Pixar’s Tom Porter For The Fenn School

"While I’m a proud Alumnus of Exeter, and Penn, and Stamford, I’ll tell anybody that Fenn was the best school.”

-Tom Porter, Fenn Class of 1965

We had the incredible opportunity to interview and photograph Tom Porter at the Pixar headquarters in Emeryville, CA. Tom is now the Senior Vice President of Production for Pixar, and was part of the the founding team. His job has been to accurately represent how light reflects off of different surfaces in the animation, a hugely important part of the immersive quality of Pixar’s films. 

He credits his time at Fenn for giving him the confidence to strike off into uncharted territories - to apply mathematics to field that could hardly have been imagined when he was a sixth grader at the school. 

Tom was gracious, generous with this time, and eloquent. Given all that we have learned about Fenn over the years we have worked with them, we were humbled but not surprised.