This article was written for the December '24 issue of Animation Magazine (No. 345).

The Student Academy Awards changed things up in more ways than one this year. The 2024 ceremony was held in London, far across the pond from the academy’s traditional Los Angeles home. But more significant is the global cast that the 2024 prizes reflect. Two of the three medals this year were earned by international students: The team from MoPA, located in Arles, France, was honored alongside a student from Tokyo’s Digital Hollywood University. Students from Brigham Young University in Salt Lake City, Utah, also took home a medal. Although past MoPA films have been honored by the academy — as have BYU winners — this is the first time a Japanese school won a spot on the podium.

That film, Origami, by Digital Hollywood University student Kei Kanamori, had already broken through this summer by becoming the first Japanese film in 16 years selected for the SIGGRAPH Electronic Theater. MoPA students also won the SIGGRAPH ET award for the short Apres Papi. So, the buzz was evident for these international students, and now the academy’s honors have underscored their achievements.

This year’s competition became a contest of thoroughbreds with the selection of Brigham Young University’s Student Accomplice from director Spencer Baird. The honor continues BYU’s notable track record at the Student Academy Awards, which includes an impressive seven prizes over the past 20 years.

Gold Medal: Au Revoir Mon Monde (Goodbye My World)

Directed by: Estelle Bonnardel, Florian Maurice, Quentin Devred, Baptise Duchamps, Maxime Foltzer, Astrid Novais
MoPA

Telling an epic end-of-the-world tale in five minutes isn’t easy, especially when your hero is a frantic guy stuck inside a fish costume. But that was the ambitious goal of six fifth-year animation students for their graduation film at MoPA in the south of France. Mixing physical comedy, apocalyptic visual effects and poignant characters was the challenge from the start.

Florian Maurice, who penned the plotline and spearheaded the storyboards, spoke for the student team. “I wanted to write something goofy, funky and strange, in opposition to the dramatic theme of the end of the world,” he explains. So, when a huge meteorite rains destruction across a high-rise city, we follow a hapless hero racing through the streets. His job at a sushi joint requires wearing a silly fish costume, which he struggles to ditch. “The purpose of the fish suit was comedy,” says Maurice. “As if facing the end of the world wasn’t already hard enough, he had to struggle with a ridiculous costume.”

That costume, studded with shards of flying glass, spared the students from having to animate the character’s terrified facial expressions while he ran breathlessly and dodged debris. “All of his emotions and expressivity had to be conveyed through his body language,” Maurice says. When the hero’s face is finally revealed at the end — in one last embrace with his girlfriend — it’s that much more poignant.

All this action plays out against nonstop visual effects of a city under siege. The students created a Close Encounters of the Third Kind moment to depict the massive scale of the destruction, and Maurice explains, “The cinematic storytelling of Steven Spielberg shaped our approach to the camerawork.”

He adds, “The R&D for the visual effects started early, because we knew they’d be very ambitious.” The team deployed a Maya-Houdini pipeline. All the cameras were keyframed and animated in Maya, while the VFX and explosions were handled with Houdini. They also employed Substance Painter, ZBrush, Nuke, DaVinci and PRISM. “The project took about 10 months, with six months dedicated to production,” Maurice explains.

The Student Academy Award for Au Revoir Mon Monde represents the fourth medal for MoPA’s animation program. Since the school was founded in 2000 to train students for the CG industry, it has enjoyed consistent success at industry competitions and film festivals worldwide. All six students planned to travel from Arles to London to celebrate this newest honor — though they likely won’t be wearing fish costumes.

Silver Medal: Origami

Directed by: Kei Kanamori
Digital Hollywood University (Japan)

If it’s true that an art form can change a person’s life, it’s especially true for Tokyo-based animator Kei Kanamori. At age six, Kanamori began practicing the classic Japanese paper-folding art of origami, and by 10 he was creating his own designs. He became interested in CG animation, he recalls, “Because I saw similarities between origami and 3D. When I first used 3D software, it felt like doing origami inside a computer.”

