Greg Tiernan

Greg Tiernan (born June 19, 1965) is an Irish-Canadian animator, director and voice actor. Along with his wife Nicole Stinn, he founded Nitrogen Studios Canada, Inc. in 2003, through which he introduced CGI to the Thomas & Friends series.^[1] Prior to this, Tiernan collaborated on various projects with filmmaker Don Bluth, Walt Disney Animation Studios and Klasky Csupo, Inc.

Tiernan made his feature film debut with the long-gestating R-rated animated film Sausage Party (2016), joining Conrad Vernon to direct production of a story conceived by Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg and Jonah Hill.^[2][3]

Career

Tiernan was trained in traditional animation for feature film in his native Ireland, at Don Bluth's now-defunct Dublin-based Sullivan Bluth Studios. There, he worked with Bluth in various capacities on the films An American Tail (1986), The Land Before Time (1988) and All Dogs Go to Heaven (1989). Soon after, he moved to Los Angeles and became a sequence director for Klasky Csupo. In addition to working on several episodes of Rugrats and The Wild Thornberries, he made sequence contributions to the feature film spin-offs off both programs.

Tiernan's Hollywood years also saw him work extensively with Disney. His first projects included several titles in the company's PC games library, including projects associated with Disney's Aladdin (1992), The Lion King (1994), Hercules (1997) and Tarzan (1999). Also through Disney, he contributed storyboards to Mr. Magoo (1997), one of his few live-action projects.

After serving as an additional animator on The Tigger Movie (2000), Tiernan moved to Vancouver and founded Nitrogen Studios. Through this new venture, he helped develop God of War (2005), the first entry in the renowned Playstation game series, and the animated film Happily N'Ever After (2006). He joined the family of artists behind the Thomas & Friends franchise when he directed the home video feature Hero of the Rails (2009). This title became the first Thomas project to shelve the historical stop motion animation technique in favor of CGI; all subsequent projects have been animated thus. Along with helming various additional home videos, Tiernan served as series director for Thomas & Friends from Series 13 to Series 16.

Tiernan gained new acclaim following the release of his feature film debut, Sausage Party (which he also voiced a potato and a noodle soup can). Produced for $19 million, the film grossed roughly $34.3 million in its first weekend of release^[4] and received positive reviews from critcs.^[5]

Allegations of mistreatment

Several days after the release of Sausage Party, allegations of poor treatment of Nitrogen Studios employees surfaced in the comments section of an interview with Tiernan and co-director Conrad Vernon, featured on the website Cartoon Brew.^[6] Various anonymous comments, from individuals purporting to be animators who worked on the film in question, made claims including that Nitrogen forced them to work overtime for free and that some employees were threatened with termination. One individual stated that Tiernan had developed a reputation for "disturbing behaviour and abusive management style".^[7] Publications such as the Los Angeles Times,^[8] dorkly^[9] and /Film^[10] later picked up the story.

References

External links

• Greg Tiernan at the Internet Movie Database
• Nitrogen Studios homepage
• Sausage Party official website