Many hands helped build the new Portland-set LAIKA film, Wildwood—including Reedie Sebastian Simmons ’21.
By Cara Nixon
October 23, 2026
What if Forest Park were a magical land full of avian warriors, coyote soldiers, and kidnapping crows?
That’s what Colin Meloy’s young adult novel Wildwood asks, and this fall, his imaginative ideas were brought to life on screen by LAIKA—with the help of people like Sebastian Simmons ’21.
As LAIKA’s stage support technical director, Sebastian works to manage the pipeline software for the stage and camera teams. In the tech industry, he says, he’d be considered a software engineer. “The distinction is that you're slightly more embedded with your users and artists and have to understand what they're doing,” he says, which is an aspect he particularly enjoys.
In his Reed application essay, Sebastian wrote about his first love—movies—and about how he ultimately decided to pursue another passion, computer science, instead.
Reed helped him discover he didn’t have to choose between art and technology. And everyday at LAIKA, he is able to combine the two. “I find it really funny that I clearly assumed those were totally separate paths, and it's so obvious that they're not, and they're so deeply connected,” Sebastian says.
When production on Wildwood was in full swing, Sebastian’s day-to-day varied a lot, and aside from writing software, he supported the stage in any way he could, working closely with the crew to ensure everything went smoothly. “It was really cool,” he says of the experience. “I was really lucky in that I started before principal photography started over here, so I got to see the first set drop, and the first frames get captured, all the way till now. I found the experience, as expected, really cool and amazing.”
For all intents and purposes, Wildwood is a Portland book, and thus a Portland movie. The setting features St. John’s, the waterfront, and, of course, Forest Park. Sebastian says the crew put a lot of care into making sure everything was an accurate representation of the Rose City.
“I'm really excited for people from Portland, or living in Portland, Reedies, to see it,” Sebastian says. “It's a really special movie.”
Wildwood is out in theaters today, October 23.