From Sketch to Screen
CFA alums stretch the limits of animation and imagination

For Big Hero 6, Disney created San Fransokyo, the largest set piece ever made for an animated feature; itâs populated by hundreds of thousands of citizens. Photo courtesy of Disney
The man on the computer screen, buried to his shoulders in thick, white goo, strains to move. His shadow looms behind him, breaks apart, and melts into the distance as he slogs inexorably to the edge of the frame. Itâs an animated image, or GIF (Graphics Interchange Format), and the artist bringing him to life is Wendy Cong Zhao (CFAâ11, COMâ11), who achieves the illusion of strenuous movement in a series of 34 line drawings. In this and other GIFs she shares on her blog, the classically trained painter is beginning to experiment with animation.
This experimentation has led her to rethink how she creates art and the idea that a single artwork is the end goal. When studying fine art, she says, âwe work for a long time on one drawing or painting. Then, we hang it up and take a long time to study it.â In animation, however, the illusion of movement is achieved by connecting tens, hundreds, thousandsâhundreds of thousandsâof individual drawings. âWhen theyâre all moving together, each drawing is only seen for a split second. Each could be very good, but itâs not about that. On screen, you see the film as a whole.â
The illusion of movement has captivated audiences since the first animated film, J. Stuart Blacktonâs Enchanted Drawing (1900), which featured a tuxedoed man coaxing chalkboard drawings to life through stop-motion animation. From the costume to the staging, Blackton presented animation as a magic trick, and in the decades since, even as audiences and films have become more sophisticated, the spell holds.
âAnimation is one of the most magical art forms you can imagine,â says Roy Conli (CFAâ87), a producer for Walt Disney Animation Studios. And today, CFA alums like Conli and Zhao are the ones making the magic. From granting movement to line drawings to conjuring an entire city on screen, they are stretching the limits of animation and imagination.

For her indie feature film Rocks in My Pockets, animator Signe Baumane developed the story and created storyboardsâthumbnail sketches that illustrate the staging for each sceneâbefore she and Wendy Cong Zhao (CFAâ11, COMâ11) added color, vocals, music, movement, and effects. Courtesy of Wendy Cong Zhao and Signe Baumane
It starts with a story
Animator Signe Baumane had a story to tell. In her 2014 feature film Rocks in My Pockets, she traces her struggle with depression through the generations to her grandmother, who fell in love with a risk-taking entrepreneur prone to jealousy in 1920s Latvia. Baumane plunges into her story of fantasy and madness through stop-motion animation driven by a crisp voice-over.
âThe script was the blueprint,â says Zhao, who worked with Baumane as a colorist and then as a compositor and editor from 2011 to 2013. âSigne recorded the voice-over first. We had to cut it up a little bit, but the main structure remained unchanged.â With the story in place, Baumane developed storyboardsâthumbnail sketches that illustrate the staging for each sceneâand worked with a team of five assistants and interns to animate the piece. Although collaboration was vital to the process, Baumaneâs singular vision steered the story and the filmâs production.
Collaborative storytelling is central to the process at big studios like Pixar and Disney, where 12 directors each pitch a minimum of three ideas to the Story Trust, a team of the studioâs directors and chief creative officer. When the Story Trust considers which stories to pursue, says member Peter Del Vecho (CFAâ80), producer of Disneyâs Academy Awardâwinning film Frozen, âwe ask ourselves: What do we want to see next, as moviegoers?â
Once a film is green-lighted, the director, writer, and a team of 8 to 10 story artists spend two to three years developing the story. âEverybody will be in the room throwing out ideas,â says Pixar story artist Christian Roman (CFAâ91), who worked on Toy Story 3. âPeople will have pads of paper and do little gags that may or may not further the story, but will at least be a little funny moment.â
As they sketch from the working script, the story artists consider a variety of questions: âWhatâs the point of the scene? What do I want the audience to feel about it? How can I make this part of the story better?â says Roman. âA lot of creative freedom is given to the story artists to own their sequence.â
As the story develops, sketches-in-progress are compiled with vocal, music, and effects tracks to create an animatic, or animated storyboard, which is screened every 12 weeks for the studioâs entire team of directors and writers. âWe essentially tear it apart,â says Conli, producer of Disneyâs Academy Awardâwinning film Big Hero 6. âOften, 75 percent of it goes back into development, but the 25 percent that stays is going to be the core of the story you tell.â
Del Vecho points to the last scene of Frozen as an example of the efficacy of this process.

