July 3, 2020 • 26 mins
After 91 career sacks, Trevor Pryce dove into his creative side and wrote and produced 'Kulipari', a kids series about battle frogs that was picked up by Netflix. Pryce has now founded an animation studio in Baltimore.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Greetings and welcome to What Happened to That Guy? A
Ravens podcast about former players and life after football. I'm
your host, John Eisenberg. Through the first six episodes, you've
had no choice but to let me guide you through
the stories I've told. By that, I mean, you couldn't participate.
You couldn't actually see Peter Bullware working at the Christian
school he founded in Florida. You couldn't actually watch Chris
(00:27):
Carr defend a client an immigration court. Well that changes
with this episode. My subject is Trevor Price, the hulking
defensive lineman who spent five years with the Ravens near
the end of his honestly very underrated fourteen year NFL career.
What's he doing now? Well, I'm going to tell you,
(00:47):
and it's something. But this time you don't have to
rely on me. You can check out what he's doing yourself.
All you need is a Netflix subscription. Just log on
and type the word coop Lapari in the search field.
I'll spell it out for you k U l I
p A r I. When the results come up, you'll
(01:11):
see two animated shows, Kulapari An Army of Frogs and
Kulapari dream Walker. It's two seasons worth the shows about
ready superhero frogs battling evil scorpions in the Australian Outback.
All told, It's eighteen episodes, about twenty two minutes each,
(01:34):
so more than six hours of war and peace, love
and loss, Frogs and Scorpions, Game of Thrones for kids.
Some people call it it was an age of war.
The frog tribes were driven back into the amphibolands by
(01:55):
the crushing attacks of the scorpions. The veil still protects
us for now. Nobody's born a hero, a little warrior.
But you can do anything if you try hard enough.
It's time for battle. Not fancy must marry. We don't
need warriors, Darrel. The veil keeps us safe. The cooler
(02:16):
Pari dive to keep us safe. Only the son of
a fallen cooler Pari thinks our world still needs a warrior.
This is Trevor Price's life after football is Baby Coola Pari.
(02:40):
He dreamed it up. He wrote a trilogy of books.
He made the books into a TV show. He sold
a TV show to Netflix. Check out the credits that
run on screen at the start of each episode. Trevor
Price executive producer, Trevor Price creator. Yep, it's the same
Trevor Price who played fourteen years in the NFL, five
(03:04):
with the Ravens, earned two Super Bowl rings, played in
four Pro Bowls, piled up ninety three and a half
career sacks. That's right, ninety three and a half. That
puts him in the NFL's top fifty all time in sacks.
He was a great football player, and he's done a
ton of stuff in life besides played football. Put out
(03:26):
an album, run a record studio, back to music download service,
written books, written for The New York Times, created a
Netflix show. Now he's running a digital animation studio in Baltimore.
He's forty four years old. I considered a lot of
former Ravens as potential subjects for episodes of this podcast,
(03:48):
guys with great stories to tell, but I couldn't pass
up Trevor. Honestly, this episode should be titled what Hasn't
Happened to that guy? Trevor laughed at that idea when
we spoke suddenly at the under Armoured Performance Center in
Owings Mills. He lives in the Baltimore area with his family.
Out of all of former players. There's more than a
(04:08):
thousand now ex Ravens. There's tens of thousands of X
football players. Is anyone doing anyone else doing what you're doing? No,
not even you are. There's more lawyers, doctors, whatever, lots
of that. You know, I'm no firefighter, right, What do
you mean? You know what I'm saying. I like people
(04:28):
are doing more interesting things. No, I mean, once Netflix
picks it up, you've got broad You're getting I mean
broad around the world, around the world. We had to
deliver it in twenty two languages, so it's been seen
around the world like Japan loves it. Full disclosure, Trevor
(04:49):
is no longer doing the show for Netflix, a story
we'll get into. He's going down a different road with
Kola Party now. As I mentioned, he's opened his own
animation studio in Baltimore, o v f X Outlook Visual
Effects on the campus of MICAH the Maryland Institute College
of Art. He also recently opened a motion capture studio.
(05:12):
It's a large space where he puts live actors in
high tech suits, films them against special screens, and turns
the human action into animation. Amazing stuff. He's making a
full length Coola Pari movie basically as a DIY project
do it yourself, with help from the twenty or so
animators he has hired as full time employees in the
(05:34):
past year. It's a path that has recast Trevor as
a show business entrepreneur. He doesn't live in Hollywood, but
he's deeply immersed in the business transacted there, the business
of studios and agents and ideas and scripts and film
and television and animation. Trevor has made the leap from
football to that, and he was big time successful in
(05:57):
football and now he's big time successful in show business.
It's got serious plans for expanding the animation business in Baltimore.
I am saying to people that what we are building
is going to start an industry here from concrete that
doesn't exist. The best animators that come out of art
school are working at grow Up or they can't afford
(06:19):
to go to LA. So what's happening now is Disney
and Netflix are coming here. They're not coming to Maryland.
They're coming east. Whether or not they stop here is
kind of up to me, right If I can build
something big enough, they'll stop. But I know all those people,
so that's kind of my goal is to say, let
me try, let me see if I can build the
same thing that Vancouver has, or Toronto has, or Australia has,
(06:42):
or Nigeria is currently building. Nigeria has staked all of
their money on animation. The country's money on digital animation.
