Dr. Robinson sits down to talk with Tony Sabo, Vice President and Creative Director at Addis Enterprises, about being a Dapper Dad, the birth of Addis Enterprises, and his experience at Lansing Community College.

LCC Art, Design, and Multimedia

Addis Enterprises

Women Working Wonders

You're listening to LCC Alumni Stories, a show dedicated to highlighting the amazing alumni of Lansing Community College. I'm Steve Robinson, president of LCC, and on each episode I have the awesome privilege of getting to know one of our many inspiring alums and hearing about their experiences at and since leaving LCC. The LCC alumni community is expansive and far reaching. They're an incredibly diverse group of people, representative of all walks of life, working in hundreds of industries across the country. LCC Alumni Stories shines a bright light on alumni who make a positive contribution to their community and showcases those who have overcome obstacles and barriers to achieve academic and personal success. These are their dynamic stories.

I'm great. Thank you so much for having excited

to talk to you because when we were doing a project together, I told you about the show and I immediately wanted to get you on, but a lot has happened since then, so it took a while to get you here. How are you doing?

I am fantastic. How about yourself?

I'm doing great. So Tony and I, we met in person for the first time when we were both Dapper Dads. That was a trip, wasn't it?

It sure was.

So for listeners who are not familiar with Women Working Wonders fundraiser Dapper Dads. Tony and I to dress up in K clothing and go down the Runway with all the lights and the music and it was a lot of fun. It was.

Got to strut our stuff.

We did. And you had one of your kids with you, right?

I did, yeah.

Tell me about that. That must have been special.

Actually, yeah. I had two of my sons with me, Landon and Lucas. And yep, they got all dressed up, walked the Runway with me.

And to end it, my other son Landon actually went up to the did a flip at the end.

That's right. I was backstage, but I heard the crowd went nuts.

Yeah, it was really cool. They kind of showed me up and helped me out. So it was good.

Well, I had a similar strategy. I didn't bring any of my kids, but we brought some LCC students and it was a really fun event for a great cause. Sure was.

So before we talk about your time here at LCC as an alum, I would love to hear about what you're doing now at Addas. Tell me a little bit about your company and what you do professionally.

Sure. Well, Addis Enterprises is a full design and marketing firm. Yeah. So about seven years ago, we rebooted Addis Enterprises.

John came to me one day and says, you know, hey, do we get jobs at Michigan State? Do you want to reboot this company? What would you like to do? And so we went out and interviewed at Michigan State.

I interviewed about two to three different departments and, you know, got a couple offers.

John got a really amazing offer at msu, and he pulled me back into his house and he said, do you really want to do that, or do you want to just take a leap of faith and go out and restart this company? And I said, I want to restart this company. Let's do it. So about a couple months from working in his.

In his house over on the west side neighborhood, we decided to just go look at some property, and we got a place right next to. Right next to Midtown Brewing Company Right here.

Downtown.

Right downtown, yeah. And that went extremely well. We ended up hiring Jody Miller, which was also from our old company, great friend of ours.

And it was just the three of us for a while, and hired a couple more people a couple months down the road, and then outgrew that building very fast.

Wow.

So within probably a year of being downtown, we decided to look around, and we got a place off of Michigan Avenue and Mount Hope, and we bought a building there, and we bought the building next door, and we took the garage and made it into a green screen studio slash lounge area for our clients.

Okay.

And we, within, I would say two to three years, we grew to 15 to 16 people.

Wow. That's huge growth.

Yeah, we grew really fast, which was a little scary.

I don't know how prepared we were right off the bat, but, you know, the past three years, I'd say, has been really, like, taking our policies and perfecting them. And now that we're, like, considered a big boy company, we had to really concentrate on policies and make sure we grew strategically.

Got it.

Smart.

So the fork in the road at the beginning is are we gonna work for somebody else at a research university or are we gonna go our own way with this company? And you've had incredible growth. Tell me a little bit about what you do with your clients. You're still in that design animation space, right?

What kind of work do you do for clients?

So for our clients, actually, LCC was a client of ours about four years ago.

