Student vs. studios: Animator vies for Hollywood's Annie Award

Just as actors regard the Oscars as the highest form of recognition bestowed by their profession, animators cherish their Annies, the top prize awarded by the International Animated Film Society, ASIFA-Hollywood.

 

One UCLA animation student on the brink of launching his professional career will find out Friday, Jan. 30, if he will be able to bask in some of this vaunted glory.

 

Joaquin Baldwin, 25, has to fight off a few competitors with a little more name recognition in the industry – including Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios – before he will be summoned on stage at Royce Hall to pick up an Annie.

 

Baldwin, a third-year graduate student in the UCLA Animation Workshop in the School of Theater, Film and Television, is in the running for an Annie Award in the category, Best Animated Short, for his dark and haunting four-minute-long film, "Sebastian's Voodoo," about a helpless voodoo doll who courageously comes to the rescue of his fellow cloth dolls against a pin-wielding sadist.

"The nominees typically come from one of the studios, whether it be one of the big ones, like Pixar or Disney, or a smaller, independent studio," said Celia Mercer, associate professor and head of the animation area in the School of Theater, Film and Television. "Seeing a nominated work done by an individual, and one who is a student, is rare."

 

The fact that Baldwin is competing against powerful, well-established Hollywood mega-studios "is a little crazy," said the unflappable student animator. "I'm very excited about that. I'm the only student competing. I'm hoping that will work for me rather than against me."

 

Already, "Sebastian's Voodoo," which took him 10 months to make while he was in his second year at UCLA, has picked up 26 awards since last June when the film was released.

 

Initially, Baldwin thought about bringing to life voodoo dolls that would fight each other. "I had the idea of doing something funny." But he realized that comedy is not his genre, said the animator, who hopes eventually to create features like Guillermo Del Toro's "Pan's Labyrinth."

 

Instead, he used the magic of animation to give these primitive stuffed dolls a range of human emotions. His most difficult challenge was to make them — well — expressive, no small task when you're working with very little.

 

"They don't even have eyeballs, just Xes," said Baldwin of their cross-stitched "eyes." "It was hard to show what direction they were looking at because they have no eyes. So it's really just a trick, framing the action perfectly, so that they look like they are staring at something when they're not."

 

Born in Paraguay to an environmental activist mother and an artist father, Baldwin was experimenting with computer graphics and basic 3-D animation by the time he was 15.

 

"I've been a computer geek since high school, playing around with graphics of all sorts. I used to make silly special effects animation because it was fun," he recalled.

 

As a teenager, he worked as a multimedia designer at Hypermedia, the first multimedia magazine published in Paraguay, and put his animation skills to work creating intros for the CD that came with the magazine. After working several years as a web designer, Baldwin, then 19, decided to study advertising and graphic design at the Columbus College of Art & Design in Ohio. But it was animation that stirred his artistic soul and set him on a path to UCLA, where the college's dean of animation had once gone to school and taught.

 

"I knew I wanted to go here. This was always my first choice," said Baldwin, who is now working on his thesis in his third and final year with the program. As he winds up his work for his M.F.A., he is also making the rounds in Hollywood under the wing of the Creative Artists Agency, which spotted him back in June and wanted to represent him.

"Joaquin has a unique voice and a strong vision," Mercer said. "Both 'Sebastian's Voodoo' and his current thesis film, (in development) share a quality of tone that is at times dark and despairing, yet also hopeful."

 

Meanwhile, Baldwin will be waiting anxiously in the audience with his friends and collaborators Friday night at Royce Hall at a black-tie ceremony to find out whether an Annie will soon be part of his résumé.

 

See"Sebastian's Voodoo."