course overview
Course goals:
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website
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objective
A portfolio website provides a platform to write, display, and present your work in a thoughtful and engaging way. You will use your website as part of your exit interview at the end of the year and website construction and maintenance will represent 20% of your final grade.
process
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sketchbooks
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Drawing is an integral part of becoming an animator. Drawing is also considered a skill that can be developed just like playing basketball or playing piano. It takes time and dedication, and the permission to grow and get better.
We will start from the very beginning of drawing and progressively perfect our hand-drawing and digital-drawing skills. Each week we will have a 1-2 skills we will be working on. That means that each class will start with 15-20 mins of drawing, and what isn't finished at the end of the week is to be done outside of class time. It is expected that you will spend at least one hour a week practicing your drawing skills (I'll be doing this too!). Each of your sketchbook entries will be either photographed, or scanned and posted to your sketchbook page at least two times a semester (for interim report cards and term report cards). The idea behind this is to show your progress over time and to give us a place to co-evaluate your work. |
animation challenge
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Animation Challenge |
objective
In an effort to learn about the different early forms of animation I challenge you as a group to create four optical contraptions in four classes.
As with flipbooks, these forms of animation are considered primitive, but as you’ve seen it’s easy to take a simplistic art form and knock it out of the park. Creativity is the key.
You will be working together to:
This activity is pushing you to do research, construct the base for your optical contraption, generate characters and ideas for your animations, and present your methods and findings.
As a class you will have a representatives that will present your animations and we will vote on winners for each category.
As with flipbooks, these forms of animation are considered primitive, but as you’ve seen it’s easy to take a simplistic art form and knock it out of the park. Creativity is the key.
You will be working together to:
- Research each of the optical contraptions
- Look up tutorials online
- Construct each of the 4 optical contraptions
- Record the history of each type and how they work
- Generate informational materials from your research
- Brainstorm the content of your animations
- Create a final piece for each type to share with the class
This activity is pushing you to do research, construct the base for your optical contraption, generate characters and ideas for your animations, and present your methods and findings.
As a class you will have a representatives that will present your animations and we will vote on winners for each category.
procedure
Voting Day:
MAY THE ODDS BE EVER IN YOUR FAVOUR!
- Please move the tables into a large circle around the edge of the room
- Pick a team name, grab the labels for each of your animations, and grab 4 slips of pape
- Tape you team name and label to each one of your animations and put your “characters” name in the space provided (character being what is animated ie. batman, ball, fish, etc.
- Set up your research for people to look at
- Go look at each others animations - make sure you try them out to see if they work
- Vote for your favourite contraptions in the following four categories:
- Best Original Character
- Best Construction
- Best Research
- People’s Choice
MAY THE ODDS BE EVER IN YOUR FAVOUR!
flipbooks
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objectiveWe are going to compare and contrast paper verses digital flipbooks. You will be working in animation teams to produce a filmed hand drawn flipbook and one digital flipbook. They will each be 30 seconds in length and somehow relate to each other.
You can combined the two in different ways but it will be subject to a concept meeting with your team. learning goals:
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gorgeous gif's
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objectivecoming soon!
Native American artist George Redhawk creates eerily beautiful gifs even though he's legally blind. With help from computer software, the designer utilizes the art of gif-making to show others how he sees the world as a man who suddenly lost his sight. “It’s an artistic expression of the confusion I go through with my vision loss,” Redhawk told The Creators Project. “Not enough data getting sent to the brain, and it tries to fill in the blanks with false information, so you can’t trust what your eyes or brain are telling you.” The result is an impressive collection of moving art, called The World Through My Eyes. |
animated ukiyo-e |
objectiveCenturies-old Japanese ukiyo-e have received a delightful update, transformed into animated scenes that sometimes include surprising, modern imagery. Japanese video artist and animator Segawa Atsuki remixed a number of these popular woodblock prints and paintings, drawing mostly from Katsushika Hokusai’s Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji series and creating GIFs that turn the static images into mini narratives. |
digital painting
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objective
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digital comic book
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stop-motion animation
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objective
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Game Design
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Objective |
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