Our protagonists are born on different continents. She dreams of bucking expectations of a career in medicine. As a young adult, he realizes his future does not lie in biology, his field of study. Their common love: art. They meet in an unlikely place, in the computer lab at CCAD where he works between day classes and nights in his off-campus apartment. Her social circle is among international students, whose common language is not sharing a language. They fall in love—you saw this coming, right?—and ride off into the sunset together toward Walt Disney Animation Studios.
Bumps? Oh, yeah. There are lots of bumps. Unemployment. Dry spells. Periods of creative burnout. Questioning decisions.
But stick with the story and you’ll see they do get there—to a place of artistic challenge and opportunities for discovery.
Fawn Veerasunthorn (Media Studies, 2005) and Ryan Green (Media Studies, 2003) best known for their storyboarding work on Disney animated movies including Moana, Zootopia, Raya and the Last Dragon, Frozen, and Frozen 2. In 2022, Veerasunthorn was selected to direct Wish, the company’s 100th anniversary film, with animation veteran Chris Buck. Veerasunthorn and Green left CCAD intending to work as animators, and they did for a short time, but they both pivoted to storyboarding pretty quickly. There were more opportunities in this niche of the industry, and the work itself felt far more expressive than the Flash animation that was de rigueur in the early 2000s.
Reflecting on their journeys so far, they credit the foundations they formed at CCAD, their willingness to take risks on themselves, their unquenchable thirst to create, and the occasional moment of magical serendipity.
Choosing Art and CCAD
Green was three years into a bachelor’s degree in biology when he took an art class to fulfill an elective. “That class changed my life,” he says. “I started carrying a sketchbook. I remember my roommate saying, you’re spending more time on that art project than you are studying for your biology exams.”
Seeing Disney’s 1999 animated film Tarzan in the theater was a lightning-bolt moment: “It was like figure drawings up on the screen. Seeing Tarzan moving around—this was animator Glen Keane’s work. I was like, maybe I could do that.”
He applied for art school. “CCAD won me over because of the foundation studies they had at the time,” Green says. “I didn’t know much about art. I don’t think I’m going to be able to cut it. Foundation studies allowed me to understand the dominant, subordinate and accent of design. I’m colorblind, so I can’t see color as well as other people. That understanding of a mathematical approach to color was very helpful. I use that with Photoshop to this day.”
Meanwhile, in Bangkok, Thailand, Veerasunthorn was in high school, staring down a future in medicine. “Most of my friends were doing that. This is a very certain thing. Life is about going to school, doing really well and at the end of that, you’ll have a career and you can support yourself and your family,” she says.
Paitoon Ratanasirintrawoot (Industrial Design, 1993), an alum of Veerasunthorn’s high school, gave a talk there when he was on vacation. Ratanasirintrawoot has created animations and visual effects for Disney and other studios. “For us kids in Thailand to hear that someone has a job in animation is pretty mind-blowing. It was the talk of the town. Like, can we really do this?” she says. She already had an interest in motion pictures and storytelling. “But I’d already written it off as impossible.”
She did not have a strong art background; her doodles weren’t going to make for a portfolio. She didn’t know what a college essay was. But meeting Ratanasirintrawoot—what were the chances?—revived her dream. She persuaded Ratanasirintrawoot she was serious, and he became her mentor and advocate, giving her feedback and advice on her portfolio and encouraging her to apply at CCAD. Persuading her family took patience and time.
“My parents said, OK, if you’re serious about this, let’s sit down and make a plan. Just that conversation helped me put things in perspective. It told me I’m going to have to work hard to earn people’s trust in doing this and that’s OK.”
She was energetic and unafraid of the unknown. “I was willing to jump in and do it even though I might not have done oil painting ever in my life. The first time I did that was at CCAD. I thought, if I’m persistent in something enough, at least I’ll end up better than if I didn’t try at all.”
Campus Life
Green lived off campus. With no car, he’d walk, hiking backpack strapped to his back, to the nearest grocery store, where he’d load up on weeks’ worth of groceries and haul it back home. His social life consisted mostly of working in the computer and photo lab, which involved troubleshooting computers and mixing photo-developing chemicals. That’s where he met Veerasunthorn.