They're saying, we have nothing going on, but we have
computers and we have people that want to learn, so
they're training and you can look it up and army
of animators Nigeria and I'm like, well, Nigeria can do it,
(07:05):
and we can't do it in Maryland. That cut from
our conversation gives you an inkling of what it's like
to chat with Trevor. You start off talking about animation,
you end up talking about government investment in Nigeria. Chat
O'Donnell a Ravens production intern sat with us while we spoke,
checking the recording levels. Trevor couldn't quite believe snappy Ravens
(07:30):
production pull over. The chat was wearing the raven production
You have your own logo. When I was here, they
started getting into that kind of stuff and we're doing
like logo design for things. So they did like the
patches with the muscle for if you made the offseason
program and it was like like an emoji did they
found somewhere everything was so bad it was undesigned. You
(07:54):
could see it. The equipment managers did all the logos
and stuff like that. So I look at that, that
looks great, Tanya. I'm telling about Ed. The equipment guide
did all like, hey, we need a thing, and they'd
slap some low rez thing. You find a world change man.
I've interviewed people for a living for a long time,
and with most of them, I've learned you can pretty
much control the conversation. That is, you can guide it
(08:17):
where you wanted to go. But then there are the
people you can't control. They're smart, they're glib, they fly
off in different directions and you can't reel them back in.
When I asked Trevor about his experience in the music business,
he ended up telling me about a University of Michigan
football teammate who was playing center for the Wolverines but
(08:37):
also enrolled in med school. Then we were talking about
video and somehow we got onto whether Trevor could play
golf well enough to make the Senior Tour when he
turns fifty. He's had a million experiences, and he has
a million thoughts, a million ideas, and they all come
tumbling out in conversation. Sometimes it's almost like a car
radio on scan. When I told Ravens president Dick cass
(09:00):
that I was doing a podcast episode on Trevor, Dick said,
that is one smart guy right there, and that is
high praise. Believe me. It turns out they'd spoken on
the field before a recent Ravens game. Trevor was born
in New York and grew up in Florida, the Orlando area.
And when I say he grew up, I mean it literally.
He topped out at six feet six and close to
(09:22):
three hundred pounds, yet he was still nimble enough to
excel in track as a hurdler. Just a great athlete.
His take on his football career is he didn't choose
the sport so much as it chose him or we
I felt was if I did not play the game
at a very high level, I was wasting the gift
I was given. Natural selection is a real thing. If
(09:45):
you don't do it, then they should have selected somebody else.
So I knew I had to play. I knew I
was gonna play at a high level. And it wasn't
a question of did I love football or not? That
really didn't mean anything. Whether I love it or not
really had nothing to do with the equation. I knew
I had to play, and I knew I knew I
was gonna play at high level because I was as
different to everybody else, at least in my neighborhood. And
(10:06):
I'm from Florida, where a lot of people are like this.
He started his college career at Michigan, transferred to Clemson
in turn Pro. After his junior season, the Denver Broncos
took him in the first round of the nineteen ninety
seven draft, a few hours after the Ravens took Peter Bullware.
Trevor went number twenty eight overall, and he was an
immediate hit. In nineteen ninety eight, his second season, he
(10:29):
had eight and a half sacks and the Broncos won
the Super Bowl. A year later, he had thirteen and
a half sacks and the Broncos won another Super Bowl.
That year, he made All Pro and began to run
of four straight Pro Bowl appearances. Nice early career. Huh,
Trevor was big, fast, dominant. Fans cheered for him. The
(10:50):
sports world marvel at him, But there was another side
to him that the public didn't see and knew little about.
With me, it was always had a creative spirit about me.
The football was good for natural selection, you know what
I mean, So you kind of like you kind of
have to do it. But the creative stuff everybody knew.
(11:10):
I made music, and I ran a record company and whatnot,
and then I started writing and storytelling has always been
something natural for me. One question I've asked all the
former Ravens for this podcast is at what point in
your career did you start thinking about life after football,
what you might want to do. If you've listened, you
know the answer. Some started thinking about it when they
(11:32):
were still playing. Some didn't think about it at all.
Trevor is in his own category. He was immersed in
the entertainment business long before his football career ended. Being
an athlete, when you have an offseason, you have a
chance you're wealthy, you know what I mean, and you
have a chance to explore every facet of your mind
(11:55):
four five to six months and then you go back
to work. I remember Neil Smith told me a long
time ago, or play for the Chiefs Hall of should
be in the Hall of Fame. He said, don't burn
the candle on both ends. When you're playing football. You
play football. When you're doing the other thing, do another thing,
he said. Never tried to do both at the same time.
So my life rotated in six month turns. He started
out making music, then he started a record company. During
(12:18):
the summer, I'd put out stuff and see what worked.
The problem is, my taste is pretty unique in that sense.
I was signing punk bands because I love that stuff.
I realized very quickly, if you're gonna sign a rapper,
if you're gonna try to put out a rap record,
it'd better be good or you will be laughed at
(12:39):
very quickly. And I signed a band called Daphine Loves
Derby that actually did okay. I put out a record
for Brian Lacrosse. I. At the same time, me and
these guys that I kind of met in Denver, we
started the first music download service. It was called Beatport.
It was right before Apple. I mean, they came to
me and said, hey, you want to be a part
of this thing where we're going to sell digital downloads
(13:01):
of dance music. And I was like, that's not gonna work.
So I became partners an ad agency as well, and
so you kind of started doing random stuff. My life
has always been a series of saying yes to every question.
I'm asked, Hey, do you want to go to Yes?
Do you want to go meet? Yep? Do you want
to go try to? Yep? And you wind up in
(13:21):
these weird circles, and you wind up seeing things and
doing stuff. Of all the stuff he experienced, he felt
most at home as a writer. That's not easy when
you're a family man, which he was by then married
with three young kids. Finding time to write was a challenge.
One of my most grave time was Saturday night before
the games, because I got out the house. You know,
(13:42):
you go to the hotel and buy yourself and just
kind of like jot stuff down and whatnot. Again, when
it was trying to go to practice, I was a
football player. I wasn't a writer who could play football.
