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PROVO — A BYU short film about a driving test gone wrong won big, earning BYU clout as the only American university to win an animation award at the Student Academy Awards in London earlier this month.
"Student Accomplice" is about a nervous teenage girl taking her driving test when a bank robber decides to use her as his getaway driver. Meanwhile, her "by-the-book" driving instructor continues to conduct the test while involved in a high-speed police chase, director Spencer Baird said.
"We had lots of opportunities to be creative with 'Student Accomplice,' which was fun for us," Baird said in a news release. "There's a lot of hilarity and complexity layered in. It's fast-paced in a very delightful way."
The student-created film won the bronze in the animation category at the Student Academy Awards, an international student film competition held in London on Oct. 14. BYU was the only U.S. university to receive recognition in the animation category, the university said.
"Behind this film, there's an entire team and crew that helped make it possible and I wanted to thank them for that," Baird said when accepting the award. "I was just glad that I could make you laugh."
More than 30 BYU students contributed to the film with animation, design, music and computer science skills combined to make the 7,000 individual images blend into a cohesive animation, a BYU release says.
"From the design of things, the lighting, the texturing, and the effects that are in there, as well as the character animation — everything has really come together in this really beautiful way that's pushed boundaries for what our student films have done," said BYU animation professor Nathan Lindsay.
The students worked together like a professional team, supporting and teaching each other, and "the end result speaks for itself," Lindsay said.
"I think it catches the eye of the industry because we're doing things that take a big team to accomplish, and it's not normal for students to pull off something of this caliber," he said. "It's pretty cool that we are one of the top three."
Lindsay said it was "phenomenal" for the students to work with the BYU School of Music and collaborate with musicians on composing an original score for the film.
Creating a realistic environment
Producer Brielle Hansen said this film had "probably the biggest environment that BYU has done on a film." Creating a city isn't just putting in buildings but making a balanced assortment of big, medium and small-sized objects and things.
"To make a city look full and lived in, we couldn't get away without background characters and filling the city with lots of interesting things and background cars," Hansen said in the release. "All of those details, like trash on the sidewalk and leaves flying through the air, made it feel realistic."
Lighting lead Lisa Bird said it gets harder to animate and render, the more objects there are. With more moving parts comes more opportunities for it to break.
"By the end of production, I think I had over 2,500 crashes. Computers are really strong, but (they) couldn't handle 'Student Accomplice,'" Bird said.
Another challenge was animating the amount of glass involved from car windows, mirrors and eyeglasses. Distortion and lighting effects from the glass kept giving the students problems to solve as they animated, Bird said.
Hansen said the student team also entered a blooper award contest and managed to beat out NASA.
"It was just so fun to be able to show off the silly things that happened," Hansen said.
"Student Accomplice" is not yet released to the public as it is still under consideration for other awards.
