 Art by Jenny Wu The feature team is excited to announce that they’ve launched this epic space rom-com into its next phase! We’re thrilled to share some spectacular updates. Casting We’re thrilled to announce that our celestial story has found its stars! Alongside director Peri Segel and writer Allen Wu, we were excited to welcome our Casting Director, Topher Ngo, and Assistant Casting Director, Sekai Murashige, to the casting team, whose expertise helped guide us through every step of the search for our wonderful voice cast. To help ensure that we focused purely on performance, we conducted a blind audition process. That meant that we listened to voice auditions without knowing who the actors were, allowing us to evaluate each performance based solely on how well it captured the heart, humor, and spirit of the character. The response to our casting call was incredible. We received nearly 50 auditions across all roles, and we were blown away by the talent, creativity, and range of performances that came our way! Narrowing down our selections was no small feat because we simply had too many talented actors to choose from for all roles. After making our initial selections from the blind auditions, we invited actors back for callbacks, where we explored chemistry, character dynamics, and different interpretations of the roles. From there, we assembled the cast that would help bring our story to life. To finish off the casting process, we gathered the entire cast and crew for our first Table Read. Hearing the script performed aloud for the first time by our full cast was an unforgettable experience. We couldn’t be happier with our cast and can’t wait to share more!  Art by Isa Kim Pre-Design Continuing from previous months, Art Director Jade Mahal Lew, Character Lead Isa Kim, and Background Lead Juris Tungpalan have expertly coordinated the art team to create over 80 art pieces. The world and story of Star Crossed have offered the design team opportunities to explore exciting questions, like how familiar technology might look in this sci-fi setting, or how characters might look across the years.  Art by Chloe Pineda Storyboards With more and more assets locked from pre-design, our story artists have officially blasted off into the world of our animatic! It’s been so wonderful to see our script come alive off the page, allowing us to explore how every scene, sequence, and emotional moment will play on screen. The process began with breaking down the script into individual sequences and identifying key story beats and character moments. From there, our artists translated our pages into hundreds of rough thumbnails, helping us map out everything from character performance to camera angles. In animation, locking the script is really just the beginning, because the story artists play a crucial role in shaping the story. The artists take what’s on the page and build upon it with visual storytelling, character performances, and visual gags, often uncovering exciting new moments that make the story even stronger! We’re excited to be approaching our Rough Pitch! This is the first time we’ll be able to experience our full story visually from beginning to end, and will really help us to make important decisions about pacing, storytelling, and character development as we move forward through production.  Art by Jenny Wu Production Team
Our team is growing! We’re excited to welcome many new members to our production team who have not only proven to be fast and eager learners, but continue to go above and beyond for the team in more ways than we could ever dream. Thank you to production for your endless support, hard work, and always bringing the calm to every storm!
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Our CG Production Program is officially halfway through!  3D Asset by Betty Liu Art (3D and 2D) Under the leadership of our Asset Supervisors, Angela Sae-Lam and Ali Daneshgar, our modeling team has started turning our 2D designs into 3D models using Autodesk Maya and Blender. We launched our artists a few weeks ago, using a detailed Modeling Style Guide provided by our Art Leads, and are working closely with the Design team to fine tune details and ensure that the 2D design translates properly into 3D. In addition, our 2D artists have been providing adhoc support whenever more clarity is needed and are working on solidifying our style frames which will be passed off to Lighting. One of the interesting challenges was designing a character made out of glass. We had to consider movement, design and composition, and interactions with various objects in the scene.  3D Art by Yoona Hwang Pre-Vis In order to make sure that our story is properly reflected through the environment, the Asset, Animation, and Edit teams have been collaborating closely. We have been working to solidify processes for file sharing and clear communication pathways so that everyone is in sync and has visibility into progress. While our Asset teams are providing the proxies, low poly, and high poly models, our Animation team has been working on camera placement and Edit has been working on keeping the animatic updated whenever a new render comes in. We’ve also been working closely with one of our Directors, Madison Lin, to understand camera placement and movement throughout our story.  