I was a football player. But when it gained time
to go write, I was on a football player who wrote.
I was a writer or a creator. After nine years
(14:03):
with the Broncos, he became a free agent and signed
with the Ravens in two thousand and six. It was
a marquee signing a big deal that year. He started
on a defense with unbelievable star power Ray Lewis, ed Reid, Terrell, Suggs, Hellodi, Nada.
Baltimore went thirteen and three before losing to the Colts
in the playoffs. Trevor had thirteen sacks. Rex Ryan was
(14:27):
the defensive coordinator. Brian Billock was the head coach. I
spoke to Brian, do you have any good Trevor Prize stories?
Trevor was one of those guys that had a lot
bigger world than football. Was a guy that was a
brilliant performer, but in a little bit different way. He
was a bit of a renaissance man and kind of
(14:48):
was going to do things his way. Came to us
as a veteran, and I was very much wanted to embrace. Okay,
so you're not gonna lift your defensive You're not gonna
lift and you're just gonna do this jump rope routine. Okay,
well let's see how that works. And he was able
to deliver on it. So, uh yeah, they're definitely a
different a different type in the NFL. Do you know
what he's doing. I cannot. He's either writing children's books
(15:11):
or he's doing some kind of movie deal or all
of the above. Yeah, he wrote a children's book about
superhero frogs that in Australia. Yeah, Netflix picked it up.
I want you to think about this, and this is
just this is one of the things I love about
the game. Imagine that defensive line room and the conversations
between guys like Tony Saragosa and Sam Adams and Trevor
(15:34):
Price and Michael Bulware and Michael McCrary. I think Terrell
was with us. That's a very eclectic room. Can you
imagine those conversations, Terrell going, bro, man, what Yeah, it's
a frog? What does this frog do? Man? I mean,
that had to be an interesting room. Throw in Ryan
on top of it as their coach because probably you know, yeah, yeah,
(15:56):
I should have spent more time there just listening to
those conversations. Trevor played for the Ravens, drew the two
thousand and nine season and into two and ten. That
ended up being his last year in the NFL. He
was thirty five and still playing pretty well, but he'd
had enough. Patriots try to sign me out of retirement,
(16:19):
and the and the Raiders try to sign The Raiders
brought me off for a workout the pages about workout,
and I was like, I can't. Like they were like, hey,
you're playing Sunday. I was like, no, I'm not, and
I left. I left both facilities. I was supposed to
play that Sunday out of retirement, and I was It's
not the football, It is the grind. Anybody would tell you.
Raylwis tell you, Ed will tell you. If I could
(16:39):
show up on Monday and Sunday, I could. I could
play till I was fifty. But you have to practice
on Wednesday. And it's not even the practice. The practice
is kind of quite fine, but it's a sitting around
and the watching of the film and just I don't
want to be here right now, and I get off
your feet. So that's why I retired. I didn't retire
because I couldn't. I refuse to go to practice during
(17:04):
the week, and you kind of have to go. When
he was done, he wrote for The New York Times
some blog posts about football, a wonderful essay about how
much he missed playing. His pieces are all archived online.
You can find them. As personable as he was at
transition into broadcasting seemed inevitable, and he dabbled in it,
(17:25):
but he didn't think he was very good at it,
And besides, ESPN wanted him for football commentary, and Trevor
being Trevor, he wanted to cover tennis. It wasn't entirely
clear what he would do until the idea for Coola
Pari suddenly appeared in his head one day while he
was watching television. I remembered to the day it appeared
in my old house in Denver. I was watching Planet
(17:48):
Earth on BBC, and I was fascinated by it because
it was high deaf in his first time that type
of thing had been made. It was almost shook me
to the core a little bit. It was so great, right,
But it was a shot where a tree frog had
jumped from tree to tree, and they shoot it in
such high frame rate. It shot out like three hundred
frames a second. So when you take a frog in it,
that thing leaps like a tree frog leaps real fast,
(18:11):
and you slow it down in a way and tilt
the camera way, it looks like Superman. And I was like, well,
that's interesting. But at that time I was already kind
of in Hollywood. I was already writing stuff and selling projects.
So I saw that, and I was like, I'm going
to do an animated show about frogs. Any writer kind
of worth this salt will tell you once you get that, Colonel.
(18:33):
The rest of it kind of happens real quickly. Once
I said frogs, then I said frogs and scorpions. Then
I said frogs and scorpions in Australia, And it just
happened like almost like overnight. And I remember that saying
that date. I was like, I have something here that's
going to resonate for a long time. How he got
Coola Pari from his mind to Netflix is a long
and winding tale, a Hollywood tale. He wrote a treatment
(18:57):
which is a version of what he had in mind.
Car two network wanted him to make it into a show.
A book agent wanted him to make it into books.
Things didn't work out with the cartoon network, but the
books were published a trilogy, and meanwhile he started making
the show himself, putting his own money into it. Some
people in Hollywood thought he was nuts. Well, I find
(19:17):
an animation company because I didn't know how an enemy
and I can't even draw. I find an animation company.
We started working on. I was like, I'm gonna green
light it, make it myself. We started making the show
and then we went out and pitched it. We pitched
it to three companies. Netflix was one of them. As
we walked in, the guy was like, I've read these
I know what these are. It's a good feeling. I
was like, okay, and I think his son Dad told
(19:39):
him Dad make this, so they so he made it.
