Cassie Shao ’19 used her distinct visual voice, developed at USC School of Cinematic Arts, to animate a music video for the band Maggie Dave. (Photo/Courtesy Cassie Shao)
Cassie Shao: Dreaming in mixed media
How USC School of Cinematic Arts alumna turned her vision into a career in animation.
A hand with a lighter, but the flame turns into a mushroom cloud. A man opens a locker, just to place a rotary phone in it. The scene cuts to someone getting ready for the day — a sink, a shower, some numbers — then the screen shifts, and the images transform into an oak tree. The visuals are both vivid and dreamy: one minute orange and blue, another green and gold, flickering through sharp contrasts and blurry imagery.
From beginning to end, This Is a Story Without a Plan, an animated film by Cassie Shao ’19, is a visual feast. The characters are animated digitally, and the scenery is painted on animation cells with 3D and painted abstract backgrounds. It’s a style that Shao has turned into her distinct visual language: “I dream of strange scenarios and make animation about them,” she states.
Depicting two people on a journey filled with colors and meditative perspectives, the film draws inspiration from what Shao says was a transitional event in her life. “I felt I was watching an explosion very slowly happening in front of me that I couldn’t look away from.” She turned her feelings into a film, explaining, “I wanted to use visual imagery to record that experience and finish that thought.”
This distinct aesthetic has earned her numerous accolades: At the 2024 Ann Arbor Film Festival, Shao was awarded The Barbara Aronofsky Latham Award for Emerging Experimental Video Artist for This Is a Story Without a Plan, an honor that sets her up for 2025 Academy Award consideration.
The film has also traveled through the festival world, appearing at the Slamdance Film Festival, Annecy International Animated Film Festival, Sydney Film Festival and International Animated Film Festival ANIMATOR. Audiences were captivated.
“People who liked that film really liked it,” Shao says. “There were also people who didn’t quite understand what was happening in the film.” She was pleased with both reactions. Audiences also told her that certain scenes reminded them of life events. “This might have been entirely different from my experience or what I was trying to convey,” she says, “but ultimately, it’s a film that allows for various interpretations of itself.”
Shao knows all about turning dreams into a creative reality. Studying animation was her lifelong ambition, so she packed her bags and moved from Hangzhou, China, to the United States.
After completing her Bachelor of Fine Arts in animation and sound design at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, she looked to USC for graduate studies. “The USC School of Cinematic Arts opened me up to new possibilities of animation,” she says. “I was mixing, combining and experimenting with different mediums and techniques.”
Shao says her USC education led her to develop her visual style. For example, Professor Michael Patterson introduced her to motion graphics. Her thesis professor, Kathy Smith, helped Shao unlock her visual language: “She inspired and encouraged me to express my thoughts and feelings with the imagery that appeared in my dreams,” Shao says. “As if my consciousness was describing a feeling.”
This style, now “the basis of all my works,” is a distinct imagery that sets Shao apart — the film world has noticed. In 2021, she animated a video for the band Maggie Dave, which received the Austin Music Video Festival’s award for Best Animation/Mixed-media and the Columbus International Film & Animation Festival’s Best Music Video. Her short There Were Four of Us won the 2020 National Film Festival for Talented Youth for Best Experimental Short (Student), and in 2019 garnered the Unknown Film Festival’s Silver Visual Arts & Animation Award, China Independent Animation Film Forum Best Experimental Animated Short, as well as Los Angeles Animation Festival’s Silver Student Experimental Short.
During her time at USC, Shao also gained experience through animation internships, including one at Bento Box Entertainment LLC. Since graduating in 2019, Shao’s freelance career as an animation director has bypassed typical animation studios.
Word of mouth about her mixed-media work has seen her schedule packed with commercial and personal projects, including music videos, shorts and commercials. She also animates for documentaries and independent films for live-action directors. Some of her projects include the Asian American Foundation’s AAPI Heritage Heroes on Hulu and two TED series, The Way We Work and Sleeping with Science.
Shao says she enjoys both working on her own projects and collaborating with others. “When working with someone else, you’re constantly learning and being forced out of your comfort zone,” she says. “When I do that, it inspires me, and I use what I learned from those projects in my own projects.”
For Shao, the dream is for her filmmaking and animation to reach viewers on an emotional level; when talking about This Is a Story Without a Plan, she says, “I wanted to connect to the audience that might be stirred up by these imageries despite coming from different backgrounds and having different experiences in life.”
