Julia Schoel turns heroic fantasy on its head in The Legend of Pipi

If you keep a close eye on up-and-coming talent from animation schools, there’s a good chance that you were one of the four million viewers who came across The Legend of Pipi. Inspired by a character that Julia Schoel created for a Dungeons & Dragons campaign, this SCAD thesis film follows the adventures of a scraggly little cat named Pipi (pronounced 'pee-pee') who is tasked with rescuing his kingdom’s missing princess. With a ticking clock, Pipi keeps encountering other damsels in distress. But will he find his princess in time? 

The comedic short trended across YouTube and Twitter, and has since inspired fanart of its own. We sat down with The Legend of Pipi's director, Julia Schoel, to discuss subverting fantasy tropes, inspiration, and the process behind directing an animated production.

Who collaborated on this project, and what were their roles?

Julia: I created the film and directed it. Then Birgit Uhlig, known as Pollovy on Twitter, volunteered to help storyboard. It just kept evolving and she was an assistant director by the end, which was awesome. So much of why this film got done and looks so good because Birgit is such a good artist.

Our main producer was Brooke Heishman. She organized all of our production scheduling documents, Excel sheets, and was the one who chased people down in DMs. She helped a lot with production stuff. And she helped me set up Toon Boom Harmony files. Every shot in the film is its own Harmony file. What I would do is make sure all the frames, the audio and the storyboard was there. I would also put notes in the Harmony file before the artist even got it, and brief them on their shot. 

We had Zoe Marson-Parkinson, a co-producer but also our background lead. She would help me oversee all the backgrounds and give notes. I was the one who passed and approved everything, but if I saw something in a background that needed plussing or just needed help, she would do that for me. It was so helpful! I learned a lot from her about backgrounds.

We also had a good friend of mine, Jess McGinnis, who is currently a background painter at Nickelodeon. She was there to help us oversee our backgrounds production process, to help supervise it and give us notes. She had some industry experience already when she came and helped with the film. I had never done backgrounds at the scope of a production; Of course, I can just open up and draw a background. I’ve done that a million times. But when it comes to preparing them for files and articulating what needs to be done for every shot — overlays, foreground, midground, all that fun stuff — she had all the information.

We made The Legend of Pipi in nine months, from start to finish. Everybody working on it was either working full-time or was a student full-time, and some people were doing both. We just made a little studio and are still all talking and offering jobs to each other.

How would you describe your role in this film and what did a typical day look like in production?

Julia: This experience was my first time directing. My role included just about anything that needed to be done. I was the one who needed to be steering the ship and I needed to be decisive. That was a hard learning experience because I’m someone who can’t decide what to eat on any given night. Having to give people a very straight answer of what I want and sticking to that was definitely a learning experience. 

My main role was holding all of us accountable for our responsibilities and our work while trying to maintain a productive environment and keeping the scope of our production in mind. I spent my day mostly expressing what I needed to get the vision I wanted. It was really just a lot of notes. 

Every Sunday we would have a big town hall meeting where everybody came and we went over all of the production updates — animation, backgrounds, cleanup, compositing — and I would give notes and other leads would give notes. Then I would do announcements. 

We’d have another meeting on Wednesday for people who had assignments to check in and get more notes halfway through the week. Then, by the end, we would also have meetings for every single department. It was just non-stop meetings for me. As the director typically you have to go to all of them.

Keeping in mind that people have other responsibilities and stuff they need to do, a lot of times people would drop something last minute. For me and Pollovy, my assistant director, if we couldn’t find somebody to pick something up, that would be something that we needed to pick up. We took on whatever we could just to get the film done.

Aside from directing, my primary role was as animation director. That’s more of my background. I come from hand-drawn animation, so I mainly had my hands directly on animation.

What did the planning stage of this project look like?

Julia: We started planning in September 2021. It started out with me and my friend, Domenic Romano. He helped me a ton with the story. I would sit in his room and we would talk and try to figure things out. 

Pipi didn’t start out as a story. My ideas don’t usually start out as stories. They start out with little visual cues. I think of the character design and that’s how Pipi became a thing. 

I came up with the first ideas of a story playing Dungeons & Dragons with Pipi and trying to figure out the motive for him going on adventures. It ended up with him being a mercenary for hire who just fails upwards and climbs the ranks of the kingdom, making mistakes that somehow work in his favour. I liked that, but it was way too broad of a story to work with for a short film. I went to Domenic Romano’s house and did a lot of the storyboarding on this film.

