This course introduces students to the essential tools and principles that animators and artists in the animation profession must employ in their creative practices. Emphasis will be placed on understanding key concepts such as energy and force, the intentionality behind various poses and gestures, perspective, and the art of simplification. Drawing exercises and lesson plans will focus on character design, the 12 principles of animation, the art of exaggeration, creating dynamic silhouette-driven poses, mannequinization, anatomy, and shape- and form-driven drawing techniques. Students will also learn to utilize the human figure as both a resource and research material. Instruction will include lectures, demonstrations, screenings, drawing from reference and life, discussions of readings, guest artist presentations, acting exercises, and collaborative team opportunities. Students are encouraged to experiment with both traditional and nontraditional mediums and styles throughout the course.
This introductory course covers fundamental concepts in editing, sound design, audio engineering, and music production concepts. Students will learn the essential principles of storytelling through film editing techniques used by professional editors, along with an overview of the historical development of editing styles from silent films to today's fast-paced action features and installations. Students will practice procedures for capturing high-quality recordings and explore creative techniques for artistic sonic expression. They will examine sound in various contexts, including live mixing, abstract composition, editing to picture, voice recording, and music production. Additionally, the course will address relevant principles of acoustics and essential sound processing concepts.Additional Information Throughout the semester, students will explore a wide range of artistic, conceptual, and aesthetic approaches to working with sound and image as a medium. A special section will emphasize how editing and sound can create effective structures for successful experimental films and installations. Students will be introduced to basic equipment, including cameras, microphones, mixers, digital recorders, and software such as Adobe CC Premiere, CC Audition, and digital audio workstations (DAWs). The course will also cover techniques for utilizing professional sound and music libraries, as well as discussions on how to hire and collaborate with professional musicians, editors, and sound designers. Additionally, topics such as copyright issues and contract writing will be addressed to prepare students for professional practices in the field.
The first in a two-semester sequence, this studio course delves into the fundamentals of frame-by-frame animation, offering students a comprehensive perspective on the art form. Designed for those with diverse interests across various mediums, this course incorporates drawing, experimental stop motion, and a conceptual understanding of animation principles, cinematic vocabulary, and experimental structures. Students will explore animation through hands-on projects, lectures, screenings of historical and contemporary works, and visits from guest artists. Weekly collaborative feedback sessions and discussions will further enhance their learning experience. Throughout the semester, students will experiment with various production methods and materials using software like RoughAnimator, Dragonframe, OpenToonz, and Toon Boom Harmony for capturing. The course emphasizes an exploration of the animation principles, from subtle nuances to the complexities inherent in the animation profession. By the end of this first semester, students will have gained a broad understanding of animation techniques and workflows, preparing them for more advanced explorations in the subsequent semester.
The second of a two-semester sequence, this studio course expands on the frame-by-frame perspective and hybrid moving image making skills using digital software. Students with diverse interests within and across, painting and drawing, sculpture, illustration, music, and performance will obtain a basic formal and conceptual knowledge of animation principles, cinematic vocabulary and experimental structures. Animation is investigated through projects, lecture/screenings on historical and contemporary works and ideas, discussion of readings, visiting artists, research and writing, hands-on experiences, and collaborative projects. In the second semester students will apply principles of timing and pacing as they learn composite software: After Effects, Flash and Painter. Students will be encouraged to explore a range of alternative approaches to creating the illusion of movement as well as to see animation as a nuanced medium for self-expression across various media platforms that communicate within and outside the traditional movie house.
Special topics courses are approved to take advantage of timely subjects, the expertise of a faculty member, or to test student interest in a topic which may later be added to the curriculum.
