-winner Gloria Borders (B.A., '78) has
worked on films with lots of Hollywood A-listers. But her latest career
move has her keeping company with less-glamorous stars: a fat ogre,
sewer rats and a raccoon.
Borders, however, is thrilled to be working with the lovable Shrek and
other computer-generated creatures in her new role with PDI/DreamWorks
Animation SKG in Redwood City.
"This
is really an amazing place. In many ways, they invented computer-generated
animation," she says of PDI/DreamWorks, which pioneered computer
animation with the 1998 hit "Antz."
PDI/DreamWorks is the Northern California campus of DreamWorks Animation,
which is based in Glendale. Borders joined in January as head of the
studio following a five-year stint in charge of postproduction at Revolution
Studios in Los Angeles. Just a few weeks into her new job, Borders was
already juggling several features, among them "Over the Hedge,"
about a con-artist raccoon, and "Flushed Away," set in the
anthropomorphized world of sewer rats. Out next year will be "Shrek
3" and "Bee Movie," starring Jerry Seinfeld.
Borders made a name for herself at George Lucas' Skywalker Sound in
Marin County. As a supervising sound editor and later general manager,
she worked on some of the biggest films of the '90s, including "Titanic"
and "Terminator 2," for which she won an Academy Award for
sound effects editing. She later picked up an Oscar® nomination
for "Forest Gump."
A New Jersey native, Borders came to the SFSU Cinema Department as a
transfer student from University of San Francisco. "The core program
was fantastic. I was in a group of 20 students, and we took every class
together so it was like living together," she recalls.
While many of her classmates dreamed of careers in front of or behind
the camera, Borders early on discovered a love for post-production,
the editing that follows shooting. The faculty included Robert J. Lewis,
now an emeritus, Mollie Gregory, a screenwriter and producer, and David
and Karen Crommie, a husband-and-wife team of documentary filmmakers
who would give Borders her first break. "I got to sync dailies
and be in the cutting room with them, and we really hit it off,"
Borders recalls. "When I graduated from State, I started working
for them as an assistant editor and script supervisor. We got to fly
around the country making documentaries. It was an amazing job."
At PDI/DreamWorks, Borders leads a staff of about 300, among them at
least one SFSU grad. As a senior animator, David Spivack
(B.A.,'93) had a hand in the success of "Antz" and
"Shrek 2," the third-highest grossing film of all time. Spivack
is working on "Shrek 3."
-- Anne
Burke
 
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