Teens of Bay Area

After crafting a storyline, creating keyframes, and assembling a visually pleasing color script, Claire Ma, a senior at Monta Vista High School, begins the arduous task she knows and loves: animation. 

Working alongside industry specialists and through much trial and error, each piece takes between one to five months to complete. A recent oeuvre d’art? A hilarious 2-minute animation about the rebellion of vegetables against restaurant chefs who keep cooking their friends.

“Animation is truly a humbling experience,” Claire said. “It takes a lot of patience, trial, and error, and I fail time and time again, even when I think everything should have lined up perfectly.”

Mistakes, she adds, aren’t failures but stepping stones.

“Patience really comes in when you animate,” Claire said. “You need to draw frame after frame to create movement, and sometimes spending hours drawing every frame only makes up seconds of a film. It’s so, so frustrating, but I actually really enjoy the process now. ” 

When asked about the biggest challenges she faces, Claire doesn’t hesitate: 

“The biggest challenge for me is style change,” Claire said. “I learned that in animation, especially 2D animation, you have to make simple character designs. The design has to be exaggerated but simple. That’s hard for me because I’m used to creating highly rendered, detailed designs. Switching to a simpler style was the hardest part — but in the end, I was able to master it.” 

Claire has been an artist for almost all of her life, starting her journey in art at 5. However, she only began creating digital art recently, starting during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“When I decided to learn digital art, it allowed me to find my passion for animation, partly because I had always loved watching Disney, Nickelodeon, Dreamworks, et cetera,” Claire said. “And I always dreamed of  being the artist behind the films.”

That passion carried her to the CSSSA Summer Program for the Arts in 2024, where she specialized in animation. Claire completed a 1-minute animation piece titled, “What the Buns?” where she mastered the use of 2D animation, claymation, stop motion, and more. Immersed in a community of students equally dedicated to their craft, she thrived in an environment where she could connect with alumni artists who had worked on well-known shows and films. Meeting Davey Jarrell, a story board artist for the “Teen Titans” show, Emmy winning artist Ivan Aguirre who directed Disney’s “Primos” show, as well as Nicole Yang, a professional artist in illustration and entertainment arts gave Claire a glimpse into what she could do in the professional animation world.

Still, pursuing art hasn’t always been easy. Growing up in the Bay Area, where academic culture is heavily focused on STEM, Claire often finds herself needing to prove that art is a serious path. 

“When people hear I want to be an artist, the first thing they say is, ‘You won’t be able to make a living,’” Claire said. 

Claire thinks the opposite. 

“People think art is simply a painting on canvas,” Claire said. “But the world has moved so much beyond that, especially in terms of technology. Much of all art is transferred into digital media, like game design, concept art, film and animation, and graphic design, so convincing my parents that this is a growing path has gotten their support for my passion. Because of this, I devote a lot of myself towards educating others about the many art mediums out there which drastically changes their perspective towards art.”

At the same time, Claire says that it’s sometimes hard to balance her artistic goals with the workload of being a high school senior. Her school’s academic intensity, paired with her commitment to animation, often means long nights and little sleep. 

“My workload can be overwhelming,” Claire said. “So instead of scrolling through social media in my free time, I work on my projects. It helps me move forward, and I feel like I’m using my time for something I really care about.”

In the future, Claire sees herself taking her passion for art and animation into the next chapter of her life — one that blends learning, collaboration, and creativity. For Claire, art is her way of building connections. She believes some of the best parts of life are meeting new people, working in teams, and collaborating, and she finds this in animation. Wanting to carry her collaborative spirit forward into college, she plans to sharpen her technical skills and explore new ways of expressing her creativity, bringing stories to life in films or games, a dream sparked by her earliest memories of watching animated movies and collecting popular characters’ plushes at theme parks. 

“When my team and I work on something precious, spend long hours on it and finish, we see the reactions of the audience. Being able to spark enjoyment… that’s my ultimate goal.”

– Claire Ma, 2025