Demand is high for Y. animators

PROVO — DreamWorks Animation SKG called Brigham Young University student Emron Grover on Wednesday morning to set up an interview for one of its three coveted internships.

Grover couldn't take the call for the very reason DreamWorks and Pixar want to interview him — he was at the premiere screening of the short animation film "Las Pinatas," winner of another student Emmy for BYU's decorated animation program.

Each year, the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences gives out three student Emmys — for first, second and third place — which means it has awarded 12 Emmys for computer-generated 3-D animation in the past four years.

BYU has won five of the 12.

The competition is steep, with more than 100 schools submitting 500 films each year.

The 2007 award ceremony is March 31, when the students will find out if they took first, second or third.

Previous BYU winners are "Lemmings" (2004), "Pet Shop" (2005), "Turtles" and "Noggin" (2006).

Another short film, "Faux Paw," won a 2005 student Emmy for 2-D, or hand-drawn, animation.

All those awards have created a market for BYU graduates, some of whom have worked or are working on computer-generated special effects for "Spider-man 3," "Pirates of the Caribbean 3: At World's End," "Horton Hears a Who" and "Night in the Museum."

Some students have landed jobs at Pixar, maker of the "Toy Story" movies. Or ILM, which is the creation of "Star Wars" genius George Lucas. Or Weta Workshop, which did effects for Peter Jackson's "Lord of the Rings" trilogy and "King Kong."

What makes BYU special is that it modeled its program after the way DreamWorks does computer animation.

Film professor Kelly Loosli worked at DreamWorks for two years. When a family situation brought him back to Utah, industrial design professor Brent Adams asked him to model BYU's program after the DreamWorks' process.

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"Our goal wasn't to win awards," Loosli said. "The goal was to create an education pipeline that mirrored the real world. The idea is to have students pay all of their dues on one film."

The result is a program that forces students to work as a team the way they must at a studio and combines storytelling, computer modeling and hand-drawing skills to produce well-rounded students who can solve problems on their own.

Adams said the combination of skills shows BYU graduates can use "both sides of the brain."

Each year, the students make one film as a senior project, and the films are growing noticeably more sophisticated each year.

In "Las Pinatas," even casual viewers will notice the newsprint visible under the coats of paint on the papier-mache pinatas.