Haverhill native nominated for Academy Award for 'Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio'
HAVERHILL - Haverhill native Parker Merrick says he's living his childhood dream. The 30-year-old has been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature for the work he did on "Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio."
"I am pretty excited. It's very humbling. And it's never a guarantee how big of a deal it's going to be, but when I signed on for a Guillermo del Toro film, who has won Best Picture back in 2017, it was pretty wild," Merrick said.
Merrick is a stop motion animator. His job is to take the puppets and move them frame-by-frame to create a single shot. "There are 24 frames in a second, so I'll move a puppet 12 times and take a picture every time I do it. And then we stream those together and that's one second of the film, of animation," he said.
Merrick grew up in Haverhill, attending Haverhill High School and later went on to Rochester Institute of Technology School of Film and Animation, where he recently returned to give a talk on what it meant to work on "Pinocchio." He says creating the film was exhausting but also rewarding.
"It's really cool to see this lifeless puppet come to life and that's a lot of the appeal for me," he said.
The film has been picking up awards leading up to the Oscars. This is his first feature film so winning one would be incredible. "The most talented people I've ever worked with and I could ever see myself working with, to see that effort and everything we went through pay off," he said.
Merrick said if there's one thing this career has taught him it's patience, both in creating a shot and staying employed. "I've wanted to be an animator since I was a kid. I don't think I knew exactly what that meant at the time, but I did end up following it through and now I've worked on this really incredible feature film and so just keep those dreams alive," Merrick said.
From Haverhill to Hollywood, Merrick is making waves and staying humble. "This is what I wanted to do and making a living doing it. I guess I am able to hold my own in the big leagues, which is just a very cool thought," he said.