The 3D Lighting and Rendering class has an undergraduate equivalent alongside the graduate section.
I find that it adds a richness to the classroom environment for students to interact across project requirements and grade level. This is a complete gallery of the MFA and BFA students who took this class in Spring.
Well done All!
The first demo for our Lighting class of the year. I collected all of the in-progress renders to show the development of the scene.
Ever since the Character Mosaic Project has become a reality in my life, I’ve been exploring faces and concepts of how different features can be stylized for animation. This has led to my dusting off some of my older sketchbooks too, and remembering what I used to see when I lived in Pakistan.
Students at the School of Film and Animation get to create full films in every year of their academic careers.
The Animation Production 1 Workshop is a Sophomore class, where our animation students make their first complete animations and screen the finished results in the SOFA screenings at the end of the year.
Every year, our sophomore students surprise and delight us with their original ideas and beautiful results and this year was no different. I am only including screencaps of the films here, with the artists names, because I hope to see some of these films qualify for festivals in the coming months.
Congratulations to the class!
The Character Mosaic Project aims to make diverse characters more accessible thereby encouraging animators and filmmakers to make more ethnically inclusive stories.
As these characters get refined, they will be made available to broader audiences as international and domestic animation professionals will be able to use them in their films as well. This project will bring attention to (and address) a very important issue in mainstream media and step away from limited stereotypes and unfair projections.
Sheryl Browne Graves speaks to this directly in the Journal of Social Issues:
“Television programming provides information about social groups in two ways: by inclusion and by exclusion. When diverse groups are included, television content offers specific examples of the physical, psychological, social, cultural, and economic characteristics of each group. However when groups are absent from the television curriculums there is implication that the missing groups are unimportant, inconsequential, and Powerless. Both types of information can contribute to the development, maintenance, and modification of children's thoughts, feelings, and actions towards racial/ethnic groups.”
It is hoped these characters will begin a new movement to represent a multitude of nationalities and
cultures around the world. By creating meaningful characters we hope to provide a new cast of
role-models for younger generations, thereby allowing them to empathize with other races and
cultures and attribute a sense of familiarity to them.
Having never been a professional lighting artist, I am always conscious of the fact that being in academia tends to isolate artists from the rest of mainstream production. More than anything (except, perhaps Rigging), Lighting is a field where software and technology update faster than the speed of light and production practices are controlled as much by engineers as they are by artists.
This was the second year SOFA included Arnold into our rendering workflow, so there’s still a lot of experimenting in this process.
Making ears can be super easy if you don’t need a lot of detail, however, when you want to bring a certain degree of realism in, the loops can go absolutely everywhere! This makes a complicated feature a little bit simpler to work with.
For this story, I realized it was super important to figure out the colors of the world and the relative scales of each feature. So I decided to start building the world and setting up the layouts so I could move into 3D cameras sooner rather than later.
