Three students from the Savannah College of Art and Design – two still in school and one a recent graduate – have been nominated for the Television Academy Foundation’s 44th College Television Awards.
LJ Burnett (director/writer) and Morgan Eng (producer/writer) were nominated for their work on the animated short film “Times Flies,” while Erika Totoro (director/producer/writer) was nominated for her work on the short stop motion film “Le Charade.” “Time Flies” follows two flies struggling to make the most out of their respective 24-hour lifespans, and “Le Charade” is about an unemployed mime grappling with his future in a diner.
Both Eng and Burnett said they knew from a young age that they wanted to be artists. Eng was inspired to go into animation after watching behind-the-scenes footage of the making of “Frozen.” She went to SCAD to study animation but fell in love with producing while working on her senior film.
“I loved the logistics and the creative problem solving that comes with it [producing], and I absolutely love working with people,” Eng said. “It’s one of the reasons I love animation, because you get to collaborate with so many different people and learn how they work.”
Burnett originally went to SCAD for sequential art for comics, but after working with SCAD Animation Studios discovered a love for storyboarding.
For “Time Flies,” Eng and Burnett were part of a team of roughly 70 people who were given the challenge of creating a hand-drawn animation film in 30 weeks using Pantheon, an animation software created by a former SCAD student that enables 3D lighting effects on 2D animation. The group was made up of not just animation students, but those in graphic design, sequential art, illustration, and other departments.
“Part of what makes our group and SCAD Animation Studios unique from a lot of other student films, is that we didn’t start with just one person pitching a story and everyone coming on to that already written thing,” Burnett said. “We started from the bottom up with our whole team coming together and thinking, ‘What is the best thing we can do with this challenge that’s in front of us?’”
The brainstorming portion of the process yielded a lot of story ideas, many of which would have been too complicated to bring to the screen in the time allotted. There was talk of a group of bullfighters and cowboys taking a train to hell, and a Victorian supernatural murderer who jumped along rooftops. Nothing really seemed feasible for a three-minute film, but the bullfighter idea prompted another; a matador mayfly fighting a bullfrog, trying to make his mark in his short, 24-hour life span.
According to Burnett, everyone glommed onto the 24-hour idea – the idea of, “make the most of your time, or else.”
“We’re stressed art students, who are very familiar with deadlines, so that just kind of resonated immediately with us,” they said.
Eng said being nominated for the College Television Awards felt like much-needed recognition for the team’s work.
“We’re trying to make an impact in the industry by advancing 2D animation with Pantheon,” Eng said. “‘Time Flies’ ended up becoming a hybrid project, a 2D/CG hybrid project, so it wasn’t even just 2D animation. It was also just advancing the animation medium in general. To have the Academy recognize our efforts in that, it means so much.”
Totoro’s path to “Le Charade” unfolded a little bit differently. She’s always had a deep love for stop motion, a type of animation that creates the illusion of movement by taking a series of still images of figurines and playing them back in sequence. The objects in the scene are moved in between each frame. Her passion sparked from watching (and being frightened of) movies like “The Nightmare Before Christmas” as a child. She got the opportunity to meet Henry Selick, the director of “The Nightmare Before Christmas,” one year at the SCAD Savannah Film Festival, and told him how her fear of his film inadvertently spurred her to get into the industry.
“Hey, you know, you traumatized me a little bit, but something about that fear has inspired me to go into it professionally,” she joked.
For “Le Charade,” Totoro’s team was much smaller – eight students from the animation department plus a few more from other departments at SCAD. Also, “Le Charade” is not her first film about a mime – she made a live action mockumentary short while working at a film camp that first sparked the idea.
“The story really stuck with me, and I thought the character of a mime really was a perfect one-to-one for stop motion,” Totoro said.
The film has no dialogue, but by virtue of its subject, the main character is a dynamic one. According to Totoro, her team ended up creating 55 face replacements for the mime to give him his different facial expressions.
“That’s record breaking at our school,” she said. “No one really does many face changes at all in the stop motion department.”
Totoro said she is also excited for the upcoming awards, which are scheduled for April 5.
“For this to be the culmination for it at the end of the year, is like – oh my goodness,” Totoro said. “It’s just such an incredible honor.”