“Those times are some of the most memorable. I think it’s because of the struggle. The struggle makes it stick in your head more,” he says.
He plunged into studies, soaking up the knowledge and naturally gravitating toward a few favorite instructors, including Bruce Barnes. “He was very enthusiastic about finding information from the studios. The internet wasn’t fully intact back then, so you didn’t just look up model sheets from Disney. He would find photocopies of photocopies of photocopies and bring them in and be like, ‘Look what I found, guys!’ You could barely see them, but it was like, ‘Oh, this is from a Disney portfolio.’ That really just kept me moving,” Green says.
Veerasunthorn connected with Charlotte Belland, current chair of CCAD’s Animation Program who had just joined the faculty. “She had a very calming, comforting demeanor, and 3D was a big new thing. Everyone was like, 2D is going away. You’ve got to learn this. She was the best teacher, the one who would support you through the emotional journey. I reached out to her to figure out this new landscape in animation, even though my focus at the time was in 2D, I liked her way of teaching, her style, methods and knowledge of the industry.”
Veerasunthorn also audited an illustration class with Ron Tardino.
“What he was teaching was character development in animation. It’s about understanding the character, the environments, the story you want to tell. That works hand-in-hand with what I discovered later in my career, which was storyboarding in animation,” she says. “He expected a lot from his students and it was a good challenge. It made you want to kind of reach inside yourself for more.”
Veerasunthorn adjusted not only to college but also a new climate and being immersed in her second language.
“I came in and stayed in the dorm the first year and got to know other international students,” she says. “I found that people who also have a language barrier, we did not have to finish sentences. We just understood what the other was trying to say, which is not a great way to learn the language, but we gravitate toward each other,” she says.
Have Skills, Will Travel
While they were still at CCAD, Green and Veerasunthorn both worked for Jamination, a Columbus scoreboard animation production company. They cut their artistic teeth making short animations shown on scoreboards at baseball fields and in arenas. This and a few other jobs would be the bulk of the animation work they’d do.
In the mid 2000s, Flash animation techniques were having a moment. It was effectively digital puppetry, changing the expression on a character’s face with a click. It didn’t suit Green. “But I love drawing, so going into storyboarding was just excellent,” he says. “I was like, oh, I get to draw again! It was almost like animating, but not with all the fluid details. But I was drawing key frames.”
After working for a while in Columbus, Green and Veerasunthorn moved to New York City and then Los Angeles, working on television series for Cartoon Network, Warner Bros., and Nickelodeon.
“The biggest thing in terms of storyboarding between television and feature is that in feature you have more time to try and fail at things to search for the best version of the story instead of working in something that’s episodic,” she says. “When I worked on Moana, I worked on this one sequence for nine months. During that time I was pregnant. So I told my daughter, ‘This took about the same time as you did.’”
In 2009, a friend from CCAD, Matt Flynn (Animation, 2003), suggested Green and Veerasunthorn as storyboard artists to producers at Illumination Studios. Flynn was a storyboard artist on Despicable Me. That connection led to work on Minions-themed shorts.
On a feature, Veerasunthorn says, artists get to know characters as they get to know people. “There’s a saying here at Disney that at some point, the film starts to tell you what it wants to be. When I started, I was like, we tell the film what we want it to be. And people were like, no, you’ve got to listen to these characters and don’t fight it,” Veerasunthorn says. “We discover an aspect of a character and we add it to make that person more complex, that feels real to us.”
Before he was hired at Disney in 2010, both he and Veerasunthorn were underemployed after Warner Bros. put a Looney Tunes project on hold and laid off everyone. He took odd jobs, freelancing on a Batman show and doing work on SeaWorld’s website. Then he got contract work at Disneytoon Studios on Pixie Previews, shorts featuring animated characters Tinker Bell and other Disney fairies. He was offered full-time work on the Batman series, but he stuck with Disney, hoping the contract would turn into full-time work. It did.