Fantastic. What did we do with you?

What career fits you? We did that campaign. They were animate Adobe or back in the old school days, Flash Ads Flash animation.

So I redid those in Animate, Adobe Animate, and we did a campaign where we took vector graphics and just created some simple 2D animations, 15 second clips, so you could sprinkle those all throughout different local websites of Lansing. And we had any category from nursing to construction, even audio. I think we did a fun little audio one.

So had a little soundboard animation of a guy like adjusting the sound levels and things like that.

That's cool. And it's still an important part of college storytelling is animation. Right.

So sounds like you did some spots that highlighted career pathways for us. And it's funny that you mentioned Flash. I mean, I'm older than you, but I remember when that was the way animation worked on the web.

I'm a huge fan of. I don't know if you know Homestar Runner, the Flash cartoon. No.

Okay, well, anyway, it's now sort of defunct because all the, all the animation was on Flash. And teach me the technology that it doesn't run anymore. Right. Flash doesn't run on.

Does not. Completely dead.

Completely dead format. So what are the formats you're developing and designing in for clients right now?

So HTML5, like anything canvas related through animate. So that just converts to HTML5 canvas. But the most exciting thing, I think we do Addison Enterprises. And I'm being biased because this is my degree.

Okay. This 3D animation and backing up outside of, outside of Addison Enterprises.

Just before we kind of had that middle phase of trying to find jobs, I did work at LCC for a year with Sean Huberty over at West Campus.

Oh, okay. West Campus.

Yeah, we built a video game over there. And I got to learn a lot of like, like 3D gaming engine modeling and things like that. And I got to put together their website and do a really cool.

I think it was called the Smart Neighborhood.

Okay, cool.

It was kind of like taking the West Campus. And what would it look like with future wind technology and all sorts of fun.

Oh, that sounds great. Maybe that's a great pivot point to talk about you as an LCC grad, you graduated in 98 and you actually studied animation here.

How did you get to lcc? Did you grow up around here? And was this your first choice for college? What brought you to lcc?

Sure. Well, we grew up in Detroit, moved to Lansing when I was 14, went to Grand Lunch High School. Didn't quite know what I wanted to do.

I really struggled coming here. Like, you know, I wanted to be an architect, but math was not my strong suit.

So I Talked it over with my parents and my mom just kept saying like, you are an awesome artist since you were a little boy.

You were building stuff around the house and you know, I could see you being an architect, but like, maybe you should just go talk to a student advisor. So I did. I met with an advisor here.

Here at lcc.

At lcc? Yeah, yeah. And I kind of, I wanted to start off at see like maybe start off at LCC and transfer msu, but I just was like, you know what?

I want to see how just two year, a two year college goes. And I knew this was a. Was a great fit. So I met with a student advisor here and it was Sharon Wood. I'm not sure if Sharon is still here.

She sat me down and she asked me, what do you like to do with art? And I said, I like to draw stuff like that. And she said, well, do you want to make soup can labels for graphic design?

And I looked at her and I was like, absolutely not.

So she asked you specifically, do you want to design labels for food products?

She said, well, that's one field. And it wasn't really. That wasn't doing best way to sell in graphic design. But yeah, she kind of, because she had something better in store for me.

She says, or do you want to make Dinosaurs Walk in Jurassic Park? And my eyes lit up. I was like, yes.

That's interesting. What a specific memory. That's great advising, by the way. She's creating a vision for you in your head about what?

So making Dinosaurs Walk, that sounded pretty cool.

Jurassic park was huge then. And I was like, that's right.

That was a huge time for that movie. So that's what you decided your path was going to be. Tell me a little bit about the classes that you took.

Yeah, I remember Photoshop very clearly. I love Photoshop now.

I mean, it's such an important tool in all kinds of design.

All kinds? Yeah, I mean I took like typography. I remember it was all hand drawn at that point. Like, I don't. It was Pagemaker, I think, back in the day.

That's a familiar name.

Yeah. So I took Pagemaker, Pagemaker. And I can't remember what the equivalent program was, but I learned that.

