An FX doctor without borders
When Carlos Arguello first told friends that he was chucking it all -- the Porsche, the house in the Hollywood Hills, the skyrocketing career as a top Hollywood animator -- and moving back to Guatemala, most wished him luck and promised they’d come visit. Others figured that the Type-A Arguello soon would go nuts hanging out in some rustic Central American village with nothing to do but paint and gawk at the snow-capped volcanoes.
“We all said he’d be back, that he’d be bored in a couple of years,” recalls Thad Beier, a longtime friend and computer graphics designer in Studio City.
“Bored” isn’t the word that leaps to mind watching Arguello preside over Studio C, the soon-to-be-state-of-the-art computer animation and design hub that he dreamed up, bankrolled and, improbably, opened two years ago in this war-scarred metropolis of 2 million people.
Darting past computer work stations and hovering over his employees’ shoulders, Arguello resembles a sort of human-hummingbird hybrid. He’s one of those rare people who thinks and speaks at 100 mph in two languages. And although he’s a long way from Hollywood, it’s not hard to picture him in his previous life, whipping up special effects for movies such as “Space Jam” and “Armageddon,” or palling around with his friend and former Hancock Park roommate and co-worker, “Shrek” director Andrew Adamson.
“I’ve been in companies where people can only do one thing at a time. I can do 15 at a time,” Arguello says in his amiable but intense polyrhythmic parlance. “I can’t be in meetings for more than one hour. I pick up a magazine and start thinking about the next stuff.”
Dressed in jeans and brown Pumas, Arguello offers gentle encouragement and low-key instruction to the roomful of aspiring high-tech artists, Guatemalans all. Their average age, 23, is six years older than Arguello was when he arrived in San Francisco in the early 1980s, wide-eyed and barely knowing a word of English.
By the time he returned to Guatemala in 2000, he had a resume that included a tongue-tied stint as a restaurant greeter, a highly productive tenure with the pioneering Silicon Valley computer-design firm Pacific Data Images (now part of DreamWorks SKG), and a lucrative gig with Kodak’s visual imaging and digital effects division Cinesite.
Now he’s turning his expertise to Studio C, the first firm of its kind in Central America. Drawing on Arguello’s reputation and network of Hollywood contacts, Studio C already has collaborated on such big-budget studio features as last year’s phantasmagoric “The Chronicles of Riddick” -- Studio C did 90 scenes -- and is working on Disney’s first installment of C.S. Lewis’ much-loved “Narnia” stories. Studio C feels very L.A.-entrepreneurial -- the orange modular chairs, the work-flow charts, the stylish metal coffee-table supporting a Mac laptop and a bottle of Advil. If it weren’t for the background hum of colloquial Spanish and the welcome absence of hipster ‘tude, you might think you were in a Silicon Valley internet start-up or a Santa Monica graphic-design shop.
But Arguello makes it clear that his goal in returning to his troubled homeland wasn’t simply to turn a little piece of Guatemala City into Southern California. Instead, he wants to help Guatemalans recognize that by drawing on their own unique talents and cultural traits, they can offer the planet something on par with the best that the Dream Factory can muster.
“We can’t create images for the rest of the world only in L.A.,” says Arguello, who was born in Nicaragua but moved with his family to Guatemala when he was 11. “There’s different points of view and different perspectives that need to be told, and [Guatemalans] have angles that are as valid as anybody’s. We’re not trying to take something away, but to add.”
Planet Hollywood
Not so long ago, the idea of opening a world-class computer animation and design studio in a developing country struggling to recover from a civil war that lasted nearly 40 years might’ve sounded like a fool’s errand. But in recent years, Hollywood studios seeking a bigger bang for their buck have been farming out animation and special-effects work to companies around the globe.
Secure computer servers and iChat teleconferencing have made it possible for designers to communicate instantaneously across time zones. Animators in Bombay or Wellington can discuss sketches or view dailies from last night’s shoot with an editor in Culver City or a producer basking in his Beverly Hills hot tub. Meanwhile, some foreign governments, notably those of India and South Korea, have invested heavily in building national animation industries from scratch in recent years.
To some in Hollywood, the migration of animation jobs to Central America will look like yet another foreboding instance of outsourcing. And, of course, Silicon Valley also grows anxious over the export of high-tech jobs. But Arguello, who has worked on both sides of the global cultural flow, has a much broader vision than just diverting work to Studio C. While actively courting Hollywood animation jobs -- and using that experience to buff and polish his young staff -- he’s also developing a variety of other projects that he hopes will express a uniquely Guatemalan vision and sensibility, among them a documentary-style, Spanish-language TV show and an animated children’s series.