Needless to say, partnering with Netflix was a major coup,
good for business, but the marriage had issues. It became
painfully obvious that once you're on Netflix, it can be
a kiss of death. It's a gift and a curse
because you're it's been seen around the world. But then
(20:00):
you talk to Disney about it and they're like, well,
you're on Netflix. We don't right, we don't want that,
you know what I mean. You've been seeing her like
this has been exposed around the world, right, And then
you go back to Netflix and you're like, Okay, do
you want to make a third one? Yes, I'll make
a third one, but our terms. And I'm like, well
that's not a thing, right, what are my terms? So
I decided to start my own animation studio because you
(20:23):
wind up not really controlling it. Even though I wrote
the scripts and I approve everything, you ship it all
to Canada and then the Canadian animation companies send you back,
so you wind up getting what you get and you're
just like, if I was standing there, this wouldn't look
like this. The second season is really good. It's really
better than the first, I think, because it has more
(20:44):
of my sense of violence in it. Not violence, my
sense of dread, like the Game of Thrones thing. I
don't watch Game of Thrones, but a lot of people
when the first season came out, they called a Game
of Thrones for kids. Because I do things to characters
and I supposed to do in a cartoon, and people
are less, like why would you That's one of our
favorite characters. I'm like, well, I'll make up another one,
you know what I mean. So I decided to do
(21:06):
it myself. The other thing I decided to do was
I was going to direct, because I didn't direct any
of the animated episodes on Netflix. I didn't direct them
all because I was not in la whether being made.
I was here. I was writing it and sending it
back instead of being there in the studio every day
and saying, no, move that character here. To do that,
I decided I was going to direct the live action reboot.
(21:27):
So we opened up a performance capture studio, a motion
capture studio on Falls Road, and I'm directing now actors
wearing motion capture suits that we slap onto the frogs
and out the frogs move as people. It is rocket science.
That is rocket science, very much. Though. The Coula Party
movie will be out in twenty twenty one, And as
(21:48):
Trevor explained to me, what's special about doing it this
way is he owns not only the Cooler Party franchise,
but also the process by which the movie is being made.
He had control, and he's doing big things with that control.
My original intention was to capture the actors, hear their bodies,
and then replace their voices with Hollywood actors. So like
(22:12):
Mark Hanaima, Luke Skywalkers and Cola Parties, he did four
voices in both seasons. But the local actors were so good,
like theater actors were so good, I'm not replacing them.
So I'm casting a movie, a worldwide feature film, I'm
shooting it with local DMV actors and actresses. Here the
(22:35):
end of our conversation, I asked Trevor football was ever
on his mind. Funny enough, it is every so often.
It is because Hollywood is really weird. I tell people
at the time, I said, here's the way football works.
If you're a quarterback and you can't throw the tan
yard out, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers aren't going to buy
two back next year to see if you know how
(22:55):
to do it, get one shot. You know what I mean.
So I give a lot of football analogies of people.
He readily acknowledges that his football career helped him in
Hollywood and continues to help him. Every president of every
student of Hollywood wants to talk to the football player.
So I could walk in any room I wanted. If
you're an executive at a Warner or something like that,
(23:17):
there's there's a billion writers and they're all good. They
don't get excited unless you've done something interesting. Unless you've
either made a movie, or you're a rocket scientist, or
you're a brain surgeon, or you're a football player. We
have something interesting to say. Do you love what you're doing? Yeah?
I do? It is Uh is this better than football? Um?
(23:39):
It's different. It's not not better. Nothing's better or worse
it's better. There's days it's worse. There's days is better. Um,
I don't sleep a lot at night anymore. Like last
night was like the first time I've gotten like seven
hours of sleep in a long time. It's not better
or worse, it's completely it's a completely different set of muscles.
When he isn't working on Kolapari, rooting investors or hiring
(24:01):
more animators, he's busy with his family. One of his
daughters is a sophomore at Cornell, a nationally ranked tennis player.
Another daughter is headed to the University of Washington to
play soccer. His youngest child and only son, is a
natural all around athlete. It's already hitting a baseball out
of sight. My kids are athletes, and that kind of
(24:23):
comes first. I go to Travis football practices. My daughter
plays on a club team that I practice from eight
thirty to ten. I miss none of that stuff, the
athletic parts of me and my family. That's what paid
the bills. So therefore that is what drives us. I
drive my kids nuts, and i'm I'm My oldest daughter
(24:43):
is tennis coach, and we go watch a play at
Cornell and a yell atter and the phone and sports
sports his life in my house. But nothing keeps him
busier than running a studio. I don't have time to
buy a new car. I don't have like be very
careful what you ask for. I was like, I'm a
sort of animation studio and I'm there at six am
(25:04):
and don't come up to twelve. It's like being John Harball,
like you're there all day and all night. And I've
learned a lot about people over the last ten months,
like last year, people and how running a business works.
And as we grow and we keep like I hire
two more people today. The constant churn and the grind,
and everybody works on the weekends and I don't ask
(25:26):
them to work just we have crap to do. I'm
trying to make a good example for everybody. I'm kind
of like everybody's uncle, and I'm like, look, I'm an
old man with gray and my beard. I know what
I'm talking about. You know what I mean. So that's
no work around here, doesn't really or you can say
I made a TV show, have you. Trevor is a
(25:50):
very busy guy. I'd like to thank you for coming
to the castle to speak to me. You can find
out more about his career at Baltimore Ravens dot com
slash What Happened That Guy? The final episode of this
first season of the podcast will drop in two weeks.
The subject is Tom Zibikowski. He's had some struggles after football.
(26:11):
I don't want to give everything away, but we had
a raw and honest conversation and he's back in the
boxing ring now. Anyway, I hope you'll listen This podcast
and The Lounge, the excellent weekly podcast from my colleagues
Rhyan Mink and Garrett Downing are part of the Baltimore
Ravens Podcast Network. You can search for that wherever you
(26:32):
get your podcast Baltimore Ravens Podcast Network and everything comes up.
