Sesame Street short tickles and challenges CIA grad

When Sesame Street asked Ashley Gerst ’07 to create a short animation for the storied children’s show, Gerst snagged a chance to add one more definition of success to her career.

Gerst earned her BFA in T.I.M.E.-Digital Arts* (Technology + Integrated Media Environment) and has done commercial work for such companies as Red Bull, JBL, Nissan and American Express. She also has worked on films.

But the Sesame Street project marked an opportunity to be part of a creative brand she’s known nearly all her life.

“This is my first role as producer and director of a short,” Gerst says. “This is the first one I could claim ownership of, as opposed to being someone hired to help do a part of it.”

Gerst loved Sesame Street as a kid and was delighted to see her animation, titled “Number 5 Jobs,” debut on HBO MAX on May 24. Along with her handpicked crew, she spent nearly a year developing the piece, which appeared in Season 54, Episode 29, which was called “Brave Bessie by Brave Gabrielle.”

Part of the fun is the shared experience.

“Some friends and family I’ve known my whole life were sending me pictures of their kids watching it in their living room,” Gerst said during a call from the Hudson Valley home she shares with her husband and fellow animator Ben Morse ’07. “And I just loved that.”

Gerst believes word-of-mouth led Sesame Street to tap her for this project. A Sesame Street spokesperson explained, “From attending film festivals to maintaining strong relationships with colleges and universities with student filmmakers, to fielding inquiries from filmmakers, we are always interested in meeting new talent.”

In “Number 5 Jobs,” an animation by Ashley Gerst ’07 that appeared on Sesame Street, a girl named Wei walks dogs to a Central Park dog treat stand. Submitted.

A personal connection

Working on “Number 5 Jobs” reminded Gerst of watching Sesame Street as a child on the West Side of Cleveland. One character that still fires her imagination was “Teeny Little Super Guy,” who rode a drinking glass through a kitchen.

“All of those animations are so different and unique, based on the individual artist’s personality,” she says. “So when I was asked to do a one-minute short for them, I was really excited to put some of my key styles within the animation.”

Her prompts from the Sesame Street team included the number 5 and the notion of work. She started thinking about what kinds of jobs a young person could do.

Gerst came up with dog-walking and provided Sesame Street a script, storyboards, an animatic (a presentation of the storyboards in motion) and a guide vocal. In her resulting, endearing video, a girl named Wei leashes the dogs, counts them, walks them and gets them a treat at a Central Park food stand.

Sesame Street weighed in with requirements specific to early education and new learners, like the importance of repetitiveness in instructions. Gerst had proposed the dogs visit a hot dog cart, but had to change it to a dog treat cart when she learned hot dogs aren’t good for dogs.

“It was a lot of fun, but it was also a lot of work,” she says. “I think the average animator, working a 40-hour work week, makes between six to 20 seconds. It depends on what they’re creating and how complicated it is. I’m average, I’m not faster than anybody else. And so it does take quite some time to even make just one minute.”

At CIA, Gerst says, one of her favorite teachers was Kasumi, a Cleveland Heights artist known for her startling works of mixed media.

“I really learned a lot about animation from her and I still use much of that knowledge today,” Gerst says. “In fact, I learned all of my 2D animation expertise from CIA.”

Kasumi remembers Gerst as well. “Ashley was one of my all-time greatest students and was (and is) nothing short of a human dynamo,” Kasumi says. “She is highly creative, intensely hard-working, exceedingly bright, cheerful, socially conscious, generous and ambitious. In all the years I’ve known her, she has produced project after project of imaginative and beautiful work.”

CIA alum and present-day Animation faculty member Anthony Scalmato was one of Gerst’s classmates. “You knew when she entered the studio and you felt her presence even when she wasn’t in there,” Scalmato says. “Her studio space was a ball of materials, inspirations and oddities that grew daily and consumed anything in its path. It had to regularly be tamed.”

In this scene from “Number 5 Jobs,” Wei counts dogs before walking them to Central Park. Submitted.

Above-average Ashley

Gerst has been extraordinarily active. She earned her master’s degree in computer art at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan. She is an adjunct professor there and a tenured faculty member at William Paterson University in Wayne, New Jersey. She also makes commercials and movies.

Three years ago, Gerst started writing a short film she describes as a “straight-up memoir” about her relationship with her father, a tax and finance expert who died in 2019. With the help of grants from William Paterson University, the PANO Network and Arts Alive, she’s been able to work on it steadily.

“Sundays,” as she calls it, is intended to honor her family, but there’s more to it than that. She expects to complete the film this fall and present it for inclusion in film festivals.

“Art therapy exists for a reason,” Gerst says, “but there certainly is a labor of love aspect to this.”