One of our biggest ideas with Pipi was subversion of expectations. Pipi himself is kind of a subversion. He has juxtaposition in his design; a scraggly little ugly cat, but in armour with a big sword. We wanted to carry that through in all the aspects of the film. We focused on finding the most hilarious and unexpected way we could show this cat’s story. 

One of the ways we did that was by giving it a wholesome look at first glance, but when you watch it you realize it has dark undertones. That’s why we ended up with the princess dying at the end due to his incompetence. You kind of think he’s going to be this underdog character, this little guy taking on all these monsters to save his princess. We subvert it by making him an antihero. He’s driven and self-proclaimed and brave, but it’s all purely for selfish intentions. 

Preproduction was fast. We had ten weeks for preproduction. Anybody’s who’s worked in preproduction on a project like knows that that is the hardest part; there are no answers to anything yet. You’re working with a blank canvas. Everybody’s scrambling and trying to figure out what they want. That process is stressful and takes time. The film that we ended up with is wildly different from my first pass at the storyboard. The Pipi storyboard graveyard is massive.

What were the main sources of inspiration for your team?

Julia: I’ve mostly been inspired by independent projects. My biggest inspiration is definitely Double King by Felix Colgrave. Something about seeing people have a vision and go through with it has always been super endearing to me. 

Felix Colgrave has been my biggest inspiration since I was fifteen. I love his stream of consciousness storytelling. I’m not someone who’s very focused on structure and logic. I’m someone who like feeling it out and the intuitive aspects of animation. I really was drawn to Colgrave’s way of storytelling because it was almost psychedelic, in a way. If you don’t structure it out, things flow into each other in a weird and unexpected way. And that’s how I approached Pipi. 

We also were inspired by Adventure Time, Amphibia and Shrek. Shrek didn’t have to explain anything. It’s already set in a fantasy world, takes those common tropes, and made a super interesting story out of subverting expectations.

How would you describe the style and animation techniques used to make this film? 

Julia: Our animation style didn’t follow very strict rules. Every shot had a different approach. For some, we wanted to feel really fluid to heighten the drama. And then for the more humorous stuff we wanted to push more limited animation. 

Since I come from an animation background, I wanted the animation of the film to be impressive. I wanted it to feel like it had good weight. I wanted it to feel believable and dynamic. Typically all animators would key out their shots and send those keys in for approval before anything else. And then, once those keys were approved, people would do their animation pass, which depending on the shot could have multiple stages.  

How would you describe the characters and monsters in this film, and what makes them funny?

Julia: All the characters and monsters in Pipi were very much self-indulgence. I created characters that I felt would be fun to draw. And sometimes they’re there for convenience. I was, like: “What an enemy Pipi can face? What is a typical fantasy creature?” And then I figured out what would be the most fun way for me to draw it. Sometimes that was difficult.

For the king, who’s a lion, I figured I needed somebody who could react to how ridiculous Pipi was in the film, since Pipi doesn’t talk. I wanted the king to be this grounded character. 

There’s a lot of stakes riding on Pipi. The king’s daughter has been kidnapped, and in walks this scraggly little cat who’s supposed to rescue his daughter. I was like, “I need someone sad and stern.” So I drew an old lion, because I thought that would be the most fun to draw. He was hard to teach other people. I was thinking about what I would like and not always thinking what’s easiest for other people to draw. 

I think what made characters funny was finding out the best ways to play up the juxtaposition between Pipi and the other characters. Anything Pipi had to face needed to be massive or intimidating, to make it funny. We tried to go ham with our designs, especially the minotaur. We wanted to make him big and muscly. There’s no way this little cat could defeat a big monster like that.

For the dragon, we wanted to introduce her as something that was big and scary and daunting, and then we wanted to reveal her as almost chicken-like. We wanted her to feel fumbly and funny so that when she and Pipi inevitably face off, they’re slipping and falling and tumbling after each other. It would make it more believable for Pipi to run off with her at the end. 

How did you go about designing scenes with the multiplane camera in mind?

Julia: That was easy, actually. Whenever I wanted a shot to look more dynamic, I was like, “Oh, we’ll make it Parallax.” Toon Boom Harmony's Z-depth function is so easy, I use it any time I can. I used to separate layers out in After Effects and do the effect manually, then someone told me you can do it in Harmony by putting all the layers in the top view, and moving them a little bit, and the camera does all the work for you. For every single shot that needed to be dynamic or had some movement, I said: “Separate that. Put it on a Z-plane.” 

In preproduction we would do a sketch of a background and plan out how many layers of background were needed. At the very least we would do a foreground, midground, and background. Some had more, some had less.

