In deep space, a spaceship hurtles through the dark on a 312-year journey to Earth 2.0. Its only passengers are a group of frozen humans and a lonely maintenance robot who passes the days watching an endless montage of their memories.

This is the opening of Alone, a 3D-animated short film that has been rapturously received by international audiences. It won gold at the Australian Effects and Animation Festival; silver at the Portland Festival of Cinema, Animation and Technology; was a finalist at the Sydney Film Festival; and received an honourable mention at the Cleveland International Film Festival.

Alone is the latest in a long list of wildly successful animated films that have transformed Australia into a global player in the animation and VFX industry. But, while it was produced under the guidance of some of Australia’s leading 3D film and animation experts, it isn’t the work of a professional studio.

Instead, it was created by students at the UTS Animal Logic Academy, one of Australia’s leading 3D-animation production training studios.

"You need to be one of many"

The UTS Animal Logic Academy is a collaboration between the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) and Netflix Animation Studios (formerly Animal Logic) – an award-winning animation studio known for such globally successful films as Happy Feet, Peter Rabbit, The Lego Movie and Leo. Through its flagship course, the UTS Master of Animation and Visualisation, the Academy is building a talent pipeline to serve the animation and VFX sector.

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Alex Weight

Alex Weight

Creative Lead, Faculty of Design and Society

To do it, the course addresses some of the key skills gaps that prevent new animation graduates from meeting industry expectations. According to the Academy’s Creative Director Alex Weight, a writer, director and animator who has worked on major international animation and VFX projects for more than 30 years, new hires often need up to 12 months of on-the-job experience before they’re ready to operate as fully autonomous professionals.

A still from the award-winning animated short film Alone, produced by Animal Logic Academy. It depicts two robots looking at each other. Text on the image reads 'Bringing ideas to life'.

The core theme for Alone was a robot on a colony ship, living by itself, taking care of everyone for thousands of years potentially. What would it do? And so we allowed at this idea of having the robot kind of be able to look at the memories or the dreams of the humans as they're sleeping. And we thought this would evoke an emotion in the robot of wanting to have a companion. Once we kind of set on that, that no one can survive alone. Everyone needs company. That really kind of kicked off the rest of the story. 

We had some certain parameters that were set in stone. We had a lot of people in the assets department and no riggers, so we had to accommodate the story, which meant a simple character. A character that couldn't speak and didn't have a muscles or a face. We had to come up with other ways to allow this character to, to emote.

For creatives even though often we want to have the whole wide world open, actually having a focus is a gift and it allowed us to really push our creativity outside the box to think about how we can tell a new and unique and emotionally impactful story.

On your average animated film, there are 11 departments from modeling the character, designing the character, animating them, lighting them, everyone's working together at the same time. Nothing's ever kind of handing over from one department to the next and then letting go of it.


It's a great part of the process that the students learn about because it allows them to understandthat they're part of kind of like a big organism. So anything they do has a ripple effect to other departments.

The biggest logistical challenge of the film was almost certainly the first shot in the film.

The team hated me for this one, but it was this wonderful shot where we see the whole galaxy reflected in the front of the spaceship and we push in through the glass of the window of the spaceship and follow the robot as it travels through the spaceship to watering a plant. To go from big to small, anytime you do that, it is quite computationally heavy. So when we transition from the outside to the inside, we have a cut and we set it up as two different environments. 

Not only was it just a gigantic shot to render the logistical challenge of figuring out how we were going to have a camera moving through glass while communicating it was hitting a boundary. How to time the camera, moving with the robot, and there were just a lot of moving parts that we all really had to be conscious of all of the other departments working in tandem to get it just right.

It's magic. It's absolutely beautiful. It's everything I wanted it to be. I mean, the scale is just beautiful.

There were a few moments that really captured our hearts in the art department. For example, the scene where the main character realizes that he needs to make a sacrifice. There is a red light coming from the reactor and it means like the ship is in danger, the passengers are in danger and the whole thing's going to shut down because he was selfish. But at the same time, we see the friend robot at the back in a blue light. That's when the, the little robot realizes as well, like, it's going to be left alone. For me, it was really playing on those conflicting emotions that, do I sacrifice myself? Do I sacrifice the life I created? When I saw the final movie together, I cried when, you know, the robot makes a decision and then the reveal at the end that they found a solution to stay together. Those moments stayed with me. 

It's a great story that connects with people. Just couldn't be, you know, couldn't be more proud of it. It was a finalist at the Sydney Film Festival, which was great. It had the most awards of any film that we've done to date.

We knew that we created something very special, but none of us expected that it would be that successful. So, we are very proud of it.

“They often haven’t had the opportunity to develop the core fundamentals, which are things like walk cycles, weight, timing and overlap,” he says.

“They’re also taught to build broad generalist skills, which means they may produce work across multiple departments. The challenge is that high-end animated feature and VFX studios tend to be more specialty based, and that’s what we’re training our students for.”

These challenges are the result of undergraduate or commercial animation training courses that emphasise theory without practical experience. But the most prominent issue is that new hires often enter the workforce with a sense of ego that’s at odds with the industry’s collaborative nature.

“A successful animation career is 80-90% soft skills. It’s how to collaborate, how to communicate, how to let go of ego,” Weight says.  

