For Disney’s Brendan Gottlieb, the showcase director and a program mentor, helping students push their artistic capabilities, especially since they’re focused on character performance typically without lighting, sound, or even clothes, means getting a team together to give each project the ‘feature treatment’ and bring its story to life.
Animation Mentor’s 2023 Student Showcase, the 17th such curated program from one of the leading online animation schools, features work from 18 students across 11 countries. With 19 projects showcased in total, the animation shorts range from dialogue and pantomime to body mechanics and creature animation.
“We have a very wide range of styles in this year’s showcase, from hyper-realistic to cartoony and everything in between,” says showcase director Brendan Gottlieb. “The artists tasked with bringing these projects to life really brought their A-game.”
Take a few minutes to enjoy this year’s showcase:
Having served as a Disney animator for the last six years on films like Raya and the Last Dragon, Frozen 2, and the 100th anniversary’s celebratory Once Upon a Studio, Gottlieb has also mentored for the past four years at Animation Mentor’s online school, which has hosted mentors from Disney, Pixar, Industrial Light & Magic, and many other major studios since it was founded in 2005. And this is Gottlieb’s second year as showcase director.
“The student showcase is designed to show the best student work that was done through the Animation Mentor (AM) program this past year,” explains Gottlieb. “We picked the top projects, and I compiled them into one short video that is now the 2023 Animation Mentor Student Showcase. Given that the students are focused on just animating character movement and performance, these projects don’t get the same treatment that an animated feature would. These student projects typically have no environment, no set lighting, or sound effects, and the digital characters are often left performing without hair or clothes!”
Thus, it was Gottlieb’s role to direct a team of professional artists to give each of these animated projects the “feature treatment” and bring them to life to support the short story that each was trying to tell.
“I gave weekly feedback to the artists to help them stay with the vision of the project and also push the limit of their own artistic abilities,” he shares. “I was also tasked with editing the entire showcase together, along with creating the opening sequence of titles and the credits. It was my job to make this showcase as entertaining and appealing as possible to get people excited about learning animation and honor the students’ hard work.”
The year’s showcase features a new type of animated shot: a character on Zoom call; it’s rather appropriate given how times have changed because of the global COVID pandemic. “The shot composition puts the viewer on the other end of the call with this character,” notes Gottlieb. “I’ve never seen that in our showcases.”
He continues, “Most animated shots are aiming for a typical Disney or Pixar style, but one is rendered to look like it’s hand-painted, another is rendered to look like it’s stop-motion, and several projects feature characters in real-world environments like a live-action movie.”
Many of Animation Mentor’s past showcase student participants have gone on to work on major studio projects such as Disney’s Elemental, Sony’s Spider-Verse, and a few Marvel projects. AM’s Student Showcase began back in 2006, and all the compilations are available on the school’s website. In going through the showcases, you don’t just find a visual explanation of character body mechanics, weight, character arc, acting techniques, and emotive elements. The visual story of animation’s evolution is also present. As the years have gone by, animation tech has evolved, and the students’ work has evolved with it. Showcases that once featured hairless, clothesless, human models with minimal features and definition (even in the final showcase) now include pilot-ready characters with immense detail, down to the shimmer of their pupils.
First-level animation abilities have come a long way, and AM’s showcases provide tangible, year-by-year proof. Free Maya rigs have even become available on the AM website, here.
“The program and projects are always evolving thanks to technology, creating new opportunities to learn, teach, and create in different ways,” says AM’s Mentor Manager Cathleen Hylton. “We've updated the Animation Mentor platform, and we have expanded and updated the rigs available for our students to work with, allowing them to create stories in more worlds than before. We've added numerous workshops over the years and are always working to make this a better learning experience based on the feedback we get from mentors and students.”
But there are things that haven’t changed since 2005, like AM’s commitment to quality.
Hylton adds, “And that when students are using excellent animation skills to tell a story that connects with people – whether through humor, empathy, sadness, or any emotion – those are the shots that stand out and get featured.”
Victoria Davis is a full-time, freelance journalist and part-time Otaku with an affinity for all things anime. She's reported on numerous stories from activist news to entertainment. Find more about her work at victoriadavisdepiction.com.