Arguello knows that Studio C’s competition with other design studios will be fierce. But rather than downsizing his expectations, he’s mapping out an expansion. In just 1 1/2 years, Studio C has gone from four employees to 50. By the end of 2005, Arguello wants to have 100 people working for him. Studio C also is undergoing a second remodeling that will add a 60-person screening room, four conference rooms with high-speed connectivity to Los Angeles, production offices, a library, a small cafeteria, a landscaped area and even a pool for employees. Arguello hopes to have it all up and running by September, and he’s paying for every bit of it out of his own pocket, with the ample rewards from his two decades in Silicon Valley and Hollywood.
He also intends to open a college for 150 young design, technology and performing arts students from throughout Latin America. The college, which will occupy the same cavernous split-level building as Studio C, will have an open floor plan that will allow students to observe and occasionally interact with the professional animators and designers working a few yards away. “I would love for the school to be able to house whoever wants to learn and has talent,” Arguello says.
Around Guatemala City, word of Studio C is spreading among some of the country’s best and brightest college students and, even more so, among autodidactic computer geeks who got turned onto design by movies like “Toy Story.”
German Almaraz, 23, a self-taught graphic designer, got hired after Arguello spotted his personal webpage. It included mock-up 3-D models of the “Lord of the Rings” characters that Almaraz had sketched from memory after seeing the Peter Jackson film.
Daniel Lopez, 28, the youngest of seven children, was living with his brother, a San Francisco architect, and trying to find work in the U.S. when his tourist visa ran out. Returning to Guatemala, he responded to a newspaper ad seeking people who knew how to use Flash and 3-D software. He has been with Studio C ever since. “When I came here, I didn’t think there was a business here like this” in Guatemala, he says.
In private, employees say that Arguello treats them more like a friend or a teacher than a boss. Alejandro Farfan, Studio C’s 26-year-old former head of production, says that more such enterprises are desperately needed in Guatemala to stem a decades-long exodus of human capital. “There’s a lot of talent we lose, there’s a lot of separated families,” he says.
Jamie Dixon, formerly Arguello’s colleague at Pacific Data Images and now president of the Studio City-based design company Hammerhead, says Arguello combines an artist’s eye with a computer technician’s proficiency -- a rare combination.
He also has an extraordinary gift for “spit-balling,” Dixon says, being able to take an idea -- “What should the world of ‘Riddick’ look like?” for instance -- and quickly sketch out 25 to 50 variations on that theme.
When Hammerhead was hired to work on “The Chronicles of Riddick,” Dixon realized he needed help handling the huge number of special effects and matte paintings. Arguello, he knew, was the man for the job. “He had this kind of magical resource of all his guys down in Guatemala,” Dixon says. Arguello’s ability to act as a liaison made the job flow as smoothly as if Studio C had been based in Chatsworth or Tarzana, Dixon says, for a fraction of what he would’ve had to pay if the work had been done in the United States.
Tim Cunningham, who worked with Arguello on “Armageddon” and recently spent several weeks at Studio C showing its crew how to better coordinate production deadlines, remembers how Arguello used to talk about moving back to Guatemala someday. “People talk about that kind of thing all the time and never do it,” Cunningham says. Now a whole generation of young Guatemalans is benefiting from Arguello’s guidance and experience, says Cunningham. “He’s a great mentor for them. They’re all very talented, but there was no place for their talent to foment.”
Studio C may have to start fomenting even faster as it branches out beyond feature film work. Not long after opening his business, Arguello concluded that if the enterprise was to survive, it couldn’t always be waiting around for somebody to hand it another job. Studio C, he resolved, must create its own products.
The offerings have included “Mi Guatemala” (My Guatemala), a TV show aimed at Guatemalan emigrants. Composed of interviews with ordinary Guatemalans about various aspects of their daily lives, the show offers U.S. immigrants and their children a way of staying connected to their native culture.
Studio C also has developed an interactive CD-book for children ages 3 to 10, written in English, Spanish and the indigenous languages of Ichique and Chequel. A charming children’s animated series, “Viaje a Latina America” (Trip to Latin America), aims to serve Guatemalan and other Latin American immigrants now living north of the border.
Then there’s “My Sexy City,” an interactive, witty, highly explicit animated AIDS-awareness website that’s being targeted at young gay Latinos. The project was co-commissioned from Studio C by two of the largest AIDS-prevention groups in the United States: AIDS Project Los Angeles and Gay Men’s Health Crisis of New York. “It’s very nonjudgmental, very educational,” Arguello says.
Asked how much he has invested so far in Studio C, Arguello laughs. “Money? A lot! Or, how much love? A lot of love too!” Has he been hitting on his old Hollywood friends for support? “The way I hit on my Hollywood friends is go and say, ‘Please give me some work!’ And they’re being very nice. I’ve been to New Zealand to talk to some people [about] some films that we’re going to be working on in the future.”
Visualizing his future
When Arguello looks back at his life, it seems he was fated to arrive at this juncture. But “when you’re trying to do it,” he says, “it’s such a fog.”