This is John Eisenberg. I'll talk to you in two weeks.
Greetings and welcome to What Happened to That Guy? A
Ravens podcast about former players and life after football. I'm
your host, John Eisenberg. Through the first six episodes, you've
had no choice but to let me guide you through
the stories I've told. By that, I mean, you couldn't participate.
You couldn't actually see Peter Bullware working at the Christian
school he founded in Florida. You couldn't actually watch Chris
(00:27):
Carr defend a client an immigration court. Well that changes
with this episode. My subject is Trevor Price, the hulking
defensive lineman who spent five years with the Ravens near
the end of his honestly very underrated fourteen year NFL career.
What's he doing now? Well, I'm going to tell you,
(00:47):
and it's something. But this time you don't have to
rely on me. You can check out what he's doing yourself.
All you need is a Netflix subscription. Just log on
and type the word coop Lapari in the search field.
I'll spell it out for you k U l I
p A r I. When the results come up, you'll
(01:11):
see two animated shows, Kulapari An Army of Frogs and
Kulapari dream Walker. It's two seasons worth the shows about
ready superhero frogs battling evil scorpions in the Australian Outback.
All told, It's eighteen episodes, about twenty two minutes each,
(01:34):
so more than six hours of war and peace, love
and loss, Frogs and Scorpions, Game of Thrones for kids.
Some people call it it was an age of war.
The frog tribes were driven back into the amphibolands by
(01:55):
the crushing attacks of the scorpions. The veil still protects
us for now. Nobody's born a hero, a little warrior.
But you can do anything if you try hard enough.
It's time for battle. Not fancy must marry. We don't
need warriors, Darrel. The veil keeps us safe. The cooler
(02:16):
Pari dive to keep us safe. Only the son of
a fallen cooler Pari thinks our world still needs a warrior.
This is Trevor Price's life after football is Baby Coola Pari.
(02:40):
He dreamed it up. He wrote a trilogy of books.
He made the books into a TV show. He sold
a TV show to Netflix. Check out the credits that
run on screen at the start of each episode. Trevor
Price executive producer, Trevor Price creator. Yep, it's the same
Trevor Price who played fourteen years in the NFL, five
(03:04):
with the Ravens, earned two Super Bowl rings, played in
four Pro Bowls, piled up ninety three and a half
career sacks. That's right, ninety three and a half. That
puts him in the NFL's top fifty all time in sacks.
He was a great football player, and he's done a
ton of stuff in life besides played football. Put out
(03:26):
an album, run a record studio, back to music download service,
written books, written for The New York Times, created a
Netflix show. Now he's running a digital animation studio in Baltimore.
He's forty four years old. I considered a lot of
former Ravens as potential subjects for episodes of this podcast,
(03:48):
guys with great stories to tell, but I couldn't pass
up Trevor. Honestly, this episode should be titled what Hasn't
Happened to that guy? Trevor laughed at that idea when
we spoke suddenly at the under Armoured Performance Center in
Owings Mills. He lives in the Baltimore area with his family.
Out of all of former players. There's more than a
(04:08):
thousand now ex Ravens. There's tens of thousands of X
football players. Is anyone doing anyone else doing what you're doing? No,
not even you are. There's more lawyers, doctors, whatever, lots
of that. You know, I'm no firefighter, right, What do
you mean? You know what I'm saying. I like people
(04:28):
are doing more interesting things. No, I mean, once Netflix
picks it up, you've got broad You're getting I mean
broad around the world, around the world. We had to
deliver it in twenty two languages, so it's been seen
around the world like Japan loves it. Full disclosure, Trevor
(04:49):
is no longer doing the show for Netflix, a story
we'll get into. He's going down a different road with
Kola Party now. As I mentioned, he's opened his own
animation studio in Baltimore, o v f X Outlook Visual
Effects on the campus of MICAH the Maryland Institute College
of Art. He also recently opened a motion capture studio.
(05:12):
It's a large space where he puts live actors in
high tech suits, films them against special screens, and turns
the human action into animation. Amazing stuff. He's making a
full length Coola Pari movie basically as a DIY project
do it yourself, with help from the twenty or so
animators he has hired as full time employees in the
(05:34):
past year. It's a path that has recast Trevor as
a show business entrepreneur. He doesn't live in Hollywood, but
he's deeply immersed in the business transacted there, the business
of studios and agents and ideas and scripts and film
and television and animation. Trevor has made the leap from
football to that, and he was big time successful in
(05:57):
football and now he's big time successful in show business.
It's got serious plans for expanding the animation business in Baltimore.
I am saying to people that what we are building
is going to start an industry here from concrete that
doesn't exist. The best animators that come out of art
school are working at grow Up or they can't afford
(06:19):
to go to LA. So what's happening now is Disney
and Netflix are coming here. They're not coming to Maryland.
They're coming east. Whether or not they stop here is
kind of up to me, right If I can build
something big enough, they'll stop. But I know all those people,
so that's kind of my goal is to say, let
me try, let me see if I can build the
same thing that Vancouver has, or Toronto has, or Australia has,
(06:42):
or Nigeria is currently building. Nigeria has staked all of
their money on animation. The country's money on digital animation.
