Mantaur

Sophia “Roo” Bakken is a storyboard artist and animator from a small town in Pennsylvania, USA. She grew up with the firm belief that somehow, someday, she’d turn into a dragon. Unfortunately, growing wings and horns is still something thats in progress so she decided to do the next best thing and make the dragons out of clay instead. Sophia believed that when she combined her creative powers with the force of a 350 degree oven, those lumps of clay would become real dragons, flying high, breathing fire, and whispering their secrets to her. Sophia’s dragons were formed by her clumsy eight-year old hands and were subject to gravity, but she gave them imaginative flight, inventing personalities and giving them stories.
These dragons were the spark for her creative adventures and her passion for storytelling. Gradually, she explored other mediums and discovered that drawing dragons on paper freed them: they escaped the physical limitations of inert clay and could leap into the air, their wings open in flight. However, drawing dragons was never enough for her; she had to see them move too! They were real, after all, they deserved to breathe, and think, and fly through the skies! So little Sophia took it upon herself to learn how to do rudimentary animations with sticky notes and a stopmotion camera. She carried that passion all the way through highschool and into her years at Ringling College of art and Design as a Computer Animation Major.
Sophia has had her work featured in the annual Best of Ringling show every single one of her four years. She’s also participated in a number of professional workshops where she has acted as a storyboard artist and animator. The entirety of her senior year was spent making her thesis film, which is inspired by her lifetime of experience of clambering around the landscapes of Greece and the love she holds for her own two brothers. Sophia has no plans to slow down and dedicates herself fully to every creative endeavour she embarks on.