By Liam O’Kennedy, News Correspondent

Austin Broder tinkered with the geometry of a digital creature on a monitor in the animation studio in Ryder Hall, bloating its head into a bulbous orb with the drag of a mouse.

The middler animation major navigated the technical windows of the Maya 3D animation software that he used to help produce the animated two-and-a-half minute film “Oh No, BoBo!,” which has been accepted into the First Annual Boston Student Film Fest.

The film’s only competition: “Notes From Next Door,” a piece combining live action and animation created by Jon Lawitts, Jaime Klein and Dave Maggio, all animation majors who graduated from Northeastern in 2011.

“Oh No, BoBo!” was a semester-long collaborative effort that began in September 2010 between members of Northeastern’s Animation Studio 2 class. It tells the tale of a sadistic young girl whose cruelty to animals comes to an end by the trickery of a clever monkey named BoBo.

“I think it’s a really important step for this department,” said Broder, who helped direct and produce the film alongside classmate Ian Hirschfeld, a senior computer science and digital arts major. “We beat out a bunch of really talented animation schools in Boston. It’s the drive that the students in this department have:  You come into the animation studio on any Saturday, and there are always people working. Everyone really loves doing what they do, and they work really hard at it, so I think it’s really nice seeing some Northeastern films getting into film festivals.”

Lawitts, too, is familiar with the manic enthusiasm that powers the animation studio in Ryder Hall.

“We pulled many all-nighters, especially on ‘Notes From Next Door,’ said the 23-year-old, who now produces iPad games for a Boston-based startup company called True Office. “Actually animating the characters is probably the most time-consuming. To get a few seconds of animation takes an entire day, and that’s if it’s going well.”

“Notes From Next Door” is the story of a young artist, played by Maggio, who struggles to find tranquility amid the musical racket of a lively band of animated neighbors. Lawitts helped direct, produce and write the film, already a winner of Best Animation Mixed Media at the 2011 Toronto International Student Animation Festival, and an Outstanding Achievement Certificate in animation from the 2011 Williamsburg International Film Festival. He also arranged the original orchestral score and lent his own oboe-playing skills to the project.

“Having worked on something for so long, you get this sort of blindness to it,” said Lawitts, who spent nine months working on “Notes From Next Door” under the guidance of Terrence Masson, director of Northeastern’s Creative Industries program, and Assistant Professor Ben Ridgway. “It’s hard to tell what you’re looking at after a while, and it’s hard to tell if what you made is good at all because you’re so close to it. Having gotten into a festival – it’s good.”

Both Lawitts and Broder said there has been an influx of new digital technologies into the animation studio in the past few years.

Two interactive pen displays, which allow the artist to paint, sketch and model with a stylus on an LCD screen, offer animators the ability to express creative concepts more intuitively, Broder said.

The animation department now also offers a class in the digital sculpting software ZBrush, which lets the user create high-resolution models like they’re molding a chunk of clay, Lawitts said.

“Since they’ve hired Ben [Ridgeway in 2009] the department has really been changing a lot for the better,” Lawitts said. “The classes that they’re offering are much more focused. When I started we were just doing animation 1, 2, 3, 4 and now they have specific classes like character animation. The animation basics class is more focused now on animating characters and how to deliver a performance.”

Ridgway – an award-winning filmmaker whose abstract animations explore themes centered around time, cycles and the concept of infinity – helped introduce the digital compositing software NUKE to the animation department, but stressed the importance of the fundamentals of art as a grassroots approach to the digital realm.

“Software doesn’t make a good artist,” he said. “A good traditional foundation in drawing and painting will always make you a better digital artist.”

To vote for “Oh No, BoBo!” or “Notes From Next Door” in the animation category of the Boston Student Film Fest, students can visit www.bostonstudentarts.org/bsfffilms through April 6. A jury of four film professionals will ultimately determine the winner, who will earn the title “Best of the Fest.”