We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Kevin Class a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Kevin Class, appreciate you joining us today. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

The 3 minute long short film that produced in 2022/2023, titled Dulce, was easily one of the most meaningful projects of my life. We produced this film as a graduation requirement from the 3D animation program at the School of Visual Arts in NYC, and it opened so many doors for me that I didn’t know were possible.

I created this film with two of my friends, Aleyda Ortiz and Lok Cheang, who I had known since the beginning of the program. The story is Aleyda’s original creation and we all produced the film together in it’s entirety. Dulce is a story of a mother and daughter confronting death with heavy influences from Aleyda’s Mexican-American heritage.

I was responsible for the previsualization, rigging, character animation, sound design, and edit of the film.

We worked night and day for over a year to complete the film. I grew so much closer to my team and the people working on other films around us. After completion, we received the Alumi’s Choice award and we were also chosen as one of SVA’s Best of 2023. Because of the Best of 2023 award, we were flown out to LA along with all the other award recipients to screen the film in front of a large crowd of industry professionals whom we were able to meet with, tour Nickelodeon Studios, and we also got invited to LALIFF (Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival.)

From there we toured the film internationally with more than 20 nominations and awards.

With our film’s international tour ending at the end of 2024, it is available online while we have all moved on to new projects.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I grew up in the North East of the United States. I spent a lot of my childhood immersed in videogames and animated media. When it came time to explore my college options, I began at a community college for Videogame Design where I fell in love with character animation. I then transferred to the School of Visual Arts where I honed my skills as a digital artist. I pride myself in the knowledge I’ve built in the entirety of the pipeline of CG artwork, but my real passion is bringing characters to life on the screen with character animation.

I find something so magical about taking a still and motionless character and bringing it to life. I suppose you could compare character animation to being an actor, but you don’t have to be the one in front of the camera. Finding the small moments of emotion that make people really feel things is such an inspiring process for me. The ability to explore deep and important questions or difficult topics and tying them together seamlessly with otherworldly visuals is something I am so thankful to have the opportunity to do.

My goal is to help bring anyone’s vision to life. From concept to final product, I love doing all parts of producing digital media with a real message. Even the parts of production like project management that most people find boring are parts that are integral to success that I love.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

The most rewarding thing about being an artist, for me, is to bring heavy topics and hard questions to people in a way that is easy to digest. Sometimes the hardest questions are the most important ones to ask, and no one should feel bad asking them. The reward, really, is to make other people feel seen, heard, and understood. It’s too easy these days to be able to sweep problems under the rug and forget about them. I aim to make sure nothing is swept away or hidden.

In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?

As of the last few years, the arts industry has been pretty rough. We have seen studios across the world lay off hundreds of their employees in order to cut costs and improve their profit margins, only to release films and games that do poorly, and then the cycle repeats.

We have been seeing the beginning of a massive shift toward independent developers within games and film, as studios are creating more and more soulless content with the sole purpose of maximizing profit.

The absolute best thing that anyone can do is to source projects and build communities around local artists. Find media made by small teams of people. Keep your money in your community rather than spending more money on the massive entertainment corporations.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://kevingclass.art
• Other: Dulce short film: https://vimeo.com/816676949