Sony Pictures Animation’s ‘Goat’ Is First Major Studio Film Looping By Persons With Disabilities

‘Goat’, a Sony Pictures Animation feature film, is the first major studio film looped by a group of persons with disabilities.

To loop a film simply means to create the ambient sounds or voices that fill out a film’s soundscape – from crowd noise to background chatter and reaction sounds.

In ‘Goat’, the Disability Loop Group, comprising nearly two dozen actors with disabilities, recorded the chant, crowd noise, and ambient arena energy that viewers hear in the film’s sporting scenes. The group was formed from the Easterdeals Disability Film Challenge (EDFC), a platform founded by Nic Novicki, to discover and put to work the talents of persons with disabilities behind the camera, particularly in the animation industry. Sony Pictures has supported the challenge for the past seven years.

A little person and working actor whose credits include ‘Boardwalk Empire’, ‘The Sopranos’, and ‘The Good Doctor’, Novicki said the opportunity to work on ‘Goat’ is one that he has been working towards for over a decade, since he founded the challenge. First, to close the persistent gap in opportunity for persons with disabilities in Hollywood, and to show what he had always believed, that “Loop work represented a unique opportunity for the disability community, where the barriers that define so much of on-camera casting simply don’t apply.

To loop the animation, the group helped construct the film’s arena sequences from scratch, build chants and crowd energy across two days of recording on the Sony lot.

“We’re doing improv, different accents, different elements, it’s almost like an orchestra. We’re coming in with different voices and sounds, sometimes collectively, sometimes singularly, to create the atmosphere of the whole movie,” said Novicki.

The group grew out of a workshop held on the Sony Pictures Entertainment lot, where EDFC participants received coaching and feedback from animation executives and casting directors. The group, coordinated by director and autism spectrum advocate Brock Powell, includes actors with a wide range of visible and invisible disabilities.

But Novicki urged, “It doesn’t matter what your disability is or what you look like. Your voice is your instrument. You could play anything,”

Registration for the 2026 EDFC competition is still open and will run from March 24 to 29, while the awards ceremony will be held on May 7 at Sony Pictures Studios.e