Photo by Christina Lynn - Rutgers University—Camden
For over five years, I’ve been a lecturer in Rutgers University—Camden’s Animation Program, inspiring the next generation of students while giving them the creative, intellectual tools they need to thrive.
On Saturdays, I’ve instructed the Pre-College Animation course for high school students.
Focused Courses:
Character Design
Exploring the narrative concepts that build legendary characters and incredible worlds, students experiment with proportions, perspective, color, style, scenario, and expression, constantly challenged to think outside the box. How do character appearances change from Disney’s Steamboat Willie to Fortiche’s Arcane? Assignments range from verbal pitches and independent illustrations to partner-based collaborations and client-oriented project revisions.
Do you have one single favorite character? …Why?!
Storyboard Art
[In Disney’s early days (in the 1930s), animators hunched around a small table covered in hundreds of numbered drawings. When Webb Smith recommended pinning the drawings up across the room on a wall-board, the term “Storyboard” was born.]
The gold-standard for time-based visual story-planning: students learn a variety of techniques to plan camera shots and action scenes with clear supporting markup and annotation. By the end of the course, they create an accurately timed pre-production animatic video with sound that serves as a blueprint for a more polished animation production to come.
Without clear storyboards, projects are an improvisational mess, full of re-shoots, trashed scenes, and wasted creative energy.
Traditional Animation
Students learn the principles of animation, timing, and frame spacing. While drawing and time-intensive, there’s nothing more satisfying than making a character’s face distort in horror or having one jump up over an incoming obstacle at the very last moment! Animation tests students eyes, minds, and hands.
Computer (3D) Animation
Without 3D animation, modern video games and CGI films wouldn’t exist: Students explore Maya and Blender, learning skills like poly-modeling, texturing, lighting, rendering, rigging, and animation.
Later on, you may really enjoy experimenting with procedural generation, character animation, and particle simulations.
Graphic Design
Humans have been creating symbols since the beginning of time — how do we decide which shapes, lines, and colors to use? What do they mean? How can we create something that is visually interesting and carries complex or intentional meaning?
