Director of Animation Briana Yarhouse travels to India for World Audio Visual & Entertainment Summit
During the four-day summit, Yarhouse participated in panel discussions, presented awards, appeared on television, and connected with industry leaders from around the world.
Briana Yarhouse (fourth from left, tan blazer) on the stage at a WAVES event.
Briana Yarhouse (right) with fellow attendees at WAVES.
Briana Yarhouse (center, tan blazer) presents an award at WAVES.
In early May, Interlochen Director of Animation Briana Yarhouse traveled to Mumbai, India for the World Audio Visual & Entertainment Summit (WAVES).
During the four-day event, which ran May 1-4 at the Jio World Centre, Yarhouse participated in two panel discussions: “Cross-cultural Storytelling: Building Global Narratives Through Animation” and “Changing Dynamics of AVGC XR Sector in the AI Era: How to Bridge Industry & Academia.”
The panelists in the AI session explored the various ways in which AI will streamline the industry while emphasizing the importance of human creativity.
“The theme that we were all discussing was that when it comes to animation, creativity requires humans to make it really work,” Yarhouse said. “The parts of animation that AI is really going to impact are redundancy elements like coloring animation. That’s amazing, because it’s just grunt work.”
Yarhouse, who joined Interlochen in 2022 as the founding Director of Animation, says the rise of AI has always informed her direction for Interlochen’s program.
“I’ve always known that AI was going to be a player in this situation,” Yarhouse said. “I’ve made the animation program at Interlochen have a couple of different ‘legs’ that it stands on. One is that we work in physical animation a lot, because it allows for a lot of the indexicality of the image to be seen. There’s no way that AI is ever going to replicate that.”
“I’ve also focused on thinking of ourselves as creators of story by having yearly pitch competitions,” Yarhouse continues. “I want our students to think of themselves as leaders rather than people who are just pushing buttons. There’s nothing wrong with loving to draw, and there’s always room for that. But I want them to think about themselves in other terms, if they’re so inclined.”
Yarhouse also presented awards at two of the summit’s three awards ceremonies and appeared on one of India’s national television networks.
“It was really nice to talk about animation and be introduced as the Director of Animation at Interlochen,” she said.
Watch Yarhouse’s interview on DD India
Outside of panels and ceremonies, Yarhouse focused on making connections with fellow summit attendees.
“I was so busy meeting with people all the time,” she said. “It was a very wide, diverse range of people. We would hang out and talk for hours about animation.”
Those connections have already begun to bear fruit: Yarhouse recently spoke via Zoom at a workshop for women in animation, invited by Senior Character VFX creator, Pramita Mukherjee. She also met the head of character visual effects at Dreamworks Animation, Pradipto Sengupta.
“Our students are going to the LightBox Expo in Pasadena in October, so Pramita and Pradipto offered to lead a tour for our students,” Yarhouse said. “It’s all because of the connections I made in India.”
Through her conversations, Yarhouse also had the opportunity to spread the word about a new animation initiative she is spearheading, “Peace for the Planet”. Inspired by the short films Russian animators created in protest of the invasion of Ukraine, the project invites animators to develop works around the topic of peace.
“The goal is to push against the idea that we need to have conflict to resolve our differences,” Yarhouse said. “There are 28 armed conflicts going on in the world right now as we speak. The power of the pencil is mightier than the sword, and it scares regimes.”
Yarhouse challenged Interlochen Arts Academy animation students to create short films about peace, then presented these works to the international board of ASIFA as a model for the initiative.
“They really liked the idea, because it fits with our goal of using animation to promote understanding among people around the world,” she said. “This initiative is now being launched around the world.”
As the current president of the Animation Workshop Group—a cohort of artist-teachers who lead animation workshops for children in 23 countries—Yarhouse is also working to get young animators involved in the project. Last summer, Intermediate animation students at Interlochen Arts Camp created works about peace as a model for AWG workshops around the globe.
“We’ve already put a whole bunch of animation on this subject into the can to seed these ideas out to the rest of the planet,” Yarhouse said. “We’re working with animators worldwide to build a momentum of voices speaking out against violence to solve our differences. I feel like this ties into what we’re doing here at Interlochen: Looking at the world stage and asking, ‘How can we model what it means to be an artist-citizen?’ There’s more to being an artist than just getting a job and making money. It’s about the quality of life that we’re going to promote, celebrate, and lift our voices toward.”
Yarhouse handed out 400 cards about the initiative to creators she met during the summit.
“I’m hoping there will be some good fruit—lots of animators joining in that conversation worldwide,” she said.
During her final day in India, Yarhouse had the opportunity to tour Mumbai with the mother of Instructor of Theatre Gulshirin Dubash.
“She’s 80, and she’s lived in the city her whole life, so she knows and loves all the history,” Yarhouse said. “We went to lunch together and did some shopping. She even took me to her bank—there were some classic 1920s and 1930s pictures of the city there—and went to a park so we could see the core of the city.”
Ultimately, the WAVES trip was an opportunity for Yarhouse to explore India’s vast film and television industry and connect with friends new and old.
“It was a time for the international animation community—in particular the Indian animation community—to come together,” Yarhouse said. “Thanks to the government of India for hosting me and ASIFA India and president Sanjay Khimesara for inviting me. To get a chance to see people I’ve known for years but never met in person was really rewarding.”
Want to learn more about animation at Interlochen? Explore our summer camp programs for middle school and high school animators, or check out Interlochen Arts Academy’s animation major.
