A Collaborative Animation Production Developed Across the Curriculum

Kate Shelley and the Bridge of Darkness is a long-form collaborative animation project inspired by the true story of Kate Shelley, the Iowa teenager who crossed a damaged railroad bridge during a violent storm in 1881 to warn an approaching train of danger.

Stephen Jennings brought us the idea to develop this project as part of his thesis research. The project became more than the production of a single film. In collaboration with Steve, the project developed across multiple courses, independent studies, and graduate research, it created a shared production environment in which students could carry work from story and visual development through character performance, asset creation, animation, and technical pipeline development.

My role expanded with the project. I contributed to story development, character and performance design, art direction, asset creation, facial rigging, animation, and production mentorship while helping students translate work developed in individual courses into a larger collaborative production.

Developing the Story Through Storyboarding

The project began with story development and advanced storyboarding, where students explored how the historical events surrounding Kate Shelley could be shaped into a dramatic visual narrative. Rather than treating storyboards simply as illustrations of a finished script, we used them as a tool for discovering the film—testing staging, performance, pacing, camera placement, and the relationship between Kate and the railroad workers whose lives depend upon her actions.

As the project continued into later courses, story decisions could be revisited in response to discoveries made through character development, animation, and production. This allowed students to experience storyboarding as part of an evolving production process rather than an isolated preproduction exercise.

Developing Characters Through Collaboration

Character development became an iterative exchange between student exploration, faculty feedback, and production requirements.

Early designs for characters such as Ed and Adam explored a wide range of silhouettes, proportions, personalities, and costume possibilities. I worked over student sketches to demonstrate alternatives and help clarify shape language, appeal, and character relationships while preserving promising ideas already present in the original designs.

Those explorations were then refined into final production designs and turnarounds by other members of the team. The resulting characters therefore reflect a collaborative design process rather than the work of a single artist.

Developing Facial Performance

Facial performance became a distinct area of development as the project moved across courses and production stages. Working from character and expression designs developed by student artists, including Gabi Delo’s expression studies for Kate, I created facial systems in Toon Boom Harmony that translated those designs into production-ready controls.

The rigs incorporated master expression controls, phoneme-based mouth shapes, and blink controls, allowing students to move from drawn performance concepts into repeatable animation workflows. This work later informed our approach to facial performance as the project transitioned fully into 3D production.

From Hybrid Animation to 3D Production

The project was originally developed within a 2D/3D hybrid animation workflow. As production continued, however, the needs of the film and the development of new technical approaches led us toward a fully 3D pipeline.

That transition became an important part of the educational experience. Students encountered the kinds of changes that occur during an evolving production and learned that visual development, modeling, rigging, texturing, and animation must continually respond to one another.

The project therefore became a laboratory for solving production problems as much as a vehicle for producing finished animation.

Building the World: Props and Production Assets

A large collaborative film depends upon far more than its principal characters. I contributed directly to the production by modeling a range of props and environmental assets, including the lantern that became one of the film’s central visual elements, along with picture frames, a clothesline, outhouse, dolly handcart, and other supporting assets.

Creating these objects also allowed me to work alongside students within the same production pipeline I was asking them to learn. The lantern in particular moved beyond being a simple prop: because Kate carries it through the storm, it became both an important storytelling device and a recurring source of light throughout the film.

Developing a Shared Visual Language

As the project moved into 3D production, maintaining visual consistency across assets created by different artists became increasingly important.

Color keys developed by the visual-development team established the film’s visual direction. From those paintings, we developed a standardized production palette and a simplified material workflow that translated those color decisions into the 3D pipeline. A library of material spheres provided each color with matte, semi-gloss, gloss, and metallic variations, allowing artists to quickly transfer established color and surface properties to UV-mapped models.

The system helped turn visual-development decisions into practical production standards while allowing a large group of artists to work within the same visual language.

Tools Built for the Production

As production demands increased, custom tools were developed to simplify repetitive tasks and make the pipeline more accessible to student artists.

Graduate researcher Stephen Jennings developed Maya shelf tools that supported several areas of production, including material assignment and facial performance. The material system allowed artists to transfer established color and specularity properties quickly, while expression and phoneme-bank tools helped animators manage facial poses as the project moved into 3D.

These tools emerged in response to actual production problems, turning the film itself into an environment for graduate research, experimentation, and pipeline development.

Performance and Animation

As assets moved into production, character performance became the point where the project’s earlier work in storyboarding, character design, facial development, rigging, and staging came together.

I contributed animation to selected sequences while continuing to work with students on performance, posing, facial expression, and shot development. The goal was not simply to complete individual shots, but to help maintain continuity of character and storytelling across work produced by multiple animators.

Collaborative Production as Pedagogy

Kate Shelley and the Bridge of Darkness ultimately became a production environment extending far beyond a single class. Work developed through Advanced Storyboarding, 2D/3D Hybrid Animation, Character Blocking and Performance, Facial Performance, independent studies, and graduate thesis research could feed into the same evolving project.

That continuity allowed students to see how specialized skills connect within a larger production. A character explored in one course could later be modeled, rigged, animated, revised, and incorporated into finished shots by students working in another. Graduate research could generate tools that improved the workflow for the broader production team.

My role within that environment shifted between producer, collaborator, mentor, artist, and problem solver. Rather than simulating a production pipeline through disconnected assignments, the project allowed students to participate in a shared creative problem whose needs evolved as the film developed.

An Ongoing Production

Kate Shelley and the Bridge of Darkness remains an active production. Stephen Jennings has continued developing the project following his work at Clemson and is carrying the production forward in his new role as a Professor at Wichita State University. Where possible, I hope to remain involved and contribute to the project as it moves toward completion.

The continuing life of the film reflects the collaborative model through which it developed. What began as work distributed across courses, independent studies, and graduate research has grown beyond the boundaries of a single class or institution. The project remains both a developing animated film and an example of how sustained collaborative production can connect teaching, creative practice, mentorship, and student research.