By Rick Vacek | August 11, 2025
Until this year, recognition of the Short-term Working Group program’s success was limited to The University of Texas at Dallas.
Now the SWGs are known internationally.
Steamboat, a short produced in a Spring 2024 SWG led by Dr. Christine Veras, was selected for a special screening at the closing ceremony of the 2025 Annecy International Animation Film Festival.
The biggest names in animation descend upon Annecy, France, every June to celebrate the best of the best in the field, and this was the third time Veras has sat there with them.
But to have students’ work in the Assistant Professor of Animation’s experimenta.l. Animation Lab on display at the oldest and most prestigious event in her specialty?
“It couldn’t be more perfect,” she said. “It was quite an adventure and unexpected to happen one year after the SWG.”
The adventure began on Jan. 1, 2024, when the 1928 Disney cartoon that introduced Mickey and Minnie Mouse, Steamboat Willie, was released to the public domain. That meant animators could reuse that version (and no other) of a much tougher and more mischievous Mickey than the one children came to know and love in subsequent years.
Veras had no plans to use the newfound access to Disney’s original animation until she received a call to action for the 2024 AURORA Video Art Night in Dallas. She quickly realized that Steamboat Willie would be the ideal content and a SWG would be the ideal content creator.
In Veras’ first SWG the previous summer, she and her students had created a massive cutout of Gertie the Dinosaur for a student play, Winsor and Gertie. This time, the nine student volunteers had to size up the best ways to cut out the 267 frames of Mickey she printed and select the historical references that would go in that void for the 1-minute, 40-second video.
As usual, the SWG was educational amid the extracurricular entertainment.
“The students are so focused on the computer, and doing something with your hands is really gratifying,” she said. “I was able to show them how the original animation was made and how its frame-by-frame changes were very smooth for the time.”
But don’t be fooled by the smaller scale and the seemingly simple handiwork. The project had some large challenges.
It didn’t take long for Eliana Nark to join the group of students finding the photos, graphics and other illustrations for the window left by the Mickey outline.
“Cutting out Mickeys is a lot harder than you think when you’re exacto-knifing him out of a piece of paper a thousand-plus times, trying to get that juuuuust right and not lose his hand or his tail or something,” she said. “I was researching because I fumbled a Mickey or two and I’d had enough.”
Not that researching was the easy way out. With 24 images per second, the video required more than 2,000 images, everything from 1950s advertisements to pop culture. It took the first three weekly two-hour sessions to snip all the Mickeys and clip all the images, leaving the final two hours for capturing it all.
It was not unlike the typical Friday meet-ups at Veras’ lab, in which she invites students to experiment with different techniques and different surfaces, including glass and sand. Experimental animation is an umbrella term for forms that don’t fit the traditional definition of animation, and Veras works at creating an atmosphere that inspires creativity.
“The environment was very welcoming,” said Mozhdeh Khamsehnezhad, who also took part in the Gertie project and one other SWG before graduating with her Master of Fine Arts in animation.
A key aspect of the environment was music. One of the students brought a radio, and Veras marveled at the way they readily accepted tunes from various nations – including Khamsehnezhad’s home, Iran.
Anisha Chaudhary, another recent MFA graduate who helped build Gertie, served as a teaching assistant for Veras and greatly appreciated her classroom techniques, such as having students substitute sketches for notes and then showing the drawings to their peers.
“Her classes in general, I think that they’re very structured, and they can be challenging. But I think that they’re very rewarding because you learn a lot,” Chaudhary said. “She’s very personable with every student.”
And that means all students. While most of the SWG members were graduate students, Dillon Weaver was in the spring of his freshman year when he signed up. He enjoyed it so much, he did another SWG with Veras last spring.
“The SWGs show that there always is something to do at UTD to fulfill yourself creatively in your field if you look for it,” he said. “It’s just encouraging yourself to go out there and finding something to do with your fellow classmates in an environment with professors you know, and the work you do can go far. It can be shown in a little exhibit. It can be shown around the world.”
The Steamboat animation certainly has been shown around the world – at the AURORA, at three other U.S. events, and in Korea and Finland. That convinced Veras to submit it for the big one, the Annecy, along with some other shorts her students had done.
When she got rejections for the students’ work but didn’t hear anything about Steamboat, she prepared for her study-abroad trip to Great Britain, figuring that the SWG product hadn’t been selected, either.
Just as she was about to leave, one email changed the course of her summer and SWG history:
“On behalf of Marcel Jean, Artistic Director of Annecy 2025, I’m very pleased to let you know that he has retained your film Steamboat for a special presentation during the award ceremony of Annecy 2025, which will take place on Saturday, June 14. Congratulations for this ‘last minute’ selection!”
The news generated considerable elation among the students after Veras shared it with them, but it also created a travel issue for her: There was a week between the end of her study abroad and the start of the festival.
After booking new flights and arranging to stay with friends in England for a few days, she was ready to enjoy her free pass to the entire festival.
The “special presentation” was introducing each of the four award categories with a short video. Jean later told Veras, “Your film was the first one that I selected because I knew it’s going to be perfect for the Experimental Animation category.”
But he also had a question: “Did you show it to the people at the Disney studios?”
When she told him she hadn’t, he replied, “They are going to love it! I’m sure!”
Finally, it was time for the closing ceremony and the screening of Steamboat, with the SWG logo prominent among the closing credits. Veras couldn’t believe it as she sat alongside all those big names in animation … including Disney representatives.
And to think that all this newfound fame grew out of a SWG.
“The brilliance of the SWG is that it is not discipline oriented,” she said. “It’s for everybody, and then the potential just expands.”
All across the world.