Character Design has its roots in industry animation where a fixed set of shapes allowed studios to employ any number of animators to work simultaneously. Character & Identity assumes audiences can relate to and engage with a character without the maker having to dilute or amplify to arrive at a superficial representation of a type. The course seeks to contrast the usual reductive approaches in thinking about character by investigating the pitfalls of classifying and stereotyping. With a starting focus on media literacy as a disruption to the usual introduction of character, students will engage in a variety of research methods aimed at gathering specifics rather than generalizations to inform visual development. How can one use the typical character types as a departure point rather than a destination? How are the traditional ways of categorizing and developing character effective and in what ways do they fail to reflect the fluidity and complexity of humanity? With the goal of designing original characters, students will collect and assemble a personal visual reference library to support their findings and challenge their own preconceptions. Students will do field work where they would go out and actively study and document real people as a way of researching when developing their designs that seek out and celebrate specifics rather than generalizations. Students will conduct interviews with people and look for all the subtleties in selfpresentation, dress, cadences of speech and physical vocabulary as well as consider how people move in different spaces, bodies, and states of mind. Acting or improv segments and drawing from life will hone observational skills. Students will assemble a personal visual reference library to support their findings and challenge their own preconceptions.
This course builds upon foundational animation principles, emphasizing the concept of the object as a character. Students are encouraged to apply the principles of animated motion to both figurative and nonfigurative forms using a variety of physical materials. The course also introduces essential techniques for utilizing camera and lighting to create compelling visual narratives. Students will explore the practice and craft of stop motion animation investigated through lecture demonstrations, screenings of historical and contemporary works, interactions with visiting artists and industry professionals, and guided technical sessions in our stop motion suites. The course culminates in an individual final project that is suitable for inclusion in a portfolio and reel.
Puppet Fabrication provides students with foundation skills in character puppet fabrication designed for stop motion animation. In hands-on workshops, students will be introduced to multiple material handling techniques including wire armature construction, clip foam body shaping, direct sculpt head build, costuming, and wig construction, culminating in a functional stop motion puppet. As a part of the curriculum, a spectrum of stop motion media will be shown and discussed in class to illustrate the diverse paths this medium takes. Students are given support to evaluate, experiment, apply and re-imagine puppetry while developing techniques as it relates to their personal voice.
This introductory course in Storyboarding for Film, or Visual Storytelling, covers the fundamental practices of professional storyboarding. Applicable to various forms of visual media including animation, live-action filmmaking, comics, graphic novels, and video games, the course guides students through exercises in visualizing stories from written prompts and treatments. These exercises serve as preparation for visualizing their own projects, which may range from traditional 3-act narratives to more experimental sequences. The class accommodates students with varying levels of drawing and storytelling skills from diverse practices. Additionally, students will explore editing their storyboards into a video format, allowing them to experiment with timing and gain insights into how their sequences translate into a fully realized production animatic.
This course is designed to apply media theory to moving image practice. Throughout academia, binary positions that pit moving image as art against moving image as documentary now seem largely artificial. Regardless, for many the terms animation and documentary can conjure an odd pairing. This course examines how hybridized digital film - or animation as defined by Lev Manovich - shifts and broadens how the real can be depicted. Beginning with definitions of documentary by Bill Nichols and Julia Lesage, this course explores, through the lens of theorist Annabelle Honess Roe, how - absent indexical relationship between live action and reality - animation's material difference and a keen emphasis on soundtrack can provide a combination that both lacks and exceeds the visual indexical bond between image and reality.From Winsor McCay's 1918 classic The Sinking of the Lusitania through a host of educational and social guidance films to Dennis Tupicoff's His Mother's Voice (1997), to It's Like That by the Southern Ladies Animation Group (2003) to Marjane Satrapi's 2007 Oscar nominated Persepolis, animated documentary exposes as false the old ultimatum: either artistic or didactic, either aesthetic or political. Emphasis is placed on advanced skills in critical thinking, oral and written communication, and studio work in order to investigate how, within contemporary ethnography, animated documentary can be used to bring breadth and depth to representation of 'the other'.
This upper division hybrid media studio extends the principles of animation the pacing of sequential images, the tension between stillness and movement, and the hybrid compositing practices that define digital filmmaking in the creation of innovative, upper division work constructed from a frame-by-frame perspective. Animated Short Film Topics include: digital film and hybrid moving image, gestures and languages of movement, rotoscoping and the loss of the index, and the architecture of animated space. The course is structured by individual and collaborative projects, critiques, lectures and screenings on historical and contemporary animated art forms, discussions of theoretical readings, research and writing, and field work to support in-depth investigations tied to non-traditional contexts, interdisciplinary investigations and a range of display platforms.