They're saying, we have nothing going on, but we have
computers and we have people that want to learn, so
they're training and you can look it up and army
of animators Nigeria and I'm like, well, Nigeria can do it,
(07:05):
and we can't do it in Maryland. That cut from
our conversation gives you an inkling of what it's like
to chat with Trevor. You start off talking about animation,
you end up talking about government investment in Nigeria. Chat
O'Donnell a Ravens production intern sat with us while we spoke,
checking the recording levels. Trevor couldn't quite believe snappy Ravens
(07:30):
production pull over. The chat was wearing the raven production
You have your own logo. When I was here, they
started getting into that kind of stuff and we're doing
like logo design for things. So they did like the
patches with the muscle for if you made the offseason
program and it was like like an emoji did they
found somewhere everything was so bad it was undesigned. You
(07:54):
could see it. The equipment managers did all the logos
and stuff like that. So I look at that, that
looks great, Tanya. I'm telling about Ed. The equipment guide
did all like, hey, we need a thing, and they'd
slap some low rez thing. You find a world change man.
I've interviewed people for a living for a long time,
and with most of them, I've learned you can pretty
much control the conversation. That is, you can guide it
(08:17):
where you wanted to go. But then there are the
people you can't control. They're smart, they're glib, they fly
off in different directions and you can't reel them back in.
When I asked Trevor about his experience in the music business,
he ended up telling me about a University of Michigan
football teammate who was playing center for the Wolverines but
(08:37):
also enrolled in med school. Then we were talking about
video and somehow we got onto whether Trevor could play
golf well enough to make the Senior Tour when he
turns fifty. He's had a million experiences, and he has
a million thoughts, a million ideas, and they all come
tumbling out in conversation. Sometimes it's almost like a car
radio on scan. When I told Ravens president Dick cass
(09:00):
that I was doing a podcast episode on Trevor, Dick said,
that is one smart guy right there, and that is
high praise. Believe me. It turns out they'd spoken on
the field before a recent Ravens game. Trevor was born
in New York and grew up in Florida, the Orlando area.
And when I say he grew up, I mean it literally.
He topped out at six feet six and close to
(09:22):
three hundred pounds, yet he was still nimble enough to
excel in track as a hurdler. Just a great athlete.
His take on his football career is he didn't choose
the sport so much as it chose him or we
I felt was if I did not play the game
at a very high level, I was wasting the gift
I was given. Natural selection is a real thing. If
(09:45):
you don't do it, then they should have selected somebody else.
So I knew I had to play. I knew I
was gonna play at a high level. And it wasn't
a question of did I love football or not? That
really didn't mean anything. Whether I love it or not
really had nothing to do with the equation. I knew
I had to play, and I knew I knew I
was gonna play at high level because I was as
different to everybody else, at least in my neighborhood. And
(10:06):
I'm from Florida, where a lot of people are like this.
He started his college career at Michigan, transferred to Clemson
in turn Pro. After his junior season, the Denver Broncos
took him in the first round of the nineteen ninety
seven draft, a few hours after the Ravens took Peter Bullware.
Trevor went number twenty eight overall, and he was an
immediate hit. In nineteen ninety eight, his second season, he
(10:29):
had eight and a half sacks and the Broncos won
the Super Bowl. A year later, he had thirteen and
a half sacks and the Broncos won another Super Bowl.
That year, he made All Pro and began to run
of four straight Pro Bowl appearances. Nice early career. Huh,
Trevor was big, fast, dominant. Fans cheered for him. The
(10:50):
sports world marvel at him, But there was another side
to him that the public didn't see and knew little about.
With me, it was always had a creative spirit about me.
The football was good for natural selection, you know what
I mean, So you kind of like you kind of
have to do it. But the creative stuff everybody knew.
(11:10):
I made music, and I ran a record company and whatnot,
and then I started writing and storytelling has always been
something natural for me. One question I've asked all the
former Ravens for this podcast is at what point in
your career did you start thinking about life after football,
what you might want to do. If you've listened, you
know the answer. Some started thinking about it when they
(11:32):
were still playing. Some didn't think about it at all.
Trevor is in his own category. He was immersed in
the entertainment business long before his football career ended. Being
an athlete, when you have an offseason, you have a
chance you're wealthy, you know what I mean, and you
have a chance to explore every facet of your mind
(11:55):
four five to six months and then you go back
to work. I remember Neil Smith told me a long
time ago, or play for the Chiefs Hall of should
be in the Hall of Fame. He said, don't burn
the candle on both ends. When you're playing football. You
play football. When you're doing the other thing, do another thing,
he said. Never tried to do both at the same time.
So my life rotated in six month turns. He started
out making music, then he started a record company. During
(12:18):
the summer, I'd put out stuff and see what worked.
The problem is, my taste is pretty unique in that sense.
I was signing punk bands because I love that stuff.
I realized very quickly, if you're gonna sign a rapper,
if you're gonna try to put out a rap record,
it'd better be good or you will be laughed at
(12:39):
very quickly. And I signed a band called Daphine Loves
Derby that actually did okay. I put out a record
for Brian Lacrosse. I. At the same time, me and
these guys that I kind of met in Denver, we
started the first music download service. It was called Beatport.
It was right before Apple. I mean, they came to
me and said, hey, you want to be a part
of this thing where we're going to sell digital downloads
(13:01):
of dance music. And I was like, that's not gonna work.
So I became partners an ad agency as well, and
so you kind of started doing random stuff. My life
has always been a series of saying yes to every question.
I'm asked, Hey, do you want to go to Yes?
Do you want to go meet? Yep? Do you want
to go try to? Yep? And you wind up in
(13:21):
these weird circles, and you wind up seeing things and
doing stuff. Of all the stuff he experienced, he felt
most at home as a writer. That's not easy when
you're a family man, which he was by then married
with three young kids. Finding time to write was a challenge.
One of my most grave time was Saturday night before
the games, because I got out the house. You know,
(13:42):
you go to the hotel and buy yourself and just
kind of like jot stuff down and whatnot. Again, when
it was trying to go to practice, I was a
football player. I wasn't a writer who could play football.
I was a football player. But when it gained time
to go write, I was on a football player who wrote.
