Animation: Documentary

This comprehensive, yearlong course provides students with an opportunity to create short, animated, documentary films emerging from investigation or activist interests. The focus of this class is on the development of 2D animation techniques and approaches that embrace documentary film as a fine-art practice. Through creative process and research, students nurture documentary ideas that they then execute in animation or with a combination of animation and cinéma vérité sources. Practice in this course is integrated with theory, so that filmmaking is held within the context of critical and conceptual thinking about documentary film. To enable students to understand the fundamental processes of 2D stop-motion animation production, the first semester of this course is devoted simultaneously to story ideas and to technical instruction, including workshops in story development, drawing for animation, cut-out animation, lighting, cameras, and the After Effects, Photoshop, and Toon Boom software. With the recent explosion of interest in documentary film production, this course offers students the chance to discover their own unique style for the telling of existent stories. Working both in teams and individually, students will produce a series of short animation projects in the first term; in term two, they will develop a single film project of greater length and depth. Conference films in the spring semester will be approximately 3-10 minutes in length and suitable for festivals and/or Web distribution. Students should come prepared with two or three documentary ideas. Some drawing experience is favorable. Limited enrollment: 8 students