3D Art by Kaylee Tan Production This month has been a great learning experience as we have concluded the Pre-Production phase of our journey and have turned our attention to supporting our Asset, Animation & Lighting, Tech, Music, and Edit teams. Our biggest challenge so far has been creating and solidifying the collaboration process between Asset, Animation & Lighting, and Edit in regards to Layout as this is the first time interdepartmental communication and handoffs have been instrumental. We have built a robust documentation and communication pipeline and will continue to iterate and fine-tune as challenges arise. In addition, we celebrated the addition of 3 more members who have shown interest in supporting our various Production departments. R&D Exploration During this month, our Animation Team, under the guidance of our Animation Supervisor, Ashley Chung, has been exploring different run and walk cycles and soccer tricks. Our two main characters are unique in their composition which makes it more challenging to animate properly. Our Lighting team is just getting started, familiarizing themselves with Unreal Engine and our File Management tool under the leadership of one of our Directors, Adnan Hussain. They have also started experimenting with some stylized lighting scenarios to help push the painterly style we’re aiming for. Music Lastly, we launched our Music team this month! Our two composers, Neel Agrawal and Michael Singh, are working together to create the soundtrack that supports the emotion you’ll encounter throughout the story. We were lucky to bring on team members with strong musical backgrounds and experience with traditional Middle Eastern instruments, such as the Oud. Their process begins by iterating on various designs, motifs, and rhythms to truly develop the proper sound and accurately portray Middle Eastern music. What’s Next Soon, we’ll be officially launching our Animation team which will carry through the rest of the Program. We can’t believe we’re already half way through the program and are excited to head toward the later half of the production. Stay tuned for next month for more progress updates!  Art by Debra Rengga
Written by Robin Burney, Animation Production Coordinator We are in the midst of an exciting transition period here with FOREST and would love to share updates on this milestone! From Boards to Animatic: The Moving Picture The Story Department has officially wrapped after delivering the successful Cleans Storyboard Pitch. Now that the full script has been translated into polished, final storyboards, the Story Department is passing the baton to the Editorial Department. This marks the end of the storyboard phase of pre-production, and the first next steps: animatics! Editorial has begun to take the final clean boards and edit them into an animatic, the first look at a film with timing and sound. For the first time, the characters and world are moving on screen in the earliest versions of the film! The Story Department: Celebrating the Finish Line As a part of the Immersive Lab, this 2D Production Program emulates industry-standard production to empower Asian professionals to succeed in the professional animation industry. In that mission, our team of board artists were tasked with delivering boards within 5 weeks, which is standard for the television industry – in other words, very quickly! In honor of celebrating the work the team has accomplished, we asked our Head of Story Grace Park to share her most valuable experience in the 2D Production Program that she will take with her moving forward. “It has been a great learning opportunity for me to receive direct feedback from directors and producers, who all brought different perspectives to the table, but are all ultimately trying to make the film better. I learned to stay flexible, adjusting the boards as we receive those notes, but also to hold my ground sometimes, if I am convinced that my ideas could make the film stronger. It's a delicate balance, and I will always remember to keep this as I move forward with my journey as a story artist!”  Cleans Board Pitch group photo with Story Department and FOREST crew. Animation: On Your Marks, Get Set…! This month, we have launched two talented Heads of Animation Joanna Jiang and Lara Pascal, as well as our skilled Compositing Lead Eric Wolford. In the interim of pre-production wrapping up and animation gearing up, our leads are busy fleshing out the pipeline with early animation tests. This is an important problem-solving phase of the pipeline where the team ensures the designs, software, and crew are ready for animation. This involves experimental walk (or flying) cycles, which gives the added bonus of finally seeing our characters moving on screen for the first time! Gearing up for animation also involves our Animation and Compositing Leads working closely with the Design Department to tweak characters and props. One benefit of animation tests is discovering new ways to streamline designs for the animation pipeline. Though pre-production is wrapping, the Design artists still have plenty of work to look forward to!  Layout by Ivory Bi, paint by Michelle Wirono. What’s Next The FOREST crew is welcoming a large team of animators this July, and very soon, animation will be in full swing. This new phase of production includes experimenting with composers and soundtrack, as well as planning for the post-production stage in the future. We are excited to share more soon!  Art Board by Ashley Lam
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AuthorThe Program & Production Team Archives
August 2026
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