I was a writer or a creator. After nine years
(14:03):
with the Broncos, he became a free agent and signed
with the Ravens in two thousand and six. It was
a marquee signing a big deal that year. He started
on a defense with unbelievable star power Ray Lewis, ed Reid, Terrell, Suggs, Hellodi, Nada.
Baltimore went thirteen and three before losing to the Colts
in the playoffs. Trevor had thirteen sacks. Rex Ryan was
(14:27):
the defensive coordinator. Brian Billock was the head coach. I
spoke to Brian, do you have any good Trevor Prize stories?
Trevor was one of those guys that had a lot
bigger world than football. Was a guy that was a
brilliant performer, but in a little bit different way. He
was a bit of a renaissance man and kind of
(14:48):
was going to do things his way. Came to us
as a veteran, and I was very much wanted to embrace. Okay,
so you're not gonna lift your defensive You're not gonna
lift and you're just gonna do this jump rope routine. Okay,
well let's see how that works. And he was able
to deliver on it. So, uh yeah, they're definitely a
different a different type in the NFL. Do you know
what he's doing. I cannot. He's either writing children's books
(15:11):
or he's doing some kind of movie deal or all
of the above. Yeah, he wrote a children's book about
superhero frogs that in Australia. Yeah, Netflix picked it up.
I want you to think about this, and this is
just this is one of the things I love about
the game. Imagine that defensive line room and the conversations
between guys like Tony Saragosa and Sam Adams and Trevor
(15:34):
Price and Michael Bulware and Michael McCrary. I think Terrell
was with us. That's a very eclectic room. Can you
imagine those conversations, Terrell going, bro, man, what Yeah, it's
a frog? What does this frog do? Man? I mean,
that had to be an interesting room. Throw in Ryan
on top of it as their coach because probably you know, yeah, yeah,
(15:56):
I should have spent more time there just listening to
those conversations. Trevor played for the Ravens, drew the two
thousand and nine season and into two and ten. That
ended up being his last year in the NFL. He
was thirty five and still playing pretty well, but he'd
had enough. Patriots try to sign me out of retirement,
(16:19):
and the and the Raiders try to sign The Raiders
brought me off for a workout the pages about workout,
and I was like, I can't. Like they were like, hey,
you're playing Sunday. I was like, no, I'm not, and
I left. I left both facilities. I was supposed to
play that Sunday out of retirement, and I was It's
not the football, It is the grind. Anybody would tell you.
Raylwis tell you, Ed will tell you. If I could
(16:39):
show up on Monday and Sunday, I could. I could
play till I was fifty. But you have to practice
on Wednesday. And it's not even the practice. The practice
is kind of quite fine, but it's a sitting around
and the watching of the film and just I don't
want to be here right now, and I get off
your feet. So that's why I retired. I didn't retire
because I couldn't. I refuse to go to practice during
(17:04):
the week, and you kind of have to go. When
he was done, he wrote for The New York Times
some blog posts about football, a wonderful essay about how
much he missed playing. His pieces are all archived online.
You can find them. As personable as he was at
transition into broadcasting seemed inevitable, and he dabbled in it,
(17:25):
but he didn't think he was very good at it,
And besides, ESPN wanted him for football commentary, and Trevor
being Trevor, he wanted to cover tennis. It wasn't entirely
clear what he would do until the idea for Coola
Pari suddenly appeared in his head one day while he
was watching television. I remembered to the day it appeared
in my old house in Denver. I was watching Planet
(17:48):
Earth on BBC, and I was fascinated by it because
it was high deaf in his first time that type
of thing had been made. It was almost shook me
to the core a little bit. It was so great, right,
But it was a shot where a tree frog had
jumped from tree to tree, and they shoot it in
such high frame rate. It shot out like three hundred
frames a second. So when you take a frog in it,
that thing leaps like a tree frog leaps real fast,
(18:11):
and you slow it down in a way and tilt
the camera way, it looks like Superman. And I was like, well,
that's interesting. But at that time I was already kind
of in Hollywood. I was already writing stuff and selling projects.
So I saw that, and I was like, I'm going
to do an animated show about frogs. Any writer kind
of worth this salt will tell you once you get that, Colonel.
(18:33):
The rest of it kind of happens real quickly. Once
I said frogs, then I said frogs and scorpions. Then
I said frogs and scorpions in Australia, And it just
happened like almost like overnight. And I remember that saying
that date. I was like, I have something here that's
going to resonate for a long time. How he got
Coola Pari from his mind to Netflix is a long
and winding tale, a Hollywood tale. He wrote a treatment
(18:57):
which is a version of what he had in mind.
Car two network wanted him to make it into a show.
A book agent wanted him to make it into books.
Things didn't work out with the cartoon network, but the
books were published a trilogy, and meanwhile he started making
the show himself, putting his own money into it. Some
people in Hollywood thought he was nuts. Well, I find
(19:17):
an animation company because I didn't know how an enemy
and I can't even draw. I find an animation company.
We started working on. I was like, I'm gonna green
light it, make it myself. We started making the show
and then we went out and pitched it. We pitched
it to three companies. Netflix was one of them. As
we walked in, the guy was like, I've read these
I know what these are. It's a good feeling. I
was like, okay, and I think his son Dad told
(19:39):
him Dad make this, so they so he made it.
