When Alex Vvedenskiy isn’t making movies, he’s watching them. The Story Artist estimates that he watches about 120 movies a year, often sharing his reviews on the cinema-focused social networking site Letterboxd. “I don’t think authority matters much when reviewing a film,” he says of the Wild West that is internet criticism. “Films are made for the general audience, and so the general audience’s opinion is the one that matters in the end. Experience does, however, help you figure out what went wrong and how [a] film could’ve been saved.”
Growing up in the early 2000s in Russia, Vvedenskiy began building his own experience by watching TV shows and movies all the way through the end credits. Over time, he recognized legendary industry names like Looney Tunes’ Chuck Jones and Tom and Jerry’s William Hanna and Joseph Barbera. He would imagine what kinds of jobs these people had. And when he played with his toys, he says he’d close his eyes and picture the end credits for his own productions scrolling by on a black screen.
Both of his parents were mathematicians and had no connections to the animation industry, but they encouraged their son to pursue his passion since, after all, math and storytelling aren’t entirely different. “Crafting the perfect story structure for your movie is almost like solving a math equation,” Vvedenskiy says. “There are a lot of analytical parts, and it’s how you craft all those components together so that they bounce off each other.”
When it came time for Vvedenskiy to research where to go post-high school, his online sleuthing brought him to the Ringling College of Art and Design in Florida. He studied computer animation there, but found that he “got bored with trying to make something perfect” and that he didn’t have the patience to “spend several weeks working on, like, two seconds of animation.”
He preferred coming up with the ideas. “And still,” he says, “I’m pretty bad at drawing characters on models. What I’m good at is coming up with absurd scenarios that will hopefully make you laugh.”
He transferred to California Institute for the Arts to study character animation, and he spent several months with the Moscow animation studio Soyuzmultfilm working for the kids’ program Prostokvashino. This all helped him discover that his mindset was better suited for storyboard artistry.
“I would much rather spend five minutes on a single storyboard panel and move on to the next thing, and churn out a dozen or two dozen ideas in a day, and then see what works,” he says.
Vvedenskiy describes the shows that inspired him as having “humor based on cartoon logic, exaggerated acting violence, and simple staging.” These included Ren & Stimpy, SpongeBob SquarePants, Looney Tunes, and The Angry Beavers. But as he continued studying films and other artists, he says his tastes and ambitions developed: “I became more interested in stepping out of the comfort zone and further exploring the potential of our medium of animation. It is very fun to combine the vibe and humor of a classic cartoon with modern tools and depth of a modern animated film.”
As he grew as an artist, Vvedenskiy also honed his knack for dark humor and adult storytelling. He made shorts like Getaway Granny, about a grandmother who spends her birthday helping her granddaughter pull off a bank heist when all she wants to do is go to Denny’s. Another one, Pissed, is about a little boy who wakes up his older sister on a camping trip because he’s too scared to use the woods as a bathroom in the middle of the night.
These have led to jobs like Storyboard Artist for Matt Groening’s fantasy series Disenchantment and the sci-fi series WondLa from TAG member Bobs Gannaway. He’s currently working as a Storyboard Artist on his first feature film, an as-yet-to-be-titled project about Jack and the Beanstalk at Skydance for another CalArts alum and TAG member, Director Rich Moore.
Although Vvedenskiy’s own tastes may steer toward the weird and mature, he believes he can be versatile creatively. On an animated project, “the sum is equal to the parts,” he says, sounding like the child of mathematicians that he is. “You need people who are very good with emotional stuff. [And] you need people who used to work on The Simpsons or SpongeBob to end up with zany [gags].”
As for the part of the sum he brings to the table, he says: “One might not think of Russians as particularly funny people, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Russians experience a new political crisis pretty much every decade… The way Russians cope is in many ways through humor… It really is no surprise then that I specialize in comedy as an artist. I’m able to find humor where few others can.”
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