Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/565118
12 2 0 1 5 E D U C AT I O N & R E C R U I T M E N T S P E C I A L Ram's Horn T he Student Emmy-winning tradition for the animators at Brigham Young University (BYU) continues, as Jenna Hamzawi (director) and Garrett Hoyos (produc- er and CG supervisor), along with the rest of the student crew who worked on the animated short film "Ram's Horn," picked up a third-place award recently at the College Tele- vision Awards, commonly called the Student Emmys. Their accomplishment makes the 17 th award for the school during the past 12 years. "Ram's Horn" is a comedic piece documenting the ascent of an oblivious, cocky mountaineer on a quest to peak a daunting summit. He faces some obstacles along the way from an unexpected rival – a precocious young ram and its protective parent – but in the end, meets his goal while learning an important lesson about priorities. While creating "Ram's Horn," the student team tackled an animation genre that was new to them. "It's our first foray into Warner Bros.," says BYU Animation Professor and Student Mentor Kelly Loosli. "The students really like Chuck Jones, and this is an homage to him." The students tried to channel Jones' work with Wile E. Coyote on "Ram's Horn," thus watching a great deal of Road Runner cartoons. They also studied the character gyrations from sequences in Hotel Transylvania for inspiration. The "Ram's Horn" story was pitched by Ethan Dean, who served as the art director on the short. (He is now working at Moonbot Studios and interned at Disney Interactive his senior year of school.) "Ethan's pitch was hilarious," says R. Brent Adams, director of the Center for Animation at BYU. "Also, it didn't feel like any other film we had done. The faculty encouraged the students to make sure that our films don't look and play the same. We are afraid that studios will think we have a conveyor belt that we put students on." Uphill Battle The young animators immersed themselves in the film's subject matter, studying lambs, sheep, and rams from every angle, even bringing taxidermeric animals into the anima- tion lab. They also visited a local climbing gym to study the art of mountain climbing. The overall work involved many late nights during a year's time in the BYU Center for Animation lab, as the students worked on the film's 110-plus shots. Like the mountaineer in the film, the students had their fair share of challenges to work through, such as animating and lighting snow, and editing with meticulous timing. "We took on a great challenge with the snow. I think the snow is, by far, the thing that sticks out as being top notch," says Hoyos. During a mentoring session at the school, Chris Buck, co-director of Frozen, even advised the students against attempting to do snow in the film, as did the faculty, fearful that it would be compared to the quality of the snow in that blockbuster feature. "Chris [Buck] told them that the snow was the hardest thing they did in that film. Plus, snow really wasn't part of the story, so they didn't even have to do it," he explains. Undeterred, the students took the opportunity to learn and assumed the risk – and conquered that obstacle un- der the leadership of Jeremy Oborn in the VFX department. Equipment available to the students in the lab included a small HP renderfarm that helped in the snow calculations. Other hardware comprised HP workstations, Wacom Cintiqs and tablets, Macs, and HP DreamColor monitors. On the software side, the students mainly used Auto- desk's Maya, along with The Foundry's Mari and Side Effects' Houdini. Effects play a major role – the avalanche, snow, explosives, and more – and were handled in Houdini. With so many computer science students working on each production, a film sees its fair share of specialized tools and scripts for the artists and management. According to Hoyos, the pipeline on the film was one of the most advanced out there for students: It's based on an animation studio's pipeline but is infused with a com- mercial-house mentality toward close deadlines. "We redo our pipeline for every film we make," says Adams, "partly