BYU animation students bring home 2 Emmys

PROVO — Talk about animated excitement: Brigham Young University students have won national "student Emmys" for the third year in a row.

And this year, the cartoon-creating Cougars are taking home one in each hand.

The two student Emmys — known officially as College Television Awards — bring the grand Emmy total for the school's animation program to five.

The awards, to be presented at a gala today in Los Angeles, are for the students' work on two 3-D computer-animated films, "Turtles" and "Noggin."

Since its founding in 2001, the BYU animation program has won five student Emmys from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Foundation.

Kelly Loosli, a BYU assistant professor who helps direct the program, said he doesn't know of any other school that has won as many Emmys as BYU in the past three years.

Most of the schools that compete for student Emmys are art schools with 200 to 1,000 animation students. By comparison, BYU allows 20 into its program each year.

"The success is well deserved because they put in so much time," he said.

The award-winning student films, which took more than a year to complete and involved the collaboration of students from across campus, are attracting attention, said R. Brent Adams, professor of industrial design, who directs the program with Loosli.

"Turtles," about an exuberant young turtle's humorous attempts to compete with his peers, was the effort of university sophomores and juniors.

In "Noggin," Adams said, the main character irks creatures called "bellyfaces" who don't like how Noggin's differences complicate their way of doing things. Studios can hardly believe it was done by students, he said.

Cash prizes come with the Emmy win, but that's not what Adams gets, well, animated about.

"The biggest thing is the bragging rights, because they give out so few of these (Emmys) and they are so recognized," he said. "There's huge bragging rights."

And doors open for students, too. A few years ago, the animation department had to beg studios to scout the program. Now, studios send representatives as early as October to recruit students to start the following May.

Of the seniors who worked on "Noggin," three now work at Digital Domain, a studio that helped create such films as "Titanic," "The Grinch" and "iRobot."

Pixar, the studio responsible for "Finding Nemo," "The Incredibles" and both "Toy Story" movies, has hired three of the "Noggin" crew.

Alex Cannon, who directed "Noggin," now is doing pre-visualization work, a type of computerized storyboarding, on the next "Spider-Man" movie.

"It's really, really thrilling for me to have our film win the student Emmy," Cannon said.