By the standards of Central America in the 1970s and ‘80s, his was a decidedly privileged upbringing in a stable middle-class home (his father managed a German chemical company). But it wasn’t without challenges.
As a child, Arguello suffered from acute dyslexia, unable to distinguish “D” from “B” or “P” from “Q” or certain numbers from one another. “I remember to this day fighting with my mom and saying, ‘Mom, I don’t get the difference!’ ” His mother, who is dyslexic herself, hired special tutors to help her frustrated son.
But it wasn’t until he discovered computers, Arguello says, that he was able to harness his talent by learning to think visually instead of verbally. “There are different types of brain, and mine is very intuitive and artistic, and computers were really able to guide me and help me.”
Arguello believes that computers can be great levelers in stratified societies like Guatemala’s. “Visualization,” he says, “is the new language of globalization.”
After finishing high school at 15, Arguello briefly studied architecture before deciding that the real action was in the United States. He went to live with an aunt in Palo Alto, and after greeting restaurant patrons and waiting tables for six months, he had enough money to enroll at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, where he took up painting and photography. His interests finally coalesced when the academy acquired its first computer-design work station in the mid-’80s. “As soon as I tested the computer I knew, like, ‘This is exactly what I want to do.’ ”
He landed a job with Synthetic Video and worked on his first 3-D project, an award-winning satellite modeling presentation for NASA. It was a heady time to be a young computer graphics designer in the Bay Area, and Arguello threw himself into it, mind and body. Long days of work would be followed by long nights of partying in the area south of Market Street, then back to work by sunrise. “Thank God I was young,” he says.
He caught his big break when Pacific Data Images decided his artistic talents would help balance out a company then top-heavy with computer scientists. Soon Arguello was developing commercials and graphics for the major television networks, and he later worked on music videos, including Michael Jackson’s “Black and White,” and on such movies as “Angels in the Outfield.”
When PDI decided to close its L.A. office, Arguello opted to stay in Southern California, where he signed on as creative director and later visual tech supervisor with Cinesite and worked on more big-budget, special effects-laden films such as “Space Jam,” “Sphere,” “The Devil’s Advocate” and “Armageddon.” But after “Armageddon,” the Michael Bay epic about a runaway asteroid that pummels Manhattan, Arguello needed a break -- especially when the scene he’d personally designed, the destruction of the Twin Towers, came to horrifying life before his eyes on Sept. 11, 2001.
“I loved this stuff in my 20s and my 30s, but you really have to do something with your life more constructive than destructive,” Arguello says. After selling the Porsche and his Hollywood Hills home, he put a few books and photos in storage. Then he spent four months bumming around Europe before moving to Antigua, an absurdly beautiful colonial town about 45 minutes outside Guatemala City.
“It was beautiful. I [looked] out my house window and there was a volcano, live, active, with lava flowing down, flowers.” After years spent working day and night, Arguello says, time seemed to go in slow-motion. “And I just started to kind of paint and my life changed.”
At first he lived incognito, bleaching his hair, dressing and acting like a tourist and having minimal contact with his family. Then a nonprofit group asked Arguello if he’d be willing to contribute a video segment to a project about ethnicity and identity in post-civil war Guatemala.
“That’s when it kind of hit me, it’s like, well, there’s so much need over here, and then actually I do have 20 years of visualizing, creating images for entertainment, and there’s a need for education, and education has always been a part of my life that I’m very interested about.”
A few months later he did a talk for Guatemalan advertising agencies and students to raise money for children with Down’s syndrome, and invited some of his old Pixar and DreamWorks friends to participate. That experience gave birth to the idea of opening his own studio. “I had to leave [Guatemala], and the idea is for other people not to have to do that, that there is a choice,” Arguello says.
Keeping his connections
His old L.A. friends are betting that Arguello can make that choice a reality for others. “If you have someone who can be the liaison between the foreign workers and the Hollywood designers, I think it could be very successful. And Carlos is that presence,” says Thad Beier. “It’s an audacious plan, no question about it. But with anybody else I would question it more.”
A U.S. citizen since 1991, Arguello still remembers the time when he and a director were coming out of a fancy L.A. restaurant after a film-wrap party, and someone handed him their car keys, assuming he was a valet.
Though he relates the incident without bitterness, he says such experiences can give you “more energy to show that the boxes are much bigger than what people want to box you in.” He believes that a person can choose to be creative in more than one language, one medium, one culture or even one country simultaneously.
“So I live now in Guatemala and L.A.,” he says, “and everybody’s like, ‘Well, what do you like better?’ I like them both, I love them both. Basically it just gets bigger, it doesn’t get like ‘one or the other.’ It’s like when you’re afraid of not loving somebody because you’re going to love somebody else. It’s like the heart works in a way that you can love everybody, if you really open your heart.”
Contact Reed Johnson at Calendar.letters@latimes.com.