I learned Painter, which does not exist anymore, I don't think, unless they've changed it around. I think it's called Corel Painter.

All right. Yeah. Coreldraw, Corel Paint. There were these other applications, believe it or not.

I mean a lot of them are just obsolete now.

But what's Interesting to me to hear you talk about all these throwback applications or software programs while they're gone. The principles of them still apply. Right. So the design principles that you studied in your classes on these now defunct, even Flash. Right.

The ideas, the principles are still the same. Correct? Correct, yeah. So tell me what makes a good animation? I mean, tell me from your perspective, how do you make an animation appealing?

Storytelling.

Okay, tell me about that.

Yeah. So I'll give you a good example. A professor at MSU, Dr. Richard Pursley, came to me and said, I have this idea.

Like I don't know how I'm going to do it, but I'm thinking of taking. Let me back up. He's a professor for animal science department. He works with basically the estrocycle of cows.

And he said, what if we did like we took a photo of a cow and took another photo of a cow cow and you kind of like just do voiceover like they're talking to each other. And I said, and I thought to myself, can I really get that point across with just still images?

And then I actually chatted with him about like what 3D animation actually is and how I could take your imagination and your ideas like talking cows and actually make them come to life and animate and make them feel like a Disney short. Pixar.

That sounds really cool.

So that's what we did. We took a four part series called Blazing Star. Blazing Star, I think it's.

These are cow names. Yeah, Blaze and Star.

Okay.

I'm already picturing it in my head.

Yeah, yeah. And it's a four part series and they're about five minutes per clip. And he uses them for basically educating his students.

You could go on just YouTube and just research Blazing Star. They're. If they're really funny. He wrote all the scripting.

And the really cool part is you just find your voiceover talent, which is a couple girls he worked with in the department and they record the voiceover and I place it into Lightwave.

And then you start by purchasing 3D models or building out 3D models and then you go on set and location to the dairy farm and, and you take reference photos of everything, the stalls, the architecture of the entire place. And you start bringing in those photos into Photoshop.

And another thing you would do is when you're at those locations you would take what's called texture photos like of the ground straw, what they eat, the cow's surface, things like that. So what I would do is I would take a lot of photos of like the back walls.

What do the back walls look like while they're aluminum and they're dirty aluminum. So I take a photo of that and take a photo of the ground.

And what you would do is take those texture photos, and then you would start building out your models and you would map those UV texture maps onto the ground, onto the cows. So you're taking real life photos and just mapping them into a 3D environment.

Wow.

Yeah. And then you light the. Light the scene, you surface the scene. Then you work on camera. Camera work.

And then you take the actual 3D models and you rig them. And then you take the voiceover and you start to play them. And every time the cow blaze talks, you look at the inflections of the words.

And then when they say, like an R, you kind of take the facial expression of what an R looks like.

It simulates what a human face would do when it's making that noise.

Exactly.

So that's fascinating to me. So how much of those kinds of principles did you pick up in your classes here and how much did you have to learn after the fact?

A ton of them here.

Like, you know, I. I loved getting, like, taking what Sharon taught me and going home and spending another, you know, five or six hours and just perfecting what I learned in class.

But, like, in your own animation.

Yeah, like, just. Just stuff for. I think we had an end project, like make a room, light it, and animate through it.

Okay.

And so I would take what she taught me in class and I would go home and just try to perfect this animation for. For some award ceremony at the end. And it was. Yeah, I would say, like, she set a great foundation here.

And I would again try to perfect what she taught me. But then I always wanted to go above and beyond, go home and learn and then come back the next day and. And feel like I really have comprehended it.

Unlike math, where I would sit in math class and I would just get so far behind because I was like, oh, no more. I cannot catch up. But I wanted to make sure I was on top of my A game when it came to the animation.

So the animation stuff, you always had that appetite for more, right? That's what I'm hearing. So you took classes in animation and typography and design. You graduated in 98. What'd you do right after graduation?

Did you go work for a company doing animation? Tell me about that.

Sure. I went to a company called Blue Lobster Multimedia Productions.

Okay.