What was the process of coming up with the rescue scenes in the montage like? Which one received the most laughs from your team?

Julia: That was actually one of the biggest obstacles in making this film. I had a very clear vision for the first act and the third act. We struggled with the second act, which was the whole montage, because we were working in a really odd way trying to find the middle piece of a puzzle that keeps the pacing consistent and doesn’t slow the story down. For a while it did.

Our original idea with the montage, instead of having the music over fast-paced, zany, slapstick antics that we ended up with, we had the characters verbally interacting with Pipi. The scenes were longer, too. It just felt weird and empty, and didn’t feel grounded with the rest of the story. The storyboard was due in a week, and I was like: “I’ve got to scrap all of Act 2.” A friend and I got together and spent three full days and nights just figuring it out. 

We reboarded the entire segment to a SpongeBob song. Then we got our composer on and said: “Hey, can you match the BPM of this and make sure it carries the same energy?” The main composer, Bryan Teoh, knocked it out of the park. He really plussed everything. 

What people laugh at the most happened by accident. It was in the storyboarding stage. I was with my friend and I was shoving frames around and I accidentally deleted a bunch of frames, so that when Pipi slaps the sheep out of frame, the sheep is just there for one frame and then out of the screen. Everybody laughed at that. Then the animator who got that shot plussed it way more by making a huge hand flick the sheep off. It became the most-liked shot in the film.

What was the most challenging aspect of this production, and what were you most proud of?

Julia: A lot of challenges came from the people side. You can be great at art, but being a director is a whole different set of skills and I’d never done that before. It was basically learning every part of production. I learned way too much about myself in that amount of time. I learned very quickly that asking for help and relying on others is a strength and not a weakness. I’m very lucky to have worked with a very patient and supportive team. 

The best part was that it was incredibly rewarding to see my vision come together. At the beginning I had no idea how it would turn out. I’ve heard a lot of student film horror stories because so many students go into their thesis super ambitious. And I did that too. 

It was an uphill battle, trying to find all the resources we needed to make the film I had in mind, but it all came together at the end because of the team’s perseverance and incredible teamwork and collaboration. It was really rewarding to grow closer to the team, especially watching everybody’s art grow and develop through problem-solving and collaboration. We all worked together to make one cohesive project, and taking a bunch of artists with different backgrounds and doing that is a major feat.

How would you describe the reaction to your film so far?

Julia: It’s been amazing. I still can’t comprehend it. The creators that I really look up to responded to it. I wasn’t expecting that at all. One of our biggest touchstones was Amphibia. We weren’t expecting this but the creator, Matt Braly, responded to it and was very positive about it and congratulated us.

It was very validating. We all sacrificed a lot for this film, especially the leads. Nobody was paid, we were all very busy and tired, but we were confident in our vision and people responded to it exactly like we hoped. It trended in YouTube, which was crazy to us. It trended on Twitter too. Everybody’s feed was filled with this ugly little cat. 

This was such a fantastic film and man what a crew. Amazing direction, comedy, and animation. Really adored this world and this character. AND whoever did the sound design on Pipi scrabbling everywhere has my eternal respect. BLESS PIPI AND CONGRATS @papajoolia https://t.co/PtVvq7PqKs

— Matt Braly (@Radrappy) July 19, 2022

Do you have any advice for students planning their thesis films?

Julia: The biggest thing is to stay aware of the position everybody’s in and the people around you. As a director, if you make a student film, that film is your baby. You are going to be the one pulling the most all-nighters for that film. You’ll be the one stressing over it. That’s probably all you’re going to be thinking about for a year. 

Sometimes, it can be unfair to put some of those expectations you have onto other people because sometimes that's just not realistic. You need to work with what you’ve got and elevate people in the best ways you can. Find people’s strengths, and use those strengths. 

If you want something done on production, you need to be able to show that person how it’s going to be done. If there’s a problem, you need to be able to tell people what problem that is. You can’t just say you don’t like it. You have to give them a way to change it, a solution to their problem, and be encouraging. You’re going to have to reject a lot of stuff, but you have to be encouraging about it. 

Organization is huge. I’m not an organized person in the slightest, but you will have to learn to be. And having a good producer is super important.

Have fun with it too. Use this as an opportunity to learn and grow as an artist. 

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• For more behind-the-scenes material from The Legend of Pipi, follow @pipifilm on Twitter.
• Interested in a career-focused approach to animation school? Visit SCAD's website to learn more.
• Planning your thesis film? Learn more about student licenses for Harmony and Storyboard Pro.