Needless to say, partnering with Netflix was a major coup,
good for business, but the marriage had issues. It became
painfully obvious that once you're on Netflix, it can be
a kiss of death. It's a gift and a curse
because you're it's been seen around the world. But then
(20:00):
you talk to Disney about it and they're like, well,
you're on Netflix. We don't right, we don't want that,
you know what I mean. You've been seeing her like
this has been exposed around the world, right, And then
you go back to Netflix and you're like, Okay, do
you want to make a third one? Yes, I'll make
a third one, but our terms. And I'm like, well
that's not a thing, right, what are my terms? So
I decided to start my own animation studio because you
(20:23):
wind up not really controlling it. Even though I wrote
the scripts and I approve everything, you ship it all
to Canada and then the Canadian animation companies send you back,
so you wind up getting what you get and you're
just like, if I was standing there, this wouldn't look
like this. The second season is really good. It's really
better than the first, I think, because it has more
(20:44):
of my sense of violence in it. Not violence, my
sense of dread, like the Game of Thrones thing. I
don't watch Game of Thrones, but a lot of people
when the first season came out, they called a Game
of Thrones for kids. Because I do things to characters
and I supposed to do in a cartoon, and people
are less, like why would you That's one of our
favorite characters. I'm like, well, I'll make up another one,
you know what I mean. So I decided to do
(21:06):
it myself. The other thing I decided to do was
I was going to direct, because I didn't direct any
of the animated episodes on Netflix. I didn't direct them
all because I was not in la whether being made.
I was here. I was writing it and sending it
back instead of being there in the studio every day
and saying, no, move that character here. To do that,
I decided I was going to direct the live action reboot.
(21:27):
So we opened up a performance capture studio, a motion
capture studio on Falls Road, and I'm directing now actors
wearing motion capture suits that we slap onto the frogs
and out the frogs move as people. It is rocket science.
That is rocket science, very much. Though. The Coula Party
movie will be out in twenty twenty one, And as
(21:48):
Trevor explained to me, what's special about doing it this
way is he owns not only the Cooler Party franchise,
but also the process by which the movie is being made.
He had control, and he's doing big things with that control.
My original intention was to capture the actors, hear their bodies,
and then replace their voices with Hollywood actors. So like
(22:12):
Mark Hanaima, Luke Skywalkers and Cola Parties, he did four
voices in both seasons. But the local actors were so good,
like theater actors were so good, I'm not replacing them.
So I'm casting a movie, a worldwide feature film, I'm
shooting it with local DMV actors and actresses. Here the
(22:35):
end of our conversation, I asked Trevor football was ever
on his mind. Funny enough, it is every so often.
It is because Hollywood is really weird. I tell people
at the time, I said, here's the way football works.
If you're a quarterback and you can't throw the tan
yard out, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers aren't going to buy
two back next year to see if you know how
(22:55):
to do it, get one shot. You know what I mean.
So I give a lot of football analogies of people.
He readily acknowledges that his football career helped him in
Hollywood and continues to help him. Every president of every
student of Hollywood wants to talk to the football player.
So I could walk in any room I wanted. If
you're an executive at a Warner or something like that,
(23:17):
there's there's a billion writers and they're all good. They
don't get excited unless you've done something interesting. Unless you've
either made a movie, or you're a rocket scientist, or
you're a brain surgeon, or you're a football player. We
have something interesting to say. Do you love what you're doing? Yeah?
I do? It is Uh is this better than football? Um?
(23:39):
It's different. It's not not better. Nothing's better or worse
it's better. There's days it's worse. There's days is better. Um,
I don't sleep a lot at night anymore. Like last
night was like the first time I've gotten like seven
hours of sleep in a long time. It's not better
or worse, it's completely it's a completely different set of muscles.
When he isn't working on Kolapari, rooting investors or hiring
(24:01):
more animators, he's busy with his family. One of his
daughters is a sophomore at Cornell, a nationally ranked tennis player.
Another daughter is headed to the University of Washington to
play soccer. His youngest child and only son, is a
natural all around athlete. It's already hitting a baseball out
of sight. My kids are athletes, and that kind of
(24:23):
comes first. I go to Travis football practices. My daughter
plays on a club team that I practice from eight
thirty to ten. I miss none of that stuff, the
athletic parts of me and my family. That's what paid
the bills. So therefore that is what drives us. I
drive my kids nuts, and i'm I'm My oldest daughter
(24:43):
is tennis coach, and we go watch a play at
Cornell and a yell atter and the phone and sports
sports his life in my house. But nothing keeps him
busier than running a studio. I don't have time to
buy a new car. I don't have like be very
careful what you ask for. I was like, I'm a
sort of animation studio and I'm there at six am
(25:04):
and don't come up to twelve. It's like being John Harball,
like you're there all day and all night. And I've
learned a lot about people over the last ten months,
like last year, people and how running a business works.
And as we grow and we keep like I hire
two more people today. The constant churn and the grind,
and everybody works on the weekends and I don't ask
(25:26):
them to work just we have crap to do. I'm
trying to make a good example for everybody. I'm kind
of like everybody's uncle, and I'm like, look, I'm an
old man with gray and my beard. I know what
I'm talking about. You know what I mean. So that's
no work around here, doesn't really or you can say
I made a TV show, have you. Trevor is a
(25:50):
very busy guy. I'd like to thank you for coming
to the castle to speak to me. You can find
out more about his career at Baltimore Ravens dot com
slash What Happened That Guy? The final episode of this
first season of the podcast will drop in two weeks.
The subject is Tom Zibikowski. He's had some struggles after football.
(26:11):
I don't want to give everything away, but we had
a raw and honest conversation and he's back in the
boxing ring now. Anyway, I hope you'll listen This podcast
and The Lounge, the excellent weekly podcast from my colleagues
Rhyan Mink and Garrett Downing are part of the Baltimore
Ravens Podcast Network. You can search for that wherever you
(26:32):
get your podcast Baltimore Ravens Podcast Network and everything comes up.
This is John Eisenberg. I'll talk to you in two weeks.
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