25+ years in animation and I’ve tried my hand at most all aspects of production. Producing, Directing, Development, Post, Animatics, Animation, you name it I’ve probably had a run at it.
Storytelling, especially visual storytelling, has been a lifelong passion. It drives me to read, watch, and listen voraciously. It also drew me into a career and hobbies that require storytelling skills to entertain and teach.
I studied fine arts, animation and illustration at college in Boston, where I met a great group of artists and got a solid foundation. Equally important to my education was my gig at VideoSmith, an independent video store in a town just outside the city. Across the street was an art house cinema. We gave the cinema folks free rentals and they gave us free movie tickets and popcorn. I had unfettered access to a vast library of movies and I put it to good use.
I moved to San Francisco upon graduating to freelance while continuing to run an animation festival for 5 years across Boston, New York, LA and San Francisco.
After the web bubble burst of the early 2000s, I moved to New York to work on an animated television pilot and continued to freelance animate. I landed at Animation Collective, at the time still a fledgling web animation studio, as a storyboard artist and Flash animator.
I soon was directing animated short series for the studio. As the studio grew into television work I began assistant directing and taking on more of a creative production role.
Head of Production and de facto show runner for two concurrent series, this was my last hurrah at Animation Collective, by then an infamous studio in New York with a storied and rocky reputation. Those two concurrent series involved live action and animation and pushed me to my limits, but we completed both in less than 18 months.
Thinking I needed a breather from series work, I decided to enter the advertising and marketing world of animation production. In 2013 I started as a producer at Mixtape Club and oversaw dozens of projects a years. I moved into an Executive Producer roll with the studio in 2016 and added more music and sound production experience to my portfolio.
In 2019 returned to freelance production, which included a stint as executive producer at Augenblick Studios. I’ve continued to freelance, producing animated films, series packaging, and post work, while continuing to animate, edit, and produce audio.
You can see a sampling of my advertising & marketing work on the front page. Below is a reel of my television and web series work.
Download (~35mb): John Holt TV Reel
Contents in order of appearance:
- Jolly Rabbit
- Dancing Sushi
- Eloise in Africa
- Team Toon
- Captain Macaroni
- HTDT
- Nuclear Strikes
- Spaceman and Robot
- The Uh-Ohs
- Princess Natasha
- Kappa Mikey
- SKWOD
- Kung Fu Academy