A Sisler High School student could be the brains behind the next SpongeBob SquarePants or Ren and Stimpy.

Nickelodeon Community Efforts has partnered with Sisler’s CREATE program to prepare students for potential careers in story development, content creation, animation and art.

Dubbed the Orange Tree Project, the exciting endeavor officially launched on Sept. 28. It sees Sisler students connecting with Nickelodeon mentors to create and collaborate on three two-minute animated stories.

CREATE department head Jamie Leduc said the partnership began at the beginning of 2020, when he started communicating with Nickelodeon director of community outreach Carson Smith.

“We try to connect our students to studios and industry as much as possible,” Leduc said. “We did a couple master classes with Nickelodeon and we started discussing the idea of doing a yearlong mentorship project for our students.”

“We have three different teams working on animated shorts and each team is being mentored by a different Nickelodeon animator or artist.”

The team are mostly made up of post-high CREATE students, but a few Grade 10, 11 and 12 students are also involved.

The three Nickelodeon mentors are American storyboard artist Mark Galez and Canadian animators Kyle Marshall and Jessica Borutski, directors on the hit TV series The Loud House.

The Nickelodeon staff members will provide ongoing mentorship to the Sisler students, sharing their experience in the areas of storyboarding, character design, animation, directing and producing. The animated stories are expected to be completed by the end of May, 2021.

The first task for the three teams is to write stories based on a theme of “change or transformation.” 

“My plan is to get into a call with my teammates and ask them some personal experiences they’ve had that they don’t mind sharing,” said Gab Reyes, a post-high student who is leading one of the teams.

“Nickelodeon live-streamed a story workshop last week and one thing I learned from that is a good story comes from the heart, typically from personal experience.”

Nya Langit, a post-high CREATE student, is also acting as a team leader. Langit said collaborating with Nickelodeon is a wonderful opportunity.

“I personally want to get into concept art and Nickelodeon is one of the biggest employers for concept art,” Langit said. “Working with them, I feel like I can get a lot of feedback on my work and how I can get into the industry.”

“This project is also developing my people skills. I was very shy before starting in the CREATE program in Grade 9 and I’ve opened up a lot. Being a team lead forces me to interact with other people and it also helps me work on my leadership skills.”

Sisler post-high student and team leader Jemimah Suba said she’s grateful to be working alongside Nickelodeon employees, an opportunity that came in the Nick of time.

“It’s a big inspiration boost with all this quarantine stuff going on and being stuck at home,” Suba said. “I don’t mind being stuck at home now because I get to work with all these amazing people.”

In addition to the three animated stories, CREATE students will be creating a video documentary of the project and posting milestone moments on social media. The first Orange Tree Project weekly recap – created by Grade 12 student Jed Orellano – can be watched here (https://vimeo.com/463147031)