Media Arts: Animation

Media Arts is different from Film Studies.  It involves more hands on experience with the film equipment that you will use on actual film shoots.    Media Arts will also give you more hands on filmmaking experience than Film Studies.  There are lots of Media Arts courses to take and each one is enjoyable and involves hard work.  When you as a film student decide to start taking Media Arts courses in college, the best courses to start with are the equipment courses.  This way you know your equipment and how to use them before you go on real film shoots and start making movies, which will happen in later courses.  One good Media Arts courses to start with is Animation. 

Animation is a very fun Media Art’s course to take.  Unfortunately what you learn and how you learn in this course all depends on your professor and the college you are attending.  For example: Trident Technical College in North Charleston, South Carolina, you might learn just about everything there is to know about animation.  Animation such as Cell animation (individual drawings of characters and their body parts on cell sheets that are moved under the camera to depict a story; what most cartoons originate from), clay animation (movement of clay to create a story on film; Tim Burton’s animation movies), clip art (movement of paper material to create a story on film, what South Park was before the show became more advanced), still animation (movement of inanimate objects to create a story), flip books, and 3D animation (what a lot of animation movies are today).

In this course you might be given projects on just about every animation mentioned.  Now say for example that you and two of your classmates were given a final project.  And for this final project you were told to take a 35mm camera with 35mm film and create an animation short film.  It didn’t matter which type of animation you used, you had to choose one create a story with it, and shoot it.  So you and your classmates decide to make a cartoon using cell animation.  But then you realize that to create this cartoon within the anointed time would be impossible, because you would have to not only draw the characters on each cell sheet, you would also have to draw the limbs of each characters individually separate form their whole bodies that you have drawn, draw individual facial features, and draw the back ground scenes, etc.

Therefore instead you and your classmates decide to film a story using clip art.  So you cut out the characters, and background scenery using construction paper.  Then you shoot the animation using 24 frames per second of movement.  In the end, your project turns out great and you know how to create clip art animation.  Now go out and make a clip art show all on your own or with friends or if you prefer clay animation, to each his or her own.

Now at the University of South Carolina, Columbia, South Carolina if you took the animation course there you might learn more about the use of computer animation than about the other variety of animation.  At USC, you might learn how to animate using photo shop and many other computer programs.  In the end it’s all about learning about film through animation and what it takes filmmakers/animators to create the cartoons we watch and enjoy on a daily basis.  

photo credit: www.refreshingcont…