Role: Animation Lead, Motion Designer, Project Manager
Company: Art of Problem Solving, Beast Academy
Published: 2026
Beast Academy is Art of Problem Solving's most iconic brand: what started as a series of comic books and illustrated characters created by Jason Batterson and artist Erich Owen, has grown into a multi-million dollar suite. BA now encompasses educational products of all types, ranging from illustrated math books, to science books, wen puzzles, and its very own Beast Academy Online self-paced platform, now harboring a community of over 50,000 young beast learners.
After working with the BA brand for nearly five years, I had the privilege to be the Animation Lead for their first BA animated series pilot: The Elevator Pitch. Over that period of time I grew to love these characters, and poured all of my knowledge on the brand and world into this project to bridge the gap between comic-book driven STEM learning, and an animated story.
For this project, I worked side by side with a talented team of creatives including series creator Jason Batterson, Lead Artist Greta Selman, and our Brand Lead Liza Marino.
BUILDING A SYSTEM
Despite it's total run time being a little over two minutes, I knew this was going to be a big challenge to tackle as the sole animator. Luckily, I had spent time building an animation system for BA in my early years at AoPS, setting up the infrastructure to tackle anything from ads to short, and even long-form animations. This system encompassed character rigs, props, environment set up, animation pipelines, and documentation on how to replicate it. Having this system ready saved me potentially months of work, and made this project feasible despite our lean team and tight resources.
THE ANIMATION PIPELINE
We had been having conversations for a while about making various different animated video content for our BA platform, so naturally my first step was to create a comprehensive animation production pipeline that could be used in both small and large projects - keeping or removing steps depending on project need. I delved in and took animation knowledge from my previous experiences, and studied the different production pipelines created by other animation studios in the 2D / 3D industries. I then adapted that knowledge into a series of steps that would fit allow our world and characters to be brought to life with relative ease.
From there, we adapted this documentation onto project management platforms, and google sheets to break these steps down into a series of comprehensive tasks I could communicate and share with the team. The majority of our team didn't possess in-depth animation knowledge, so outlining these steps was crucial for the team to know where we were headed and how long things were going to take.
RIGGING THE BEASTS
This is where the tedious work began. Back when I started in 2021, the AI race was just beginning, and we didn't have agentic AI tools to help with the tedious work of building fully functional character rigs with strict naming conventions. We had a large library of working characters - there were 17 base student and teacher characters - but the catch was that each of these had 3-5 variants each, given that the artist team created a different character depending on their grade level. Each character was differed widely in size, age, and characteristics. In reality, I was looking at animating about 85 characters, with more being added as different projects demanded different characters.
When I got these however, they were illustrator files that had not been prepped with animation in mind, so I had to do double the prepping rigging work - I had to build one organized character puppet for illustrator, and a separate rig for After Effects to plug into any project. In total I ended prepping 170 assets, learning how to adapt and make my process quicker with each new character.
IDLE CYCLES
After setting up the rig came the fun part - bringing these characters to life. The cast of beasts was so fun and diverse to work with, that I found it relatively simple to extract personality from their bubbly shapes, curious eyes, and enthusiastic smiles. The idle cycles seen below were made to capture the personalities of each, until our BA stakeholders were happy with how their characters interacted with the world around them - but most important of all - how the showcased problem solving in real-time via their distinct approaches to math.
ANIMATIC, CLEVER PLACEHOLDERS
Fast-forwarding back to the present date and with our animation systems in place, we began to create our series pitch. I first sat down with Jason Batterson and went through a roster of ideas we could turn into an episode based on his original comic book series. We landed on one of his favorite chapters: "The Elevator Problem." Here, the Beasts attempt to get to floor 41 of Hilbert's Hotel using a series of elevators that can only skip a certain number of floors, and unable to go directly to any specific floor. Their journey takes them down a conundrum of adding, subtracting, and problem-solving in order to find the right combination of numbers that can get them to their destination.
Our team however, was facing a different kind of logistic problem - all of our artists were busy working on different projects across the company, so we had nobody readily available to help us storyboard our idea to get it approved through stakeholders. I worked with Jason to develop a storyboard / animatic hybrid which would include AI-generated place holders to give our viewers an idea of setting and tone, while I placed our characters as stand-ins to deliver their lines. At this point, I also decided to get in our voice actress to do all of our final voices and lock our dialogue from the start since lacked the luxury of an audio-dubbing soundstage for post.
Once we went through several iterations, we had our first rough-cut, which gave our team a sense of pace and timing in order to move into production.
ANIMATION & COMPOSITING
With our narrative locked in, I could focus on bringing our beasts to life - and this is where my character rigs were put to the test. In After Effects, I set up a whole system of parented assets that could talk to one another so that I only had to focus on animating key elements of expression - such as arms, body, and eye movements. Along with that, I set up my After Effects template in a way where I could animate each shot individually, with a duplicate character rig dedicated for each shot. That way, if there were any changes required for any given shot, tampering with the rig of one would not cause changes to any other shot in the short.
A few weeks after delving into the main character animation segment, I received all the final background assets from our art lead Greta Selman, and input them into our final piece. My jaw-dropped at the beauty of the work she had created! The hotel was shimmering with art-deco influence, and it fit the vibe and quirkiness of our storyline like a glove. With all of our assets in place, I could ship our short into post-production.
POST, MUSIC & SFX
For the final piece of our animation puzzle, we needed an original soundtrack. I had temp stock tracks cut into our original animated edit to aid with the shorts' vibe and pacing, but our Beast Academy Online product suite was very specific in terms of instrumentation - so we needed something that sounded like the BA world that had already been created. I recruited our very talented email marketing manager, Sita Sunil, who just happened to have a degree in music composition. I sat down with her and gave her a series of prompts pulled from our BA universe that best described out characters, along with a series of open source audio inspiration from my favorite video games / movies to get her creative juices sparking.
Bottom line - I was blown away with what she came up with. It not only perfectly captured the BA Universe that had already been created, but it also added an extra degree of flare that was perfectly tailored to the story we wanted to tell.
SOCIAL CUT DOWNS
Once our final cut received stakeholder approval, I worked with our VP of marketing to develop a series of social cut downs to promote our animation on social media. These were tricky because there were a lot of relevant details that would get cut out from our main narrative to adapt to the square screen, so I had to get creative in what bits to show that would tease at the animation we had created.
Overall, this was one of the most rewarding projects to work on, and everyone in the team knocked it out of the park with their contributions to this short.
CREDITS
Animation Lead & Project Manager: Nestor Tomaselli
Script Writer & Series Creator: Jason Batterson
VP of Beast Academy: Anju Khetan
VP of Marketing: Carl Brinker
Creative & Brand Lead: Liza Marino
Art Lead & Set Designer: Greta Selman
Music Composition & Score: Sita Sunil
Character Voices: Krystell Futtrell
Robot Voice: Nestor Tomaselli