Animation has come a long way since the days of drawing and painting a series of images to simulate movement. “Animation Explosion” will present student work in a variety of animation styles including film, computer and drawing animation and claymation.
The art department presents “Animation Explosion” at 7 p.m. Thursday and Friday in 177 Lawrence Hall. Entry to the event is free, and there will be complementary refreshments.
The University has taught animation for more than 40 years through the art department’s visual design program. But in the 2000-01 school year, the department changed the name of the program to multimedia design because of the increasing number of computers and various media used to produce animation. The first multimedia design class graduates this year.
“Animation Explosion” is “a showcase of what has been done in our department,” said Marianne Hallock, coordinator of the event.
The event will exhibit animation work that students have produced, she said. The students have worked on projects that incorporate various types of animation including 3-D models, drawings, stop-motion, video, computer animation, experimental animation, interactive Web sites and live action with blue and green screens.
“We try a little bit of everything,” Hallock said.
Hallock said she began studying multimedia design in Winter 2001, but she had already experimented with animation in high school using Legos and drawings.
The hard part of animation is not the drawing, she said, but “you have to be willing to keep drawing the same thing over and over again.” She said some animating styles involve scanning lots of drawings. But drawing is no longer the only way to make an object move, and the projects shown at “Animation Explosion” will demonstrate the various techniques with which the student animators have been working.

“The hard part is figuring out the pacing,” she said. “How do you exaggerate the motion?”
She said the animators use a technique called “squash and stretch” that the old Disney animators used in their classic cartoons. Movements are added to an object that may seem overly cartoonish, but the end result is a more lifelike movement.
She drew a ball bouncing into the distance and pointed out how she elongated the ball in midair to simulate more “organic” movement. Then when the ball hit the ground, she drew it with a dramatic “splat!”
Hallock offers “Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within” and “Shrek” as other examples of how exaggeration gives reality to animation.
“The trouble with ‘Final Fantasy’ was that the characters were too rigid. They were gorgeously drawn by the best animators in Japan, but the characters didn’t feel alive. In ‘Shrek,’ (the characters) feel alive, but they’re totally exaggerated,” she said.
Other techniques used in some animation include physically scratching the film, then projecting it, according to Pat Welbrn, a senior in the multimedia design program. He said the animators etch drawings onto the negative, creating shapes and simulated movement. The art department encourages its students to develop a broad understanding of many different kinds of animation rather than specializing in just one, according to senior Nick Falbo. He will be one of the last few visual design majors to graduate this year.
In the last four years, Falbo said he has been a part of “Animation Explosion” and has experimented with drawing, clay model, computer and abstract animation, but he has not yet found a favorite medium.
He said he will submit three or four pieces of animation for the event this year, including his BFA terminal project.
“I’ve been experimenting with different narrative structures,” Falbo said. “How does alternative (narrative) structures affect the story itself?”
In his project, he has taken Shakespeare’s character Ophelia, from “Hamlet,” and told her story through a forensic study of her death. The result is a very fragmented view of Ophelia’s life and death, he said.
Welbrn and other animators have also experimented with using mathematical formulas to manipulate images. He said they could change the shape and color of an image by changing the formula.
Hallock said each night will exhibit many different animation pieces, and most animation pieces are less than five minutes long.
“Get there early,” she said. “It fills up fast.”