By Laurie Morrissey

It was either E.T. "the extraterrestrial" or Professor Kathy Hoffman who steered a criminal justice major into a career producing computer animated feature films about robots and woolly mammoths.

After seeing E.T. at age 7, Sean Murphy thought it would be fun to make films. He fell in love with movies and idolized Stephen Spielberg. But, he recalls, making movies was "just a dream." A legal career seemed a more realistic option, so he went to a liberal arts college and set his sights on law school.

Fast-forward to 2006.

Instead of filing briefs and arguing cases, Murphy works in a studio outside New York City on the team that creates films such as Robots, Ice Age, and Ice Age: The Meltdown. Blue Sky Studios’ current project is Horton Hears a Who, scheduled to appear in theatres in 2008.

Although not an artist, the Saint Anselm grad plays a key role in the process of taking a film from the idea stage to the big screen.

"I totally latched onto the organization side of the animation business," he says.

It was while taking a film elective in the fine arts department that the Worcester, Mass., native decided to give his early ambitions a try. Outside of Professor Hoffman’s office, Murphy saw a notice about a film internship at New York University. He spent the next summer in Manhattan, working on the set of an independent film. "It really sparked my interest and ended up paying off well," he says.

He went on to earn a master’s degree in film and TV production at Emerson College, paying for his housing by taking a job as residential director of Emerson’s satellite center in Burbank, Calif. He then worked on several projects in Los Angeles before finding his niche with Blue Sky Studios.

The production pipeline involves as many as 350 professionals in departments including story, layout, materials, lighting, effects, and in some cases fur. Murphy has worked in several, and is now an assistant production manager in special effects. Special effects are the sounds and images that make digital animation almost as convincing as live action: falling rain, glowing embers, footprints, dust, smoke, and in the case of Ice Age: The Meltdown, an exploding lava geyser.

"There’s no button on the computer that says ‘animate this scene.’ It all has to be done shot by shot. You’re creating an artificial world and bringing it to life," Murphy says. "I never thought I’d get into animation, and now I can’t imagine doing anything else."