Stephen Hillenburg  developed an interest in art and the ocean.
During this time, Hillenburg also started attending animation festivals such as the International Tourne of Animation and Spike and Mike's Festival of Animation, where student films from the California Institute of the Arts (colloquially called CalArts) were shown
 He described the latter as "a poetic animated film based on relativistic phenomena" in his grant proposal in 1991 to the Princess Grace Foundation, which assists emerging artists in American theater, dance, and film