It was a little F.D. hayes, Sister Branch Electric. And it was an awesome job. We literally. I started off as an intern and then it turned into a six year job.

So we would take dimmer switches for companies like Wiremold and Leviton. We would take dimmer switches and we get like 10 physical models of a dimmer switch and we would just wreck them.

We would break them apart and there would be a circuit board and there'd be all these little pieces on there. And same thing with like the cows. We'd break it completely off all the models apart, the physical models.

And then I'd take a photo of like the circuit board and then I would actually model that and then I'd take what I broke off of the circuit board and then I would model and surface that and then attach it to that.

And so basically what would happen is we'd have a full 3D model and then we'd have some voiceover work done explaining how this dimmer switch gets installed. And we would do an explosive view.

So the model would pull apart and we'd show how to connect the wires properly to an outlet, how certain screws go in and things like that. And it was a training device.

Wow. So let me see if I get this right.

It's fascinating because in order to what you were making essentially were instructional videos or like almost like visual manuals for these switches.

And if you've ever worked with one of these things, you get a little white piece of paper that you open up and it's got these little diagrams and it's really hard to understand. You made essentially a teaching tool for what? The installation and repair of these things.

Exactly.

Was it fun to break these things?

Oh, it's so much fun.

I got to know about this. So you're taking images of them at various stages of deconstruction. How did you actually break them? They seemed like they'd be hard to break.

Yeah, well, a lot. Some of them, you know, you would just unscrew certain parts. But yeah, a lot of them we would needle nose pliers.

You just take them and wrap the plastic.

Really?

This is why you got probably 10 different models because you would need to, you know, actually use or actually surface and model them perfectly. But you, you know, it'd be pretty hard to do with half of them because they're so destroyed and wrecked.

So yeah, we would have, like I said, I would probably get through about four to five models and then we'd have five left over. But yeah, it was, it was just needle nose pliers, hammers. Sometimes we just sit there and that's funny.

So the audience of these videos are what, technicians and then just end users who are, who are, who are installing them. That's great. So you were there for six years?

About six years, yeah.

What'd you do after that?

Oh, probably American Eagle and Meijer Warehouse. Yeah, I kind of dropped off for a while, I would say. I worked at Meyer Warehouse for four to five years.

Okay.

And then I realized like, I have to do, I have to get back.

You want to go back into animation?

Yeah. So I went to Robert Half Associates in Novi and I said, hey, I'm kind of going back into the ball game. Here's my old resume, my old work.

Now the problem is, is 3D animation is super cool, but we don't live in New York, Chicago and for one, not a lot of people have heard about it. To the pricing, it can be a little high. So a lot of people are like, I will just go with still images.

So tell me a little bit about that. It's more expensive, I'm guessing because it's more labor intensive to create, Right?

Exactly.

It's one thing to just take still images, but if you're going to do 3D modeling, it's going to cost more, Right?

Yeah. And that's usually a, a five to ten person team for animation.

Really?

And I am, yeah, one person team. So. So yeah, I went to Robert Half and I, I did a little bit of web development dabbling when I was at Blue Lobster.

And that was when you're using tables, I believe, tables and frames to build.

I remember that.

Yeah. Scary. So I, I kind of add that background. And then after that I got placed into a company in Waterford, Michigan.

It was a law firm and he wanted to put together AdSense websites, which is kind of bizarre. So I started to learn a little bit more web development there.

That lasted about two years and then I moved back to Lansing because I moved down to Howell and then moved back to Lansing and then I went back to Robert Half and they placed me again into a company called, called Rizzy Designs. That, that was about 12 years ago.

Okay.

And that's where I just said, hey, I got animation skills. But I understand that there may not be a huge market for it. Okay. So I self taught myself websites, how to program front end development.

Right.

And then I got huge back into Flash graphics, premiere editing, video editing, audio editing, things like that. And I loved it.

But then it was time to like make a move to the new company about seven years ago and I really started to realize that just web development is huge. In the city. Like, you know, everybody needs a website for a starting business.

It's true. It's the front door for your enterprise or your organization.

Yeah. So. And I got heavier into the, the web development and then my boss just said, you know, like, I think I need to make you creative director.

