From Provo to Hollywood: How BYU produces some of America’s biggest animators
PROVO, Utah (ABC4) — If you’ve seen any major animated movies or TV shows in recent years, it’s likely that Utah hands helped make it possible.
That’s because for the last two decades, the Center for Animation at Brigham Young University has been producing talented animators who often make it in Hollywood. ABC4.com got an inside look of the center and how students created the short film “Student Accomplice.”
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Laughter filled a small theater at BYU’s Center for Animation as a group of students watched some of their work come to life on the screen.
“With animation, sometimes, you’ll have teams of hundreds of people,” Spencer Baird told ABC4.com. “In our case, it was 30 people — but it was really, really cool to collaborate with a big group of artists and have all their different ideas and try to create a unified thing together.”
Baird directed the latest short film to come out of the center. He explained that the team collaborated for about a year and a half to produce “Student Accomplice.”
The five-minute short packs a punch as a nervous teen driver and her instructor find themselves in a sticky situation. Baird added: “A bank robber runs in and hijacks their car. She has to get rid of the bank robber and also complete her driving test.”
The film is bound to rob viewers of a chuckle, which Baird said is the goal.
“For me, most of what we’re trying to do is make people laugh,” he stated, emphasizing the team’s goal.
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To bring a smile to the viewers’ faces, the team basically had to build a whole new world — something that hadn’t been done in any of the short films that came before “Student Accomplice.”
“It was challenging because it was so big,” Baird recalled. “The scope was just so crazy. It’s the largest set I think we’ve ever built here at BYU. We had a whole city. That was five different streets. To put that into perspective, the last film that we made, ‘The Witch’s Cat,’ was a single room.”
Along with the sheer size of the set, Baird told ABC4.com that elements like hair and clothing added to the challenges of animating people. While he said there are a few of those extra little elements he would leave out if he could do it again, the end result was worth the hassle.
“It’s a lot prettier than I thought it would be, which is really cool,” Baird said.
With production complete, the team is awaiting some big news: They are hoping to be the latest student Emmy winners — an accomplishment not uncommon for artists in the program. For instance, “The Witch’s Cat” recently won a student Emmy.
“We were all holding hands,” Jessica Fink Blaire said as she recounted the night her team won the award. “And then they said the name. They said, ‘The Wi…’ and then we all screamed, ‘Oh, my gosh!’ and then they’re like, ‘The Witches Cat.’ We all get up, and the whole team is onstage. It was such a magical night.”
Jessica Fink Blaire was the producer for “The Witch’s Cat.” Like “Student Accomplice,” it has a strong, even magical, storyline. The star of the film? A strange-looking cat that hates the man who his witch owner is dating.
“The cat is like trying to sabotage the proposal and doing everything he can to make sure it doesn’t happen,” explained Fink Blaire. “Then he sees the witch and how broken hearted that makes her. He’s like, ‘I love her, I don’t love him, but I have to accept him because I love her.’”
Even though the film is only five minutes long, it’s full of humor and heart-warming moments that are sure to leave viewers spellbound. Fink Blaire told ABC4.com that part of the reason the team was so successful in creating a film that captures the audience’s attention is because professors are hands-off during production.
“The scariest thing is that you don’t know what you don’t know,” Fink Blaire stated. “You’ve been taught by the teachers how to do each specific step and now it’s putting it all together and doing it in a big group, and getting everyone on the same page, and getting everyone to finish all their stuff before the next person needs to do their thing, and you don’t realize how long and time consuming each step is until you do it.”
That hands-off approach appears to be working.
“We have a lot of people, hundreds of people, out in the motion picture industry and in TV having very successful careers,” said Kelly Loosli. He is the director of the center and helped co-found the animation program two decades ago.
Watching his current students build a world is proof that the program is producing talented animators.
However, as his current students work on their projects, other proof of success hangs over their heads — literally. Dozens of movie posters hang on the walls above them. These posters are all signed by alumni who helped bring some iconic characters to life.
One of those characters has a special display in the hallway. Loosli explained, “So, Po we have here in our lobby because Jason Turner, who was the head of modeling on the ‘Kung Fu Panda’ movies, is a BYU graduate and taught a modeling class for us back in the day.”
While Loosli’s methods clearly help artists excel in their future animation careers, he is humble and believes the program is successful because of the students it attracts.
“I think Hollywood was shocked that we had really great talent here,” Loosli stated. “I think beyond just BYU, the other schools have amazing talent as well, so there’s just a lot of really creative, talented people here and I think LA is taking notice of that.”
Some of his students, like Spencer Baird, have their sights set on Tinsel Town.
“My mission is to direct, but for the next 10 years I’d like to just work on a project and not be in charge of it,” Baird said. “Just be given an assignment and kill that assignment.”
And others, like former student Jessica Fink Blaire, have their skills broadcast on a smaller screen.
“I’m working at a startup called Continuum XR and we make [virtual reality] games. They’re multiplayer social VR games,” Fink Blaire told ABC4.com. “One of our games right now is called Monkey Doo. You play a monkey in VR and you throw poop at other monkeys. It’s all 12-year-old boys. They just get on and play and love it.”
Whether their work is shown on the silver screen, the TV screen, or the VR screen, it’s clear these students are the future of American animation.
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