Audiences around the globe gathered in darkened theaters on Sept. 27 to experience the captivating world of “The Wild Robot.” As the screen illuminated with a stunning palette of blue and gray, viewers were transported into a beautifully-crafted narrative that blurs the line between technology and nature. 

Among those behind this cinematic masterpiece were three Aggies: former student Toby Johnson, Class of 2023, along with visualization graduate students Anna Keniston and Sean Kerrigan, all connected through Texas A&M’s School of Visualization. 

“The viz program is incredible at A&M,” Kerrigan said. “We have so many Aggies in the industry and the network has been such an incredible resource to me.” 

Together, they played vital roles in the film’s creation and navigated the precise and intricate animation pipeline. This process demanded seamless collaboration at every stage, from the early storyboarding and design phases to the final rendering and post-production.  

Each stage of the animation pipeline built upon the last, with each intern contributing a crucial element to bring “The Wild Robot” to life.

Lighting artist intern

“I never really had any other thing I wanted to do in my life,” Johnson said. “Pretty early on, I knew that this is what I wanted — to pursue film, especially animation.” 

Johnson, a proud fourth-generation Aggie, grew up with a deep love for animated films. His father often recommended movies, which sparked Johnson’s early fascination with the animation process. He found comfort and inspiration in films like “Ratatouille” and “Shrek” and soon realized that creating movies like those was his true calling.

At the end of his junior year, he spoke to former students and reached out to people in the animation industry, which led him to an opportunity to work on “Wild Robot.” He previously worked on “Kung Fu Panda 4” and then shifted towards creating a hand-painted style of animation. He said this movie was something he had never done before and he was eager to start. 

“This movie was the perfect blend of unique, original project,” Johnson said. “DreamWorks hasn’t done something like this for a while.”

Johnson’s job as a lighting and compositing artist, taking the unrendered animation and composing and rendering the entire shot. He said his team took shots from the movie and made it something one would see on the big screen. 

“I do all of the [digital] lighting and I put them in the scene,” Johnson said. “I do all the final tweaking and color grading and sending it off.”

Johnson said he had tools that helped develop and maintain the artistic brush-stroke aesthetic of the movie. Johnson worked on two sequences from the movie and approximately a minute of footage made by him is featured during the movie. 

Look development intern

Keniston said she always loved to draw and always enjoyed animated movies. Her parents were Aggies who supported her dreams to work on these movies and led her to A&M. 

“Right when I graduated is when I got my internship,” Keniston said. “‘Wild Robot’ was my second internship and it was a really fun experience that taught me multiple skills.” 

Her job as a look development intern consisted of creating painted textures, defining the color and  roughness values and how the assets reacted to light. This team added the color, any hair required and ran the stage where objects get color before they are placed in a scene.

“I was assigned assets, which are props and characters that come down the pipeline,” Keniston said. “My job was to find the color, roughness and height of the objects and I would show them to my supervisors.”

Keniston said she worked on many characters and she knows two of those characters and one environment made it into the movie. She said “Wild Robot” was a style that had never been achieved before, and her team had no idea what the final image would look like. Regardless,  Keniston was excited for the directors’ vision to come to life.

Layout artist intern

Kerrigan was only 7-years-old when he became intrigued with a how-to-draw Spongebob special. When he heard about A&M’s visualization program in high school, he knew exactly where his dream would lead him. Kerrigan scored his internship with the help of Jon Gutman, who was one of his mentors while he was at A&M. 

When he was a junior, he took a class with professor Michael Walsh and learned layout was an actual position that worked with cameras and editing. 

“When I heard what a layout artist was, I knew this is exactly the job I want to do,” Kerrigan said. “I get to do animation for characters, and my favorite thing is to apply film language to animation.”

A layout artist is similar to a cameraman or a cinematographer. They are completely in charge of the camera and what happens in the frames. They use the same focal lengths and camera moves as in live-action movies, making the animation as natural as possible. Kerrigan said they work at a very quick pace and the shots can vary depending on what they need. 

“We’re mostly working off storyboards of every single shot on every single sequence in the movie,” Kerrigan said. 

Kerrigan said layout artists have a method they call “going off boards,” where they work with the director to create a sequence that was too difficult to illustrate with a simple storyboard in terms of camera composition, blocking, timing and editing. 

Layout is one of the last generalist positions in animation. These artists get to do a little bit of everything to plan the final shot, which brings the team toward the end of the pipeline. 

The end of the pipeline

The intern experience was very collaborative amidst the team effort to get “The Wild Robot” across the finish line. The directors were excited when content was created and presented to them by production teams, which was very motivating to the different groups.

Johnson said the team had energy and knew it was making something special. He said DreamWorks was one of the best workplaces in terms of culture, and the relationships he built with people was a big leap for him to feel wanted and motivated. 

To score a position as impactful as these DreamWorks positions, the interns said it was very important to network, reach out to people and form meaningful connections. This helped create an A&M pipeline for future opportunities. 

“Be good at working with other people and be flexible,” Keniston said. “Feedback is the fastest way to go and getting the job is 60 percent networking and 40 percent talent.”

Kerrigan said the Aggie Network is something people should take advantage of. Most A&M graduates understand where students come from, and they want to help and connect them to mentors, Kerrigan said. 

“Working on this movie was an absolute blessing and gift, and it’s an indescribable feeling I would not have been able to feel if it wasn’t for the connections through A&M,” Kerrigan said. “I really want people to know how much work the artists and employees put into this piece of art.”