Story by Bruce Bourquin
Image Courtesy Eric Dapkewicz
Eric Dapkewicz ’93 (B.A. communications– radio-TV-film) has been a part of three animated Disney hits spanning the past 15 years. Most recently he served as lead editor on the DreamWorks animated film, “Monsters vs. Aliens.”
Dapkewicz was honored as the 2009 Cal State Fullerton Radio-TV-Film Distinguished Alumnus in May. He was presented with the award at the TV-Film
Society year-end banquet and awards ceremony in Orange.
“I felt strongly it was important to come back to a class to talk with students,” he said. “I wanted to do this alumni event, to speak to students to let them know that, ‘Hey, I was in your shoes once.’ ”
His student days helped launch him toward a career as a film editor. At Cal State Fullerton, “I learned the basics of production – pre-production, production, post-process,” Dapkewicz said. “It was cool. We had hands-on training. They lined me up with professors who mentored me.”
His latest production, “Monsters vs. Aliens,” was the first computer-animated
movie to be directly produced in a stereoscopic 3-D format, instead of being converted into 3-D after completion. “Earlier movies in post-process didn’t have 3-D in mind,” he explained. “We incorporate 3-D from the very beginning. The studios had not done that kind of thing before.”
On the film, he worked with stars Reese Witherspoon, Stephen Colbert, Kiefer
Sutherland and Seth Rogen, among others. “Reese called me the torture master,”
Dapkewicz said. “During the big San Francisco scene, her character is being chased by this large robot, so I asked her to act out every physical gesture so we could record her sound efforts. I had her do this for all the action scenes. She told me I was giving her quite a workout.”
From his beginnings as a tape vault manager in Santa Monica, Dapkewicz first
broke into animated film work as a production assistant on the 1995 hit film “Pocahontas.”
“I had a crash course on how to work in the film business,” he recalled. “One
week they had me in editorial, the next week I was in special effects or lighting. I saw how films were made. I knew I wanted to get into editing.”
After moving to Florida, Dapkewicz served as an assistant editor on another
Disney hit, “Mulan,” released in 1998. Another opportunity came up the next year,
where as an associate editor he worked on his first alien film, “Lilo and Stitch,” released in 2002. Upon moving back to Southern California in 2004, he worked for DreamWorks on “Flushed Away,” starring the voices of Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman.
Dapkewicz is currently working with Antonio Banderas and Salma Hayek as the
lead editor on “Puss ’n Boots.” A spin-off from the “Shrek” movies, it is set to release in 2012. “Each of the films I’ve worked on has taken three or four years,” he said. “For me, it’s like going to college.”