This upper division studio course builds upon the principles of animation while pushingthe idea of 'screen' beyond the traditional single rectangular experience. Course topicsaddress both concepts and production to include: experiencing spatial form/movingimage in spaces, spectacle & poetics, and considerations for multi-channel projections.The course includes individual and collaborative projects, equipment demonstrationsand hands-on technical experimenting, critiques, field trips, and lectures/screenings onhistorical and contemporary installations and projections. Students will be asked toparticipate and lead discussions of theoretical readings and engage in upper divisionpractice-based research to support in-depth investigations leading to the creation ofwork designed for range of display platforms and audiences. Final projects will culminatein a public exhibition.
This upper-division course offers an in-depth exploration of narrative construction in literature, film, critical theory, and the history of the moving image, with a special focus on animated narratives for short-form platforms. Through applied exercises, lectures, screenings, critiques, and hands-on workshops, students will expand their understanding of short moving image works. The projects within this course will address various narrative and conceptual elements, such as associative thinking, visualization, event analysis, and structural development. Students will engage with traditional narrative forms, animated documentaries, and experimental practices while exploring the unique language of animation. Key phases of the animation pipeline-pre-production, production, and post-production- will be studied, with a focus on story/script development, storyboarding, character design, and music composition. By the end of the course, students will have developed original pre-production works, including scripts and animatics, that set the tone for their final projects, preparing them for the AA351 Production Co-lab course in the following semester.
Special topics courses are approved to take advantage of timely subjects, the expertise of a faculty member, or to test student interest in a topic which may later be added to the curriculum.
This upper division studio course is for animators and designers interested in understanding concepts and applications of 2D/3D software in a creative environment. Students will explore the relationships between 2D and 3D toolsets. Beginning with the 2 D aspects of After Effects we will move into concepts of 3D software including MoGraph, a toolset in Cinema 4D. Then we will roundtrip our work back into After Effects to learn some advanced compositing techniques and polish up our images. With the potential of utilizing hand drawings, photos, collages, and even video, this course helps you find a unique voice in computer graphics. Hands-on instruction in Photoshop, After Effects and Cinema 4D will bring students to an intermediate level in the software. A series of short assignments coupled with screenings of a range of animated work, pertinent analysis of work and on-going critique support both exploration and problem solving. This course is a 300 level elective for Graphic Design and Animated Arts.
This course serves as a continuation of the production pipeline, building upon the pre-production work (story, script, visual development, character designs, storyboards, and animatic) produced in the previous semester's AA333 Narrative Strategy class. In this course, students will focus mainly on theproduction and post-production phases of the pipeline, simulating the interactions and responsibilities of studio experiences. Students will work in different departments and teams, bringing their expertise to the larger project. Potential production roles include layout artist, background artist, animator, special effect animator, editor, cleanup artist, colorist, fabricator, rigger, director, producer, etc. The course offers studio experiences by creating opportunities for collaboration and team building as they work to complete the group project throughout the semester.
This upper-level course rigorously examines the studio practices and intricacies of layout and background design within film and animation creative practices. In this course, students will explore unique compositional schemes and analyze a variety of techniques for creating dynamic and engaging visual narratives, acquiring a comprehensive understanding of industry-specific terminology and procedural pathways essential for layout and background design, and how to effectively utilize colors and tones to enhance moods and to study the psychological impact of color on the human psyche and emotional responses through a series of in-class exercises and assignments. Students are encouraged to createdesigns that reflect their individual artistic interests, experimenting with both traditional and non- traditional mediums in developing distinctive styles. By the conclusion of this course, students will beequipped with the creative and technical competencies necessary to produce compelling, high-quality background designs for their creative practices, professional portfolios and advance opportunities for careers in animation and film production.
Special topics courses are approved to take advantage of timely subjects, the expertise of a faculty member, or to test student interest in a topic which may later be added to the curriculum.
The Animated Arts curriculum combines the hand crafted with the digital to help you grow your unique vision. You'll find you have plenty of options to tailor your experience.
Willamette University