“And I still look back on it. It was kind of in a way, stupid, it didn't make sense, but I just went with my gut. They weren't offering me a job, but I just tried to wow them. And it worked out,” he says. “I really enjoyed drawing that content, so I was just hoping that it would lead to something else.”
Disney rejected Veerasunthorn’s applications multiple times, she told The New York Times in November 2023. So did Pixar. She applied almost seasonally, developing a dark humor about the pile-on rejections. She also kept going back, keeping the faith. She attributes her hire at Disney in 2011 to a change in perspective and portfolio.
While working in television, she’d started drawing an offbeat webcomic for creative joy. Her portfolio remained filled exclusively with professional work. Then she added panels from the webcomic. “I was like, might be weird, but whatever. Here are some comics about pants that are too tight,” she says. “The person who interviewed me at Disney was like, I saw that the thing about pants that are too tight, it's kind of funny. Do you like comedy? And I'm like, ‘I like comedy. I like weird things and I like quirky characters.’ And they were like, ‘Great, we like that. We see you.’”
Finding a professional home at Disney
The second season of Disney’s Short Circuit series of short films included Crosswalk, directed by Green. “It was a really cool experience because the studio doesn’t get involved with the content. This is just kind of like, we want to see what you do. It’s very much for exploration.”
Crosswalk was a living example of the collaborative culture at Disney. Green entered the project not settled on its style. When the team started talking, though, a vision emerged. “They introduced me to the idea of stop-motion style. Those things start moving forward because of suggestions of people around you. I did not have that in my head when I went into it. That’s the great part of the collaborative process at Disney.” Green continued in leadership roles at Disney Animation, recently serving as head of story on Moana 2.
At first, Veerasunthorn didn’t find it easy to be vocal during project meetings. Her supervisor encouraged her to speak up more. “He said, ‘I think you have more to offer, if you were to talk and share your thoughts. I would encourage you to do that.’ He told me there’s a way to do it that will make people listen to me. I did. And I found it’s important to trust your gut. If something comes to mind and you bring it up, even if you don’t have a solution, if you open it to the room, we always arrive at a better solution.”
This is baked into the collaborative nature of work at Disney, where everyone works as a team and creatively problem solves and advances projects.
Veerasunthorn started work on Disney’s 2023 animated feature “Wish” as head of story. After a year, she was invited to direct the film with Chris Buck (Frozen, Frozen 2). Moving from story to directing felt natural.
I feel like my whole life has been all about jumping into the challenge. I'm going to say yes and I'll figure it out. I already understood what the story means to me as a person. That is really important for a filmmaker to be able to hold that in your heart. And if you can communicate to your crew, the scene is about this and because this is our North Star, everything has to point to that.”
Nurturing Creativity
Green’s Instagram feed is filled with images of expressive faces carved into wood and carved functional objects, such as spoons. Meet the creative outlet of someone who is creative for a living.
“You almost always have to have something on the side for your own sake,” he says. “I still do really enjoy just doodle drawing. I love to go to tea shops and take a sketchbook and still just draw. The woodcarving has been the 3D form of that.”
How to make a path like the one forged by these two? Green says flexibility and persistence are the keys. “We had some dry spells. You have to just work through them, keep applying, keep talking to people,” he says. He tells an anecdote about a colleague who finished a project with nothing else ahead of him. He had lunch at the studio and ran into a showrunner he knew. Pretty soon, he had an episodic directing job. “It’s just coincidence, and you have to be looking and available for those coincidences to happen.”
Veerasunthorn leans into a vulnerability she first learned at CCAD and rediscovered at Disney. “I remember Charlotte said, if you hear repeated criticism, you have to take that into consideration. If you only hear it once, take it with a grain of salt. But if it’s a repeated thing, there might be something under it. We call it the note behind the note,” she says. “In art, you put yourself in your work, you put it up there and you take it personally when someone doesn’t like it. It’s unavoidable. Storyboarding is the kind of work where you throw out a lot of your trials in search for a better one. You have to believe this process will make the work better even though you’re not going to like it today. Better versions are ahead.”
Learn more about CCAD’s Animation program and Film & Video program, or apply here.
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