Design Magazine · October 2026
Isabelle Auphan has joined the judging panel for the Design Magazine Awards 2026. She teaches 3D animation at ESMA (École Supérieure des Métiers Artistiques) in Nantes and Rennes, and before that spent years as a feature film animator at Blue Sky Studios, Sony Pictures Imageworks, DreamWorks Animation and Industrial Light & Magic.
She is self-taught. After long study in literature and fine art she discovered 3D and learned to animate on her own, and that route still shapes how she works. Her practice draws less on classical 2D principles than on character, cinema and screenwriting. She animates from the inside out, using her own sense of how a body moves, feels and acts, and she treats every shot as a short story with its own beats that still has to cut cleanly into the sequence around it.
Her career has crossed games, television, feature animation and visual effects. She started in video games in London, animated on a television series in Vancouver and on short projects in Paris, then returned to London for her first feature, Tomb Raider. Robots followed at Blue Sky in New York, then Open Season at Imageworks and Kung Fu Panda at DreamWorks in Los Angeles. On the effects side she animated on Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen at ILM in San Francisco, and The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian at MPC in London. She also animated two music videos for Gorillaz at Passion Pictures.
She holds an MA in Image Synthesis and Computer Animation from Middlesex University and a DNSEP, the French national higher diploma in visual arts, from the Fine Art School of Orléans.
She has been based in France since 2011, teaching 3D animation at ESMA and at Gobelins in Paris, and screenwriting at Rennes University. At ESMA she supervises student teams through their graduation films. Each one brings its own problems, and she describes the work as a constant source of renewal. She shares the credit with the ESMA Nantes teaching team, Benjamin Deyries in particular.
Four of the graduation films she has supervised:
L’ogre du Danube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLE8Yo0ies4
I’m a Pebble https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fteCUWuHnBk
Mountain Source https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_E54MokNNM
Œil pour œil https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gd_cIWkpFyw
She judges the way she animates. Accuracy and sincerity in a gesture or an action matter most, and routine, which she calls the worst enemy of creativity, earns her distrust. The work she keeps going back to includes Laika’s Kubo and the Two Strings, Fortiche’s Arcane, the films of Hayao Miyazaki and silent cinema. On one point there is no room to move: the line between tribute and plagiarism.
Isabelle Auphan · Animation instructor, ESMA Nantes and Rennes · Rennes, France · LinkedIn
