Amid the glitzy glamor of Hollywood live-action blockbusters, one creative medium glows quietly yet fiercely — animation.

Animation is often misunderstood as not only an art form but also as a method of filmmaking. Although the finalized product of an animated film looks beautiful and polished, the demanding work, effort and dedication that occurs behind the scenes is taken for granted by viewers.

Onion Skins, an on-campus animation club, seeks to set the record straight — animation is challenging, but not impossible. It is time-consuming yet fulfilling, hard work yet a great time.

Last fall marked the genesis of the student organization, intentionally established as a community that brought together creatives while also pursuing a professional goal.

“Animation is, at its heart, a really collaborative medium,” said Matthew Sorgie, co-founder of Onion Skins and a senior majoring in animation and digital arts. “We just wanted to create a space where everyone can come in as equals, share their experience, share their craft and just make friends.”

Onion Skins’ first information session showed the strength of these connections. The members’ endless stream of chatting, catching up and comfortable joking defied the club’s adolescence. As newcomers were welcomed and returners were welcomed back, each person started to show their creative spark, taking to the whiteboard to draw a unique onion.

In the animation industry, “onion skinning” is a fundamental technique that allows an animator to view several frames of a sequence in order to create a smooth and realistic animation. For the USC club, the name also explores a deeper, collaborative dimension.

“We felt like every person was a layer to the animated product we were making,” said Jules Pincus, co-founder of Onion Skins and a senior majoring in animation and digital arts. “All of those layers came together to make the club.”

The collaboration doesn’t happen without some crunch time, though. With a mission to produce a one-minute short animated film each semester, Onion Skins runs on a narrow schedule. Members of Onion Skins apply for and take on more than one role in the pipeline, which means each person has a different deliverable and deadline.

Onion Skin’s animation pipeline begins with ideation night, a meeting early on in the semester where all members collectively decide on the semester’s film.

“We all pack into a room and have Mad Libs-style prompts,” said Matteo Aldon, co-president of Onion Skins and a junior majoring in animation and digital arts. “We have mini games and icebreakers to fill in the prompts to a point where everyone in the club is satisfied.”

Onion Skins strays away from an individual director and vision. Instead, ideation night is where all members contribute input to the film’s main character and the main action or conflict. All the loose creative juices are distilled into one concept, and the story team will spend a week to create a storyboarded pitch.

While the story team continuously revises the pitch, pre-production roles including the layout artists, environment artists and exploratory character designers will have fun with tangible sketches on early drafts.

“When you step into our workflow, you really feel like you’re part of a studio,” Sorgie said.

Those character and environment designs are peer-reviewed weekly until they are solidified into a timed animatic, which is a rough animated storyboard.

Onion Skins moves into production with several animators, artists and compositors to create the beautiful backgrounds and move all the creative assets into an animation software.

“There were a lot of late nights in the animation lab,” Pincus said. “Just getting to spend all that time with people in the club … was really nice. We’d talk, watch movies and come up with creative solutions when problems did arise.”

Lighting, music and color all coalesce in the final push of the film’s visual feel. The final film is truly like an onion: a single entity made of complex layers.

For those new to and outside of the small animation major or the creative field, Onion Skins acts as a mentorship program where learning different tools and software is encouraged.

“Last year, we had a lot of people interested in learning how to composite and add effects in Adobe After Effects,” Aldon said. “So we threw a one-day boot camp that [taught] the basics of Adobe After Effects in production. This semester, we want to incorporate more 3D, so one of our [executive] board members will do a 3D workshop.”

Sorgie hopes Onion Skins gives the younger animation cohorts a sense of belonging for their time at USC.

“If I could have walked into school as a freshman and had this for four years, it would have absolutely changed my experience here,” Sorgie said.

Animation shines as a storytelling medium with limitless potential and creative freedom. It empowers artists to bring any idea to life. This limitless imagination is how and why Onion Skins thrives. In an environment where creativity is celebrated, students collaborate to push the boundaries of their craft.

“For me, my peers and everyone in Onion Skins, we view animation as a film medium that is literally a blank canvas,” Sorgie said. “In live action, you have constraints of what’s real, like stepping on a set and having actors. With animation, any concept that you have can be made into a film.”