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Oscar Shortlist Interviews: Directors Dan Abraham And Trent Correy Share Their Favorite Shot From ‘Once Upon A Studio’ (Exclusive)

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We invited the filmmakers behind each of this year’s 15 Oscar-shortlisted animated shorts to share their favorite shot from their film and explain why it’s special to them. The pieces are being published in the order that materials were received. Nomination voting kicked off yesterday, January 11, and runs through January 16.

In this piece, directors Dan Abraham and Trent Correy share their favorite clip from Once Upon a Studio, a short film produced to celebrate Disney’s 100th anniversary in 2023.

One of the most technologically advanced shorts in this year’s competition, the film mixes styles and techniques from a century of Disney animation. Hand-drawn characters from decades ago share the screen with modern cg counterparts in a way that feels entirely natural from the first frame to the last. The film’s narrative is straightforward: Disney’s most iconic characters must be wrangled up for a group photo, leading to a joyful nostalgia trip for anyone who has enjoyed Disney’s animated films over the past 100 years.

Below, Abraham and Correy share their favorite shot from the film and explain its significance:

In order to complete this 1155 frame shot (48 seconds), our whole team had to roll up their sleeves, get scrappy, and be in constant communication in order to make it believable that our 30+ hand-drawn and cg characters were living alongside each other within the studio halls. To complicate things further, we utilized three different camera setups (one of which involved flying a drone down our main staircase and through a narrow hallway), forcing us to expand our typical process and lean on the expertise of our previs, layout, and tracking teams.

Our character teams (modeling, rigging, and look development), along with our technicians, stopped at nothing to ensure that we could access all our desired legacy cg characters despite technology changing over the years. In the case of Bolt (2008) or Prep and Landing (2009), we needed to rebuild these characters to make them compatible with our current pipeline. While veteran Disney animators like Mark Henn (Minnie), Randy Haycock (Aladdin/Abu), and guest animator James Baxter (Peter Pan/Michael/John/Wendy) took pencil and paper in hand, Adam Green (Bolt, Mittens, Rhino), Riannon Delanoy (Sisu), and others brought life to the cg characters, ensuring a seamless and uninterrupted handoff between the mediums.

For interactions such as Moana and Flounder, animators like Mario Furmanczyk who are fluent in both mediums, were able to execute both the hand-drawn and cg characters. Cleanup animation artists kept track of the specific line quality of each character (since the line varied from Peter Pan to Aladdin to Pete’s Dragon and even a cg/2d hoverboard).

The effects department tackled cg water, smoke, and pixie dust, while the lighters made sure that while we celebrated the flatness of the hand-drawn characters, they needed to interact with the ever-changing light sources, reflective surfaces, and their cg counterparts. Knowing that we only have a few seconds with each character, it was instrumental that our clean up, ink & paint, and lighting teams worked together to ensure these characters look just as you remember them from their original films while living together and interacting on our live-action plates.

This shot was designed to show the handoff of hand-drawn and cg characters and their enthusiasm to gather for a group photo. That feeling was absolutely mirrored by our incredible team showing their unbridled enthusiasm and commitment to making this shot the best it can be and the incredible communication it took to complete a shot this complex. This was the first shot we started, and the last one we completed, with each department making it better along the way and it’s that teamwork mentality that makes working at Disney Animation so incredible.

Read the other entries in the series:

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