Tell us about your organization. How big is your team? Where are you based? What is your organization’s specialty in the film and video space?

I’m Jimmy Calhoun, the chair of the BFA 3D Animation and Visual Effects Department at the School of Visual Arts in New York. The school was founded in 1947, and our program has been around since 1993. It’s built around one idea: story-driven CG. Students train in animation, visual effects, and related pipelines so they can move fluently across film, television, games, and commercials. Our current faculty of working professionals bring credits from Framestore, Disney, Nickelodeon, Method, Hornet, Psyop, and Nathan Love into the classroom every week. On the ground, we’re a full production studio with a motion-capture stage, green screen, sound recording, a color grading suite, and a render farm that processes over 600,000 frames a year. Eleven full-time staff keep the facility running seven days a week, and a faculty of over 50 instructors educate almost 300 students. Our specialty is helping young artists find their voices by supporting the production of over 50 short films every year.

Why do you do what you do? Was there a transformative moment that solidified your career choice, your org’s success, or your commitment to storytelling?

I do this because SVA changed my life, and I’ve spent my career trying to make that same thing possible for the next student who walks in. I earned my own BFA here in 2003. I came back after a short stint working in TV animation. I continued freelancing but also started teaching Figure Drawing and Storytelling courses. My role at SVA continued to grow as I became the curriculum coordinator, then director of operations, and now chair of the program. The transformative moment wasn’t a single one… it was the accumulated realization that a program is really a community, and that a good chair’s job is to protect the conditions that let students find their voice. Kindness in the room. Honest critique. Space for the ambitious idea. If we get those right, the technical fluency and the industry-ready portfolio follow, but not without tension and focus. The craft of animation and VFX requires both creativity and a technical mindset, and it’s amazing to watch students attack their weaknesses and grow all of their skillsets.

Tell us about your Telly Award winning piece. What’s the story behind it?

Four of our student films won Telly Awards this year in Film & Shorts – Student. These are short films made by small groups of students who stand as individuals on their own, but they’re the outcome of the same program:

Intrepid (Silver) by Ausar Johnson, produced by Anshul Katkar with look development by Sarah Terceros

The Koretechs (Bronze) by Eason Li and Yikong Xu

Second Spring (Bronze) by Jennifer Sun and Ailla Crossman

Beyond the Journey (Bronze) by Lucie Lee and Joowon Lee

All four are thesis films made in our senior year, when students commit to a single project and drive it from concept through final delivery. That includes writing and boarding it, building the assets and the pipeline, and getting it in front of the industry professionals who assess our graduating class every April. What the four films share isn’t a style or a genre, it’s the same underlying question every student in our program answers over four years: what do you actually want to say, and how do you use your craft to say it.

Can you share a behind the scenes story or fun fact about the making of your piece?

All of these films were standouts because they were made by people that relied on their community to help. Our students create a community in our labs that feels like both a serious studio environment, but also a welcoming club of friendly faces. And I’ve been doing this long enough to be familiar with the cyclical nature of both academia and filmmaking. I know when it is safe for me to walk into their computer labs and be greeted with excitement, and when to avoid their space so they stay focused. I know when I’ll have students that are overwhelmed and need me to just listen to them, and when a student needs a push. My goal is that at the end of the school year the students are all proud of what they’ve accomplished and how they handled themselves in that process.

What was your biggest challenge during production and how did you solve it?

The biggest recurring challenge in student thesis work is scope. Every strong project starts as an ambitious idea, and by the time a student is halfway through preproduction they’ve usually planned three films’ worth of shots for a nine-month schedule. What we’ve built over the years is a preproduction structure that allows for students to imagine their wildest dreams and then the film’s scope is stress-tested against what a small number of students can actually complete in a year. The films that win awards aren’t the ones that avoided the problem… they’re the ones where the student and the advisor found the version of the story that could be made brilliantly at the right size.

What are you most proud of about this piece? What is the most memorable response you got from this work?

What I’m most proud of is that we create space for diversity and individuality. You can see that in the four different student teams, working on four different films with four different creative visions, that all made professional-level work the Telly Awards honored, but I have dozens of more films and filmmakers that are amazing in their own unique ways. That’s not a coincidence… it’s the program doing what it’s designed to do. The memorable response came after thesis screening, when the industry professionals we invite every year spent the reception talking to the students about their work as peers. That’s the moment a program is trying to earn: when the industry stops seeing the graduating class as students and starts seeing them as artists they want to hire and work with.

You won a Telly Award for this piece. Why is recognition important for you, your team or your work?

Recognition matters for the students, first. A Telly is an external, industry-recognized credential that a graduating senior can put in front of a hiring manager the week after they finish their reel to verify their work in a way the diploma alone doesn’t. It matters for the program, second, because prospective students and their families are trying to understand what makes our school special. Four Telly Awards in a single cycle is evidence, not marketing. And it matters for the faculty who mentored these films, because the work honors the time and care they put into it.

Tell us what you’re up to! If there’s a new project, launch, or milestone you’d like us to celebrate with you, let us know, and we might share it with our community.

And now we get to do it again! Every year the next thesis class starts over, and the recognition our current graduates earned is a benchmark for what’s possible, not a summary of what’s done.