To make his graduation film at Tokyo’s Digital Hollywood University, Kanamori brought this venerated art to animated life with Origami, a two-and-a-half-minute visual meditation on color, form and movement. Plants and animals come alive and change shapes in swirls of motion. Created almost completely by Kanamori alone, the sweeping camerawork is underscored by an elegant musical score (which he, like many resourceful students, found online royalty-free).

“I aimed to capture the infinite possibilities of origami, which can bring life and wonder out of the simplest material,” he explains. “Origami does not involve cutting or gluing, and any origami model can return to its original state once unfolded. I thought this concept resembled life rising from the Earth and returning to it.”

“I’ve found that the representation of origami in visual media often lacks realistic elements,” he says. “So often with animation involving paper folding, they use techniques which are not actually possible with real paper. Unlike any other character design process, there were no concept art drawings. I designed the characters by folding an actual square piece of paper.”

To transform those physical forms into digital animation, Kanamori developed his own techniques to create technically correct origami in 3D software. “Using my new origami workflow, I was able to accurately model everything.”

The use of color was key to the design of Origami, where pops of color accentuate the action. “Paper changes color when it is given life,” he believes. “In the first scene, every paper is colorless except for one red paper. In Japan, the red often represents life.”

Kanamori expected to travel from Tokyo to London for the academy ceremony and witness his sweeping film play out on the big screen. A key reason why his short pulls viewers into Kanamori’s invented world is his dynamic camerawork. “That was crucial. There are only 10 shots, and the average shot length is 14.6 seconds,” he says. “The first and last shots are almost 40 seconds. It was important for me not to cut the shot during the transformation of the origami to show its authenticity. I also aimed to make the camerawork as satisfying as possible, similar to the style in the Transformers movies. I believe origami is the real Transformers!”

Bronze Medal: Student Accomplice

Directed by: Spencer Baird
Brigham Young University

Student Accomplice celebrates the classic cartoon tradition of a madcap chase film, carrying us on a careening car ride after a student driver’s vehicle is hijacked by a bank robber on the lam. Abetting the comedy is the nonplussed Mr. Magoo-style passenger, who’s in the car to test the driver’s skills. The blend of quirky characters and nonstop action makes the film an animated tour de force, combining 7,000 images in under five minutes.

Although Baird directed this senior year “capstone” film, he’s representing a 30-person team of fellow students onstage at the London festivities. BYU lets students pitch ideas and then the class votes to choose a storyline and elects the leadership to oversee it. Baird recalls pitching the short as a mixture of two opposing story elements: a traditional character and an untraditional setting. Thus, a student’s driving test collides with a bank heist gone awry.

“To get the pacing right, we referenced a ton of iconic movie chase scenes from The Bad Guys, Bullitt, The Italian Job and Baby Driver,” says the director. The film was heavily storyboarded (Baird’s own specialty) and tightly prevised so that students could efficiently create all the cityscapes that the characters race through.

“The size of the environment was a challenge,” says Baird. “We tried to be smart by building things in a modular way, as well as utilizing some procedural modeling techniques.” Although their main tool was Maya, he says, “We had some talented programmers on the team who created helpful tools in Houdini. We could populate the bare bones of the streets very quickly.” The sets also presented technical issues with motion blur and rendering, and Baird recalls, “We worked on optimizing the sets up until the last hour of production.”

Student Accomplice provides quite a calling card for Baird and his fellow grads as they begin pursuing career opportunities. “Of course, I’d jump at the chance to direct again,” he remarks. But he adds, “I would love to work as a story artist. Telling stories collaboratively is fun [in] animation.”

Traditionally held at the academy’s Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills since its inception, the 51st Student Academy Awards took place at the Odeon Luxe Leicester Square in London on October 14.

All medalists in the Student Academy Award for Animation category are eligible for consideration for this year’s Oscar for Best Animated Short.