Far from the light of day, bunkered in a basement encompassed by austere concrete walls, animated armadillos are springing to life on flat-panel computer screens at Brigham Young University.

The hard-shelled, soft-bellied, three-dimensional cartoon characters are the stars of "Xing" (pronounced "Crossing"), an in-the-works animated short film from the decorated students of the BYU Center for Animation.

Producer Jenny Harris and director Carson McKay coordinate the work on "Xing," currently in its animation stage. Animators feed distinct, intermittent frames into a computer program that renders the in-between movement which must occur to get from one image to the other. Although computers do much of the work, good old-fashioned manpower is still required to painstakingly touch up things like shadows and depth perception that artificial intelligence cannot fully calculate on its own.

In a computer lab nestled on the bottom floor of the Crabtree Building on the north end of the BYU campus, two dozen computer workstations are placed back-to-back down a long line spanning the length of the room. Wall decorations are composed entirely of movie posters for animated major motion pictures such as "Bolt" and "Kung Fu Panda." Beneath the looming visuals, ever-present reminders of where these students' careers could someday carry them, work on "Xing" presses forward methodically and without fanfare.

Student Emmys are the gold standard for college animators, but only three of the statuettes are awarded every year to student-produced animated films. Despite the nationwide competition, BYU bagged two of the three awards in the animation category at the College Television Awards, a black-tie gala in Hollywood on March 21.

"Kites," the latest creation of the Center for Animation, won first place at this year's Student Emmys. It tells the story of an adolescent boy who magically gets to fly kites one final time with the spirit of his recently deceased grandfather. The other BYU recipient, "Pajama Gladiator," is a rollicking romp about a young boy who fights aliens with only his blanket as a weapon. It nabbed second place.

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This story is provided by the LDS Church News, an official publication of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It is produced weekly by the Deseret News.