“One of the horrible things about Mormons is that we’re so polite,” Kelly Loosli, a faculty member, later told me. “It’s one of the serious issues facing our community: our polite culture is problematic for excellence.” Loosli has taken it upon himself to be the program’s bad cop, showing students how to tell one another when their work looks terrible, to get them industry-ready. “I’ve made a lot of people cry,” he told me, proudly. At the end of the evening, “Fetch” received only one vote — and that was only after the faculty coaxed Raines into raising his hand: he felt sheepish about voting for his own idea.

As Raines finished, I noticed Morgan Strong slip out of the room. Strong is 24, a contemplative and steady-seeming senior. He was the producer on “Chasm,” the current project. Having borne the managerial stress of the production all semester, he insisted on carving out some time that night with his wife, who was six months pregnant with their first child. Even though Strong was about to graduate, “Chasm” was the first film he worked on at B.Y.U. He wasn’t technically an animation major — he was on the university’s more strait-laced computer-science track. He’d felt an artistic itch all his life but, like a lot of his classmates, felt pressure to pursue a more pragmatic career. (A junior named Daniel Clark described spending his childhood making elaborate stop-motion animation films with his father’s video camera. Still, he convinced himself that he should major in construction management at B.Y.U. It was during an estimating class — a lecture covering how to estimate bids for construction jobs, down to approximating the number of screws you’d need — that Clark finally jumped ship.) Strong told me, “Saying you’re going to be an artist for a career is kind of like buying a cardboard box as a house.”

Earlier, Brent Adams told me that his students’ idealism about reforming the entertainment industry often comes from their recognition, as they’ve matured, of the negative influence that films and games had on their own lives. I wasn’t sure I believed him — he sounded like a father figure projecting his values onto his children. But Strong was a perfect example. We had a long talk one afternoon in the computer lab, and he told me that growing up in northern Idaho, he was an undisciplined teenager — hanging around with girls who drank and hiding those friendships from his parents. His dishonesty unsettled him, but he repressed the feeling. Then, during his freshman year at B.Y.U., his outlook changed. He saw students who were all striving to be kind and moral people but also having fun and enjoying solid friendships with one another. The uneasy compromises between his principles and his popularity didn’t seem necessary anymore. It was the reverse of the typical coming-of-age-at-college story: he felt liberated enough to experiment, so he experimented with returning to the values he was raised with. “I realized I can be whoever it is that I want to be,” he said. “That thought just hit me like a ton of bricks. And I discovered I want to be a really good person.”

Now, Strong said, he avoids even some PG-13 movies. “You never know what’s going to come up on that screen, and once you see something, you can’t get it out of your head. Ever.” He thought a moment, then asked: “What’s the name of that film?” I don’t know what I expected him to say, but I was surprised when he said, “ ‘Wedding Crashers.’ ”

In high school, a friend persuaded him to sneak into the movie, and the nudity, as well as Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson’s general attitude toward women, shook him. After that, when he saw a girl, his first thoughts would be about whether she was attractive; he felt himself moving through the world essentially casting or rejecting its inhabitants as possible extras in “Wedding Crashers.” You could argue that this was only the harmless awakening of a teenage male mind. But Strong didn’t see it this way. In fact, he feels so uneasy about this stretch of his life that later, when he began dating his future wife, he made a point of discussing it with her. (“I had changed,” he explained, “but I wanted anything like that to be open between us.”) “In the L.D.S. church,” he told me, “a really strong message is that everyone’s a child of God — that they’re a sacred individual. They’re born into this world clean and pure and beautiful.” “Wedding Crashers” altered his vision. He spent some time looking at the world through “Wedding Crashers”-colored glasses, and it was not only disrespectful of other people, he felt, but it also deprived him of experiencing them in a more genuine way. Why couldn’t films subconsciously encourage us to use the eyes that God gave us instead? “To view people through that window puts a positive, beautiful spin on your life,” he said.

It was easy to worry about how students like Strong would fare out in the wilds of the film industry after graduation. But talking with alumni, I uncovered only a handful of mildly uncomfortable conflicts. There was the case of Mike Warner, finishing postproduction on the latest “Die Hard,” who signed on to the film reassured by the studio’s strictly business-minded goal of keeping it tame enough to land a PG-13 rating. Ultimately the film was rated R. “It’s a bummer,” Warner said, “but what can you do?” There was a story Adams told me about an alumnus who panicked when asked to animate ants for a Budweiser commercial. (Adams talked him down. “I said: ‘O.K., Vern, are you breaking any commandments by working on a beer commercial? Not technically.’ ”) But mostly, I sensed a nuanced and pragmatic understanding of what it meant to be a Mormon in Hollywood: a commitment to avoid contributing to negativity whenever possible, but also a parallel obligation — and maybe a more important one — to create the maximum amount of good. A modeler and rigger at Pixar, Jacob Speirs, told me that working at Pixar probably meant he would never be asked to create images of violence or promiscuity. But he had recently asked the company to stock nonalcoholic drinks, and not just Champagne and beer, for its many in-house celebrations. Even non-Mormon co-workers frequently thank him for it, Speirs said; they didn’t always want a drink in the middle of the workday and were relieved to have another option. “And Pixar keeps it fun too,” he added. “It’s not like they just throw in a can of 7-Up. They bring in novelty sodas.”