Student Films Sweep SIGGRAPH 2025’s Top Animation Awards As Industry Heavyweights Reveal Behind-The-Scenes Secrets

Student filmmakers have claimed all top honors at the upcoming 2025 SIGGRAPH 2025 Computer Animation Festival (August 10-14), marking what organizers call a “historic milestone” for the computer graphics conference.

The prestigious Best in Show prize, an Academy Award-qualifying award, went to Trash, a frenetic, visually bold short from eight students at École Supérieure Des Métiers Artistiques (ESMA): Maxime Crançon, Fanny Vecchie, Margaux Lutz, Romain Fleischer, Alexis Le Ral, Grégory Bouzid, Robin Delaporte, and Mattéo Duran.

“This year’s winners reflect a global future of animation that is fearless, inventive, and deeply human,” said Dawn Fidrick, SIGGRAPH 2025 Computer Animation Festival Director. “These projects don’t just meet professional standards, they redefine them.”

The festival’s Best Student Project award went to Ringling College duo Mason Klesch and Vivian Osness for The Mooning an animated mockumentary exploring conspiracy theories behind the 1969 moon landing. Meanwhile, the Jury’s Choice honor was claimed by Jour de vent, a surreal short from France’s École des Nouvelles Images (ENSI), where the arrival of wind in a city park sends civilians floating into the sky.

Beyond celebrating student storytelling, SIGGRAPH’s Production Sessions will feature industry veterans on stage dissecting their latest works.

In a marquee joint session, DNEG and Wētā FX pulled back the curtain on the second season of HBO’s The Last of Us, presenting A Journey Through Dystopia. The two-part breakdown detailed everything from building CG versions of post-apocalyptic Seattle to crafting massive, infected hordes.

Disney, DreamWorks, NASA, and Nickelodeon also featured prominently in this year’s sessions:

• Walt Disney Imagineering and Walt Disney Animation Studios shared the seven-year development behind Tokyo DisneySea’s new ride, Peter Pan’s Never Land Adventure, blending hand-drawn animation and CG techniques.
• NASA revealed how its interdisciplinary team transforms raw Earth science data into cinematic visualizations, including the use of AI models to create real-time disaster dashboards.
• DreamWorks Animation showcased painterly 2D aesthetics translated into rich 3D visuals for its 2024 feature, The Wild Robot.
• Compulsion Games demonstrated their hybrid stop-motion/CG pipeline for their Southern Gothic video game South of Midnight.
• Nickelodeon Animation presented how they achieved a handcrafted, stop-motion style in their CG series Max & the Midknights using a custom Unreal Engine pipeline.

SIGGRAPH’s newly introduced Spatial Storytelling program further blurs the line between cinematic tradition and immersive, interactive narratives. Conference Chair Ginger Alford summed up the conference’s creative spectrum: “With the Computer Animation Festival, Production Sessions, and the new Spatial Storytelling program, we see the full arc of storytelling — from bold student visions to immersive experiences and cinematic spectacle.”