“You’re in it together, you’re bouncing ideas off each other to the point where no one actually knows whose idea it was. But junior staff often arrive not really understanding that it’s not my shot, my project; it’s our shot, our project.

“If you want to be a creative in the animation or VFX industry, you need to be one of the team, and that’s a completely different way of working.”

283

Master of Animation and Visualisation graduates since the Academy’s launch in 2017.

Animation students review concept drawings for the film Alone.
(Images: Two Giraffes)
Animal Logic Academy Creative Director Alex Weight talks animation students through some concept drawings for the film Alone.
Alex Weight sits with students at Animal Logic Academy reviewing concept art.

An antidote to industry pain points 

It’s a pattern that Weight has seen play out in studios around the world, from Sydney to London, Los Angeles to Beijing. The Academy is an antidote to these challenges: despite offering an accredited postgraduate degree, it has none of the hallmarks of traditional university education. 

Instead, the space is set up with tools and workflows that mimic those of major studios like Netflix Animation Studios, Industrial Light and Magic, Flying Bark and Framestore. Students, who apply to the program based on creative or technical expertise in a particular area, are on the tools as soon as their studies begin.

Depending on their interests, they’re assigned to one of 11 production departments: art, modelling, rigging, animation, surfacing, effects, lighting, compositing, technical direction and production coordination. Each student cohort delivers two end-to-end animated films that equip them with the technical and collaborative skills to work in professional animation and VFX roles.

“There are no classes, no lectures, no homework. It’s 9–5. It’s a job,” Weight says.

For the 2024 Academy intake, one of those projects became Alone. The students worked together to brainstorm, pitch, develop and produce the critically acclaimed story of two robots on the outer reaches of the solar system. As well as learning the tools of their future trade, they found themselves unlearning the habits that could limit their career potential.

“We had to learn to leave our artistic pride behind and work collectively. It wasn’t just, ‘oh, I’m designing the robot’. There was a lot of negotiation back and forth, and that was a new experience for me,” says student Ildy Izso, a member of Alone’s art department.

Izso and her peers created what would become the film’s retro-futuristic look, anchored by its wide-eyed robot characters with their very human emotions. Because the film takes place in an otherworldly setting, the art department faced both the challenge and the opportunity of creating something completely new.

18

Number of films projects produced by students at Animal Logic Academy.

The difference colour choice can make

A series of images shows how changing the colour concept for the film Alone changes the mood, look and feel of the characters and environment.

  • Image of two robots standing side by side in the film Alone. Image of two robots standing side by side in the film Alone.
    Every detail is agonised over, from colour palettes to the angle of each eye.
  • Image of two robots standing side by side in the film Alone. Image of two robots standing side by side in the film Alone.
    Every detail is agonised over, from colour palettes to the angle of each eye.
  • Image of two robots standing side by side in the film Alone. Image of two robots standing side by side in the film Alone.
    Every detail is agonised over, from colour palettes to the angle of each eye.
  • Image of two robots standing side by side in the film Alone. Image of two robots standing side by side in the film Alone.
    Every detail is agonised over, from colour palettes to the angle of each eye.

From the design of the ship itself to the lighting and the colour scheme, the team worked from a blank canvas to build a previously unimagined world. On screen, they created a soft, ethereal environment that feels cocooned from the bleak darkness beyond its windows. Off screen, they gained a new understanding of what it meant to work as one piece of a larger whole.

“As you keep drawing and reiterating and discussing them, you get more inspired, you give each other ideas and bounce off one another. At the end, you have something totally unique that you’ve all created together,” Izso says.  

Animating the future of a global industry 

Since the launch of the Academy in 2017, nine cohorts have come through the master’s degree. Most graduates go on to junior careers at major studios in Sydney and Melbourne; as they progress through the ranks, international roles become more available. 

“The industry loves our grads, because the skills they learn with us are an exact mirror of industry. They just grab someone and go, ‘Come on board.’ And within a few days, the new hires are up to speed,” Weight says.

These successes are in no small part due to the Academy’s commitment to continually adapting the master’s degree in response to industry feedback. At the end of every year Weight and his team host an industry discussion panel with a dozen professional studios. 

The goal is to better understand the tools, pipelines and trends that are shaping the contemporary industry so they can adapt the master’s content to keep pace. It’s good news for students and even better news for the industry, which now has access to a steady supply of highly trained juniors. 

“We’re constantly pivoting. We can't afford to be stagnant because we don't want to be sending any of our students out in the world with the wrong skillset," Weight says.

60

Number of award nominations received by student films at Animal Logic Academy.

Animal Logic Academy student Ildy Izso draws artwork for the animated short film Alone.
Ildy Izso worked within Alone’s art department and helped create the film’s unique look and feel. (Image: Two Giraffes)

For the 2024 Academy intake, now in their second year in industry, the master’s program has more than delivered on its promise. But even as they lend their creativity to some of the biggest animation and VFX projects in the global pipeline, few will forget the experience of working on Alone.

At the film’s first public screening, watching as audiences saw their work for the first time, the students finally understood just what it was they’d made. Like all great animated films, it was built on the power of working together, not alone.

“We were sitting at the back and we could really see the audience experiencing all the emotions we’d built into the story. There was laughter and tears and everything in between. At the end, they gave us a standing ovation,” Izso says. 

“We knew then that we had created something very special.”

 

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