Fine arts and business major Nick Falbo said he first became interested in animation when, as a high school senior, he attended an Animation Explosion, an annual showcase of student animation at the University.
“I decided it was something I wanted to do,” he said. Now, two years later, Falbo is this year’s Animation Explosion student coordinator, in charge of organizing and running the show. He will also be contributing a stop-motion animation and a short live-action sequence to the show, which will display work from more than 60 student artists in several University animation classes. Their work ranges from simple drawings on index cards that are filmed, to complex 3-D computer animation done with the software called 3-D Studio Max. Clay, cut-outs and fabricated puppets are also filmed in stop motion.
In addition to the animation tape, the presentation Friday will include a short animated film from 1957 by animation pioneer David Foster. There is also an exhibit in the LaVerne Krause Gallery in Lawrence Hall that displays artwork from the animated films that will be shown on Friday.
“There’s some pretty amazing stop-motion animation in the show,” said Ken O’Connell, a fine and applied arts professor who teaches several of the animation classes. “The results are pretty spectacular. Also, the computer animation gets more sophisticated every year.”
Falbo agreed that the quality of work is improving each year.
“Each year, the standards have gotten higher and higher,” he said.
Animation is a time-consuming process, and many of the projects on display Friday night are the product of hours upon hours of work. When animating something like a person walking, a person would have to study the movement and break it down into pieces, O’Connell said. The average walk cycle, for example, has 12 phases, and people move at about one stride per second.
When people see the finished product, they have no idea of the hours of work that went into making the animation move smoothly on the screen, O’Connell said.
“Basically, animation is shooting one frame of film at a time,” O’Connell said. While a regular movie camera could shoot around 24 frames a second, one second in an animated movie can take almost an hour to film. And when the animation is drawn, it can take up to 350 drawings to make one smoothly-animated film that runs three minutes, Ken said.
For another one of the films that will be shown at the Animation Explosion, a student spent 50 hours working on his three-minute animated film, O’Connell said.
Senior fine arts major Paul Kuck is also contributing work to the show. His work, which he completed as part of his animation class, is an abstract visual music piece, uses mostly geometric shapes set to music.
“I’m basically taking an African-driven percussion piece and putting visuals to it,” he said.
The Animation Explosion has been held for the past three years, though O’Connell said the department put on a similar show before it got its official title. Donations and grants from corporations such as Sony Disc Manufacturing, Intel Corp. and Eugene Print help fund the event each year.
O’Connell said that since the University began teaching animation and motion graphics more than 42 years ago, graduates have gone on to work for companies like Disney, Dreamworks, Apple Computer, Adobe Software, Broderbund, Microsoft and Netscape.