PEORIA, Ill. — This Sunday marks the 95th Academy Awards ceremony, and a Bradley University alum may end up walking away with an Oscar.
25 News had the opportunity to speak with the producer behind one of this year’s nominees for Best Animated Feature, Jed Schlanger.
Schlanger graduated from BU in 1996, and since then he’s been taking over the animation world, spending 20 years with DreamWorks before joining the animation team at Netflix.
Schlanger says, “amazing little things like this happen and it really wakes you up like ‘woah I’m really in the movie business, that’s right. This is amazing.”
Schlanger produced Netflix’s “Sea Beast”, the story of a girl taking on a giant sea monster.
After four years of working on the project, he says as an artist, the hardest part was finally putting it out there, and waiting to see what families and children think.
“You have to put it out there. You can’t just hold on to it and keep tinkering. You have to put it out there and say ‘here you go world’ What do you think? It’s scary but in a way, it’s just like all of your choices up to that point has led up to that moment.”
Schlanger’s work is a testament to the successful track record of Bradley University alumni.
“One outright Academy Award, they shared in three other Academy Awards, they have over 60 Emmys, 7 Tony Award nominations and a Pulitzer Prize,” Dr. Jeffery Huberman taught Schlanger when he was a student here and he says, it comes as no surprise Schlanger is receiving this high recognition from the academy given the theatre education he received during his time at the school.
Dr. Huberman says, “the students learn creativity on a high level, and even more important than that they learn storytelling. Jed is a great storyteller, so he thinks in stories, and he thinks in visual, and he thinks in action.”
The Oscars will air Sunday night on ABC.
The Best Picture awards are typically given out toward the end of the ceremony.
Schlanger says his team at Netflix is working on a sequel to “Sea Beast”, but it’s still in the very early stages.