A Disney artist placed Frozenâs ending scene on a fjord and manifested Queen Elsaâs emotions as a storm. The clarity of the staging âgave us the impact of the scene we had hoped for,â says film producer Peter Del Vecho (CFAâ80). John Ripa, Walt Disney Feature Animation (top); courtesy of Walt Disney Feature Animation (bottom)
Loosely based on Hans Christian Andersenâs fairy tale The Snow Queen, Frozen is the story of Princess Annaâs epic quest to save her sister, Queen Elsa, who has suspended their kingdom in winter.
When Anna falls under a spell that begins to freeze her heart, only an act of true love can save her. âWe always knew we wanted to end the movie with the true love being between the sisters, but it wasnât very clear how to stage the ending to achieve the desired emotional impact,â Del Vecho says. The team finally agreed on an ending, but one artist had a different idea.
âHe went off for two weeks and sketched up a new ending and pitched it to us,â Del Vecho says. To achieve the compelling climax, the artist âfirst placed the scene out on the fjord, and second, had Elsaâs emotions manifest as a storm that makes it believable that everyone is close to each other, but cannot see each other until the right moment, when the storm suspendsâeasy in hindsight. It was the clarity of the staging that gave us the impact of the scene we had hoped for. We gave the artist a standing ovation.â
Building character
In tandem with developing a story through script work and sketching, the creative team collaborates to produce memorable characters, like Elsa from Frozen, Woody from Toy Storyâand the puffy white robot Baymax, who steals every scene in the Disney film Big Hero 6. An inflatable health care robot, Baymax is the brainchild of Tadashi, who dies in an accident, leaving a grief-stricken little brother, Hiro. Hiro stumbles across Baymax among his brotherâs belongings, and the robot sees the boyâs grief as a wound he must heal.
When developing Baymax, directors Don Hall and Chris Williams were aiming to create an original, a robot different from anything the audience would have seen before. They filled their story room with pictures of âliterally every robot that has ever been in a film,â says Conli. WALL-E, Robby the Robot, Gort from The Day the Earth Stood Stillââthe room was just plastered.â
âWe want to make sure we are dealing with themes and characters that resonate with audiences worldwide, and that means getting to the core fundamental values we all share.ââPeter Del Vecho
Hall and Williams visited the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. There they met researchers working in the field of soft robotics to develop a health care robot made of inflated vinyl that would tend gently to elderly patients. This project âsparked in Donâs mind the idea of a huggable robot,â Conli says. âThis was the beginning of Baymax, and the fact that he was a health care robot made total sense within the structure of our story.â
When the team had Baymaxâs shape, they drew out his personality through expressions and movement. âAnimators are essentially actors with computersâwe used to say âactors with pencils,ââ Conli says. âThey do a lot of research, as an actor does, exploring character.â Influenced by Japanese animation, the creative team traveled to Japan, where they stumbled upon a suzu bell at a Shinto shrine. It seemed to be smiling serenely at them, Conli says, and inspired Baymaxâs simple yet expressive features.
Finally, âwe recognized that we were going to want a super-appealing walk,â he says. The team watched videos to find the cutest walks in nature, which they determined were âa human baby in a diaper, a human baby in a loaded diaper, and a baby penguin. The baby penguin won.â They had found Baymaxâs distinctive waddle.
Lights, camera, action
Once the story works and the characters are waiting in the wings, itâs time to bring the film to life. The storyboard artists sketch each scene, complete with movement, lighting, and camera angles. âEvery little detail should support the direction of the story you want to tell,â Roman says. The storyboards then head to a production team that animates the story.
At Pixar, itâs about a two-year processâbeyond the two or three years it takes to develop a story. Modelers create the characters and backgrounds on the computer, then riggers add points of articulation to the models so they can be manipulated. The layout artists use the storyboards to develop rough blocking, placing the camera within the scenes and the characters in their key poses. The animators enrich the posing, camera movements, and character expressions, which are all coordinated with the actorsâ voice recordings. The lighting team then adds shading, textures, and reflections to the scenes.
âEvery step has people who are experts,â Roman says. âWe all work together. It is always an amazing bit of alchemy when everybody is firing on all cylinders.â All told, the process of bringing a single film like Toy Story 3, Frozen, and Big Hero 6 to the screen involves the work of anywhere from 350 to 800 people.
Story artist Christian Roman (CFAâ91) gives us a behind-the-scenes look at the Pixar animation process. Video by Taylor Toole
Although a small production like Rocks in My Pockets follows a similar process, Baumane did not have the budget for a big team. She drew characters on paper by hand and constructed backgrounds from papier-mâchÊ, painted wooden boards, and other materials. To achieve the illusion that the 2-D characters are moving through the 3-D sets, she created numerous drawings for each movement, all of which were colored, shaded, textured, and lit. In all, the film required 30,000 drawings.
Zhao worked with Baumane to bring the characters and their world together; she edited the scenes, digitally colored each one in Photoshop, composited them in Adobe After Effects, and edited the film.
She had to not only develop new technical skills, but employ the traditional skills she learned at CFA. âIt helped to have taken sculpture classes,â she says, âto know what it should look like when a character moves through space, especially if the background is moving, like if thereâs a pan or a zoom.â And the skills she developed as a painter enabled her to shade characters with the knowledge of how different light sources generate shadows.
âThe ability to draw well, compose, understand perspective and color theory, and so on, is key to working and creating animation,â Roman says. âThe computer doesnât compensate for a lack of creativity or artistic ability. It is simply a tool, like a brush or a pencil.â
âEvery once in awhile, you get to work on a film that takes on a life of its own,â Del Vecho says of the film that has inspired Halloween costumes, stuffed animals, jewelry, toys, stamps, sheetsâand more than 55 million YouTube videos of fans singing âLet It Go.â
He saw firsthand the continuing enchantment with Frozen during BUâs 2014 Alumni Weekend, when he took alums behind the scenes of the film. As he screened a clip, four little girls sitting at the back of the auditorium shot to their feet to sing along to âFor the First Time in Forever.â After the talk, Del Vecho opened the floor to questions, and he called on one of the movieâs littlest fans first. She asked, âHow does Elsa make snow come out of her hand?â
The producer expounded upon the animation techniques behind the characterâs dramatic talent, which Elsa perceives as a curse, and how her struggle to control the power ties into the filmâs theme: love, not fear.
This wasnât the answer the young girl was looking for. At the end of Del Vechoâs explanation, she asked, âBut how does she do it?â How does Elsa actually make magic?
The spell holds.
Lara Ehrlich can be reached at lehrlich@bu.edu.
A version of this story was originally published in the fall 2015 issue of Esprit.
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