 Art by Emily Chao Visual Development We are thrilled to announce that our art team has completed 30+ total assets for pre-design over the past few weeks, including characters, backgrounds, props, and even maps of our expansive worlds! Our talented art team is led by Art Director Jade Mahal Lew, Character Lead Isa Kim, and Background Lead Juris Tungpalan. Alongside Director Peri Segel and Writer Allen Wu, the art team is working hard to ensure that every piece of art is crafted with a strong sense of intentionality to deepen character, reinforce themes, and further enrich the world of our film. We’ve been so impressed by the creativity and enthusiasm that has come out of this team so far and can’t wait to share more of their beautiful art soon!  Art by Eri Iguchi Story Led by our fearless Head of Story, Al Teng, the story team has officially assembled! To better familiarize themselves with our story, world, and characters, the story artists have cooked up many creative pieces of art over the past few weeks through a series of short exercises. Some of these exercises have even inspired new elements in our film!
Art by Jenny Yi What’s Next
We’re so excited to continue on with design and storyboards in the coming weeks and are grateful for the endless support and dedication of our exceptionally hard-working production team. Our production team has not only kept us on track and organized throughout every step of the process, but they have also patiently and efficiently put out every fire that has popped up along the way. Special shoutout to our fearless production team – this project couldn’t happen without them. More updates on storyboards, casting, and records coming soon!
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 Art by Dasom Park We're so excited that we've officially wrapped up our Pre-Production phase!
Story Under the leadership of our Head of Story, Dasom Park, the Story and Edit teams have officially completed our fully timed and picture-locked animatic! Huge congratulations to Dasom, our incredible story artists Debra Rengga and Chelsea Paige Roasa, story revisionists Annie Jerry and Aishwarya Dhulipala, and our editor, Anna Maria Folsom, for bringing this milestone to life. We are so excited to share some of our more treasured beat boards with you and hope you find them as inspiring as we did.
Art by Dasom Park What’s Next
With the help of our character, environment, and surfacing/texturing artists, we are excited to begin Production, starting with the Modeling phase. In addition, we have brought on our Tech, Music, Animation, and Lighting teams to start Research and Development. This brings our crew to a total of 57 people! Our Research and Development consist of two sections. As we are building part of this pipeline from scratch, using unique file storage solutions, we are emphasizing the importance of documentation and clear communication to ensure that our process functions properly to support our artists. Our teams are currently testing the pipes to make sure that file transfers are working properly for our artists. With the help of Production, our Tech team and Directors are working closely with our Discipline Supervisors to make sure the water flows smoothly from the pipes. Our Asset, Animation, and Lighting team are also researching and ideating on ways to create that painterly style for our film using software like Unreal Engine, Nuke, and Houdini. Written by: Phoebe Jiang, 2D Line Producer  Art by Ashley Lam and Laura Swalley Things are glowing up in the world of FOREST and we're thrilled to share some exciting updates. Pre-Design: Continued and Counting Our pre-design team (Ivory Bi, Andrew Fratasci, Joanna Jiang, Vanessa Nakasone, Laura Swalley, Michelle Wirono) has been hard at work building out the lush, little world of our 2D animated short. The pre-design phase has been an incredible opportunity for our visual development artists to explore, experiment, and establish the visual language that will carry our acorn protagonist’s story from beginning to end. Every asset, from the tiniest face masks to mushroom-sized gadgets, was thoughtfully crafted. We can’t wait for you to see the nooks and crannies that bring this world to life.  Art by Joanna Jiang Beat Boards: Bringing the Story into View One of the most exciting milestones in the early stages of animation production is the development of beat boards. As a script gets close to being locked, beat boards help the team think visually about what the story actually looks like. We’re fortunate to have a trained storyboard artist as our Director, Ashley Lam, who was able to visually convey the big picture and help the team understand the overall pacing and narrative direction. Beat boards serve an important role in mapping out major turning points and establish the emotional “tentpoles” in the story. Compared to standard storyboards that detail every single short, beat boards apply single, detailed images to convey entire scenes. The resulting images are reminiscent of storybook illustration, packing complexity and emphasizing the emotional core of the story. Questions guiding each panel are simple but powerful: Who’s important in this scene? How do we compose the image so that it not only communicates what’s happening, but also how the characters feel about it? It’s a thoughtful challenge as every choice in framing, focus, and staging is a storytelling decision. And watching those decisions come together into a first visual pass of our film has made the story feel just a little more real.
Art by Ashley Lam Storyboarding: First Panels, First Steps Our storyboard team is also officially up and running! Led by Grace Park, our Head of Story, our story artists Alyssa Huang, Aloha Lee, Vivian Le, and Connie Wen, have hit the ground running in these earliest stages of the boarding process. This month, the team made their way through thumbs and rough pitches, which are the scrappy, exploratory first passes where the real magic of visual storytelling comes into view. Thumbs and roughs aren’t about perfection; they’re about momentum and discovery. And our story artists’ enthusiasm for the project has propelled us into the next phase of the pipeline. At this stage, the priority is to clearly convey ideas, find the flow of sequences, and begin to answer the big questions: Does this scene land emotionally? Is the staging clear? Pitches gave our director and story team a chance to unpack and explore these questions together, and the conversations that emerged are sharpening the way we see our story. It’s early days, but the exuberant creativity of this team has been exciting to watch!  Art by Andrew Frastaci What’s Next
The FOREST crew is growing! This month, we welcomed our composers, editor, compositing and animation leads to the team. These new additions bring with them a wealth of expertise that will provide the guidance and structure our team needs as we head into the next phase. In the weeks to come, we’ll be bringing on the remaining artists and creatives, and we can’t wait to introduce them to you. |
AuthorThe Program & Production Team Archives
June 2026
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