With student Joaquin Baldwin at the ANNIEs

Watch our video interview with Joaquin Baldwin, from the red carpet at the ANNIEs

MFA animation candidate Joaquin Baldwin shared the red carpet at the annual ANNIE awards on Friday, January 30, with the directors and writers of some of the top animated productions of the year, including “WALL-E,” “Kung Fu Panda” and “Bolt.”

In a rare coup, Baldwin’s student film “Sebastian’s Voodoo,” a dark CG fable about a self-sacrificing voodoo doll was a nominee for the prize as Best Short Subject of 2008. All the other nominated films were made by top professional animation studios, including Disney’s “Glago’s Guest,” Pixar’s “Presto,” Bill Plympton’s “Hot Dog” and the ultimate winner, Aardman Animation’s “Wallace & Gromit: A Matter of Loaf and Death.”

The ANNIE Awards, presented each year by ASIFA-Hollywood, the International Animated Film Society, are regarded as the field’s highest honors, and graduates of the UCLA Animation Workshop have been regular fixtures at the ceremony.

“Initially,” reports UCLA Today,

“Baldwin thought about bringing to life voodoo dolls that would fight each other. “I had the idea of doing something funny.” But he realized that comedy is not his genre, said the animator, who hopes eventually to create features like Guillermo Del Toro’s “Pan’s Labyrinth.”

“Instead, he used the magic of animation to give these primitive stuffed dolls a range of human emotions. His most difficult challenge was to make them — well — expressive, no small task when you’re working with very little.

“They don’t even have eyeballs, just Xes,” said Baldwin of their cross-stitched “eyes.” “It was hard to show what direction they were looking at because they have no eyes. So it’s really just a trick, framing the action perfectly, so that they look like they are staring at something when they’re not.”

Born in Paraguay to an environmental activist mother and an artist father, Baldwin was experimenting with computer graphics and basic 3-D animation by the time he was 15.

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