This article originally appeared in the Fall-Winter 2019 edition of The Rock magazine.
So begins Hero and Nim, Lauren Swintek’s ’20 award-winning short story about an adventurer and her flying boat. The captivating tale didn’t begin its life at the tip of Swintek’s pen, though. The characters debuted first as a painting: a large, eye-catching glimpse of the bold Nim and colorful, airborne Hero gliding through the deep blue sky. Soon, the companions’ journey will continue beyond their short story into yet another medium that’s enjoying a promising debut at Whittier College: animation.
Swintek, who’s designed her own film major through the Whittier Scholars Program, is turning Hero and Nims’ adventure into her senior project: an exploration of how storytelling adapts across mediums, using Nim and her flying boat as portfolio-building examples. The project will take her to challenging places—animation is new territory for her—on her way to a career in the entertainment industry.
But thanks to her growing talent, skill-building experiences at Whittier, and brand-new course offerings in animation, her journey is off to an amazing start.
The process for Swintek began by learning how to be a good storyteller.
Looking back to her first-year, she recalled listening to English professor Sean Morris speaking at New Student Convocation. “I’m going to start by telling you a story,” he said as he unveiled a common thread woven through many popular franchises from Star Wars to Harry Potter to Spider-Man. A young orphan living with an aunt and uncle discovers they’re extraordinary and, with the guidance of a wise old man, learns to use their special gift to save the world.
People have been telling themselves variations on that story, known as the monomyth, since antiquity; you can find the pattern in Beowulf and Greek mythology. Swintek is well-aware of its weaknesses; for one, it’s so broad that it encompasses anything from King Arthur to The Spongebob Squarepants Movie. But its strengths interest her, such as how a rigid structure forces storytellers to differentiate their narratives with inventive worlds and characters.
At Whittier, she’s discovering and examining the inner structures of stories. She’s also crafting her own worlds, and people are taking notice.
Swintek won the top prize in the English department’s annual prose contest two years in a row—as a first-year, then as a sophomore. On top of that, she won first place in the art department’s annual student art contest in her sophomore year, too. The first writing award, for her short story The Girl, The God, The Man, emboldened her to push herself further as a storyteller. She honed her talents and grew as a writer in courses and workshops, absorbing feedback and inspiration from her peers. By the time she was crafting her second award-winner, Hero and Nim, she’d learned how to transport her readers into a world as tangible as it is magical.
The story is imbued with a Studio Ghibli-like quality, with its tranquility, blending of nature and magic, and a strong heroine. Its peaceful tone and moving imagery stick with you, and Hero and Nim has certainly stayed with Swintek. She’s ready for the adventure to continue.
“It’s all I think about every time I’m driving on the freeway,” Swintek said. When not driving, she’s filling her sketchbook with Nim and Hero, capturing their every emotion and angle. She pencils them motion by motion into the margins of her books, creating volumes of impromptu animation flip-books.
The question then became how to take Hero and Nim to their next, animated level.
Before Whittier, Swintek had never made a film before, let alone an animated short.
After class one day, she approached Associate Professor of Art Daniel Jauregui with her idea for an animated project. He encouraged her and gave her the tutorial she needed to get started.
While she was fleshing out the story of Hero and Nim, her first foray into animation explored a different world.
With a mission in mind and a canvas at hand, Swintek sat down, turned on French composer Claude Debussy’s Nocturnes and La Mer, and pieced together the story of an astronaut who crash lands on a celestial tree. Bringing the story to life wasn’t easy: everything was a first.
“A lot of it was problem solving and doing work-arounds,” Swintek said.
Creatively, she combined her talents and course work in traditional art with digital tools. She began by drawing and painting the backgrounds, spaceships, and the various pieces of her astronaut from all different angles, creating an inventory of parts for her protagonist that looked like an unassembled puppet. She scanned everything into Adobe Photoshop, where she began the intensive process of putting the puzzle pieces together and setting them in motion, one layer and frame at a time.
With the editing tools of Adobe Premiere, she structured her story and pumped Debussy’s sweeping melodies into the fabric of her new, colorful universe. After weeks of hard work, Celestial Bodies was finished.
The short made its public debut on a May afternoon at the annual student art showcase. In the bustling foyer of the Wardman Gym, Celestial Bodies was a newcomer in a room full of wooden and metal sculptures, larger-than-life sketches, striking photographs, and vivid paintings (one of which was Swintek’s portrait of Hero and Nim). But it quickly made its presence known, as Debussy’s magical notes joined the buzz of the mingling crowd—who, soon, cheered and applauded Swintek’s award for best entry in the contest.
With Celestial Bodies, the showcase has seen the first—but certainly not the last—student-animated story.
Students like Swintek, who were excited for opportunities to start animating stories, have helped launch a new era for art at Whittier. Jauregui and his fellow art professors were hearing the growing demand for animation courses from students, so in 2017, the art and visual studies department introduced new digital animation courses. A new wave of aspiring animators from Whittier comes at an opportune time in the field. Among streaming services’ many effects on the entertainment industry, they’ve heralded in a golden age for animation production. As the likes of Netflix and Amazon order a flood of original animated content for both children and adults, jobs in the industry are surging with no signs of letting up, according to Variety.
The new classes excite Jauregui as much as his students. The rich medium gives them a dynamic opportunity to explore visual storytelling, he said. The students are equipped with Wacom drawing tablets, as well, to give them the tools they need to sketch their stories onto digital canvases.
“What has impressed me the most is the students’ willingness to experiment and their ability to master digital skills so quickly,” Jauregui said. “Our students have a unique voice and I’m happy that they are using this medium to amplify it.”
Like the projects coming out of the animation courses, Swintek’s Celestial Bodies is more than a beautiful showcase of the medium. It has something to say, too.
“What I like best about Lauren’s piece is how timely it is,” Juaregui said. “At a moment when we are contending with issues related to global warming and extinction, I found her exploration of outer space as a pertinent metaphor for our present-day dilemmas and anxieties related to the survival of the human race. The animation shows the power of the medium to address contemporary topics in a sophisticated and magical way.”
Swintek also wanted to up-end some viewers’ expectations about the kind of person who can lead a sci-fi story. When the astronaut takes off her helmet, the viewer learns she’s a woman of color. The choice was deliberate; Celestial Bodies was an opportunity to revisit the early days of sci-fi without inheriting its sexism, when there were “pretty exclusively white men going into space,” Swintek said.
Animated films could use more heroes like Swintek’s. Representation on the mscreen lags: from 2007 to 2017, only 27 percent of the characters in major animated movies were female, according to a report by the University of Southern California.
The gender-gap extends behind the camera (so to speak), as well; there’s a need for more animators like Swintek. Women make up only 20 percent of the animation industry’s workforce, and only 10 percent are producers or directors, according to an Animation Guild survey. Meanwhile, women make up 60 percent of animation students, according to Women in Animation (WIA), a non-profit organization that advocates for women in the industry.
WIA’s goal is to achieve a 50/50 gender split in the next seven years. By then, Swintek hopes to count herself as part of that growing equality.
“I would love to work in film or TV, and ideally with animation,” she said. “I love visual and literary storytelling and hope to continue to work with both, perhaps as a screenwriter or author, as a storyboard artist, really just anything in production or development.”
Swintek’s beloved characters have been waiting in the wings, but will soon come to life as she continues her studies in animation.
“The little boat sailed through a cloudless blue sky. The wind was at his stern, the sun warmed his wooden flanks, and the earth was slipping by far below him. They were making good time.”