When Emily McShane’s fifth-grade classmates were asked, “Which college do you want to go to?” most answered with the expected “UT,” “A&M” or maybe “Harvard.” McShane, however, said she wanted to attend the Ringling College of Art and Design, where she could study at one of the country’s top-rated animation programs.
Now, seven years later, the Plano resident and recent Hockaday School graduate’s love for animation is winning her awards. In October 2024, McShane’s new animated film Crushed won the Emerging Artist award at the All-American High School Film Festival in New York City.
Crushed follows the story of Alyvia, a student who develops a crush on her classmate after starting at a new school. The pair grows close, and Alyvia finds the courage to come out to her classmate and reveal her true feelings, only to be met with rejection. After making her first film, I Love You So Mush, about queer joy, McShane says she wanted Crushed to be about a tough reality that a lot of queer teens could relate to.
“Even though it’s literally about rejection and one of the tough parts about being queer, which is coming out about your feelings, it’s more than just popping a question about a crush. It could literally make or break a relationship that you have built with people,” she says.
This film is a fitting addition to McShane’s filmography, which is filled with animation and visual designs that aim to show underrepresented and diverse voices. McShane says she started thinking about the social impact her art could have while in middle school. At the time, her mom showed her a virtual gallery opening that featured works that were all about the current state of the Black Lives Matter movement. Ever since then, she says, she has been intentional with her art, especially with Crushed.
“It’s very important to me that, like, art is very political, and since I have this platform of making the film, it’s important to me that I use it to make a statement,” she says.
McShane has always been a self-taught artist. She says she has loved making art for as long as she can remember and was always “drawing on scrap paper on every possible surface that I could.” In elementary school, she did her first film festival. Her first art award came in the second grade during a district-wide art competition, which she says affirmed her skills as an artist.
Though there weren’t many opportunities for her to pursue art in middle school, McShane continued to develop her skills at home. When she reached Hockaday for high school, McShane says she was given the opportunity to explore more disciplines. She joined music clubs, the school musical, started taking dance lessons and even joined the drill team. Her passion, however, remained with film and visual design.
McShane began applying for art-focused internships and submitting her work to competitions and festivals. She was a teen ambassador at the Dallas Museum of Art and attended the Ringling PreCollege program. Her art has earned her a number of honors and awards, including the YoungArts Merit Award in Film in 2023.
To stay within the film’s budget, McShane did all of the writing, editing and directing herself. For other aspects of the film, she tapped the talents of her friends also involved in the arts. After one friend helped her edit the script, others were cast as actors and met with McShane whenever they had free time during the school day to film their lines. A musically-inclined friend from elementary school composed the film’s original score.
The film took McShane six months overall to finish and submit to competitions, but she continued to make small changes on it for a couple of months until she felt it was ready. Though the making of Crushed was time-consuming, with McShane sometimes having to work 30-40 hours a week on it, she says, “If you love something so much, there will always be time for it.”