Like, because, because you're starting to like, design every website. You see that in Lansing that we've done has been, you know, your eye. So why don't you start doing all the front end mocks and things like that.

And then I would also do my video editing on the side. You know, we do a lot of editing with Premiere, things like that. But I always had that passion for 3D.

And John saw at Rizzy Designs the success in it, even though we, we only had maybe three or four clients, he saw that there was a lot of potential, a lot of like, if, hey, if we could really break this door wide open, let's do it. So he bought me the software, he bought me Lightwave, which Sharon actually taught me.

Lightwave right here at lcc.

Yeah, yeah, I believe, I believe they're using Maya now. Okay.

But yeah, they're, you know, I'm still one of those people in Lansing that, that use Lightwave and I know there's a couple other cool cats in Lansing that still use it that I like to hit up and say, hey, you know, how do you do this still? Because it's, it's Lightwave is, you know, the big ones are Maya, Softimage and anything like the big studios use.

Got it.

But Lightwave still is, is just, it's an amazing tool. It's a powerful tool. And I just told John, I said, hey, we need to continue this service.

And right now I think we have about 16 or 17 animation clients under our belt at Edison Enterprises, anywhere ranging from, you know, MSU Dairy. We've done the MSU U of M Rugby intro, outro graphics for those.

Very cool.

That's great.

Yeah, we do a lot of logos for businesses. That's kind of the biggest thing. We do a lot of like just, just logos for businesses. They have, hey, here's my EPS file. Do something cool with this.

Make it like flip around, have some smoke and fire behind the logo.

Well, and motion is so important for that. Right. So to track somebody's eye or to pull them. And I find it fascinating that you're still using a tool that you Learned here at LCC in the 90s.

I mean, that's very, very cool. Before we end, Tony, tell me a little bit about what it was like to be a student here at that.

You know, you're obviously deeply, deeply immersed in this animation. You've got an advisor who's gotten you excited about it. What about outside of the classroom?

What kind of things were happening here when you were a student?

Yeah, well, I really transitioned at that age with, like, my entire life, like, high school. Going from kind of the dorky kid, getting bullied. You know, I knew, like, oh, I needed a change. I'm glad I went to new school.

And, you know, I started meeting a lot of really cool people.

Okay, so you met a lot of people on your career?

Yeah, it's a cool campus.

Do you bump into anybody that you studied animation with? Anybody professionally? You see them around?

Okay, so believe it or not, my wife, Thuy. She had a friend at Auto Owners that. It was like, hey, you know, he. He just left Auto Owners. This guy is a brilliant videographer. And so he.

She's like, can you. Can you. Can you do our wedding? And I was just like, do we need a videographer? She's like, no, no, just. Just for a favor for me. Can we hire him?

And I said, okay, absolutely. And his name is Lex. And I met Lex, and I was just like, man, you look familiar. And he's like, yeah, man.

We used to, like, be in class together at lcc here at lcc. And I was just. And so we shared stories, and I was just like, man, like, I had no idea. Like. Like, I just don't remember you being there.

But I guess he was just in one class, and he's like, oh, I sat in the back. But. But he. I mean, he's brilliant. He's like. And he was like, yeah, man, I contribute all my success to lcc. And those classes we took together.

Well, very cool. Well, I have to talk to him.

Yeah.

Tony, it has been so fun to have you on the show. Great to see you again. And I'm really fascinated that you're still using the same design platform that you learned here.

I know that designers get really attached to the environment and the software that they use, so that's. That's really cool. And thanks for sharing your LCC story with us.

Thanks for having me, Steve. Appreciate it.

LCC Alumni Stories is recorded, engineered and produced by Steve Robinson on LCC's downtown campus. The soundtrack, “Who Told You” Is licensed through DeWolf Music and was performed by Ian McCanty. Thanks for listening. Learn more about what our alumni have been up to at lccconnect.org and if you're an LCC alum and want to share your story with me, send me an email at steve.robinson.lcc.edu. Until next time, keep learning. This is LCC connect on WLNZ 89.7 FM.