MAGIC Student’s Film Airs In Latin America On Nickelodeon And Nick Jr.
Hannah Roza wanted to create a character that showed resilience despite having disabilities.
The Miami Animation & Gaming International Complex student created A Lesson in Magic, an animated short film showcasing a character with hearing and speech impairments.
It aired in Mexico City on July 17 through ViacomCBS’ Nickelodeon and Nick Jr. television networks. It has since been viewed on screens all across Latin America. It’s the first MAGIC production to feature a leading character with a disability.
“It’s films like this that bring light to people all over the world,” said Mauricio Ferrazza, the chairperson at MAGIC.
The 142-second film tells the story of Luna, a young witch who communicates through sign language and dreams of attending a magic school. However, in the world of magic, spells must be spoken to be executed and she can’t speak. But when her loyal magical bird Quetzal is in danger, she uses sign language to save his life.
The idea for the film originated from a character she created for a game development course in 2016. The character, Zola, is a vocally impaired teenage adventurer whose sidekick is a sarcastic magical bird.
Roza expanded Zola’s story and pitched the idea for her narrative storytelling course in the Spring of 2020. The film served as her capstone project.
For nearly 10 months, Roza and her classmates worked with Nickelodeon producers and Ferrazza to develop the project. They met every two weeks to discuss the film’s progress.
“We had a lot of fun while connecting and bonding through all the work we’ve done,” said Luis Adolfo Chiurliza, Quetzal’s voice actor who also assisted with the film’s storyboard and props design. “I was so ecstatic to see how smoothly everything came out.”
A team of about 20 people worked on Adobe Animate to create the various sections of the film, such as storyboarding, character design and skeletal animation. A project of that scope typically consists of 30 people, so they were short-staffed when translating sign language in English, Spanish and Portuguese.
To ensure that the translations were accurate, the script was shared with an American Sign Language interpreter from the College and Nickelodeon sent it to an interpreter in Mexico and Brazil.
The animation part of the film came naturally to Roza. Drawing has always been a passion of hers. As a child, she created comics and shared them with family members. They varied from the retelling of Cinderella to creating original storylines.
When she was eight years old, Roza created Señora Fantástica (fantastic woman), a story about a Mexican superheroine who fought crime, saved kittens and dealt with high school drama.
Roza, who earned a bachelor’s degree in advertising with a minor in digital arts and sciences from the University of Florida in 2018, works as a graphic designer at a medical marketing company and previously worked as a graphic designer at the PIL Creative Group.
In the fall of 2019, she started working toward an associate’s degree in animation and game art at Miami Dade College. She is scheduled to graduate in May of 2022 and aspires to become a storyboard artist for an animation company and illustrate children’s books.
“I love telling stories that resonate with people through art,” the 26-year-old said. “I just want to keep going with that and tell stories of people working to make their dreams come true because those hit me in the heart.”
