Texan Mosaic

Story & photos by Andrew Angelo

What do you think of when you hear the word animation? Cartoons?  The movie “Toy story” or “Frozen”?

If so, you wouldn’t be wrong.  But the animation industry may be older and broader than you think.

According to Brittanica.com, animation is simply creating the illusion of movement through still pictures.   It says the first ever animated film was created in 1908.

(Disney screenshot)

Fast forward to 1923.  According to Disneyanimation.com, the Disney animation studio is celebrating its 100-year birthday this year.  Disney started producing short, animated cartoons in the 1930s.  Its website says it released its first fully animated feature film, “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” in 1937.  And, of course, we all know it’s expanded since then.

Some sources show the number of jobs in the animation industry is expanding too.  For instance, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, employment of special effects artists and animators is expected to grow by eight percent between 2022 and 2032. 

On the other hand, articles like one in 2022 appearing on American video game and entertainment media company IGN.com suggest there are problems.  The article is headlined

“Why Layoffs and Cancellations Have Sparked Industry-wide Worry Among Animators.”  The article describes what it calls a “general lack of respect” felt by workers in the animation industry and  concern that streaming services aren’t a reliable business model in the entertainment industry.

Still, someone who wants to learn more about animation has to start somewhere.

That somewhere might just be the ARTV 1303 Basic Animation class offered at South Plains College.   This semester the class meets Mondays and Wednesdays from 330 p.m. to 5 p.m. in the Technical Arts Building on the Levelland Campus. 

The description listed in the SPC course catalog reads: “Examination of concepts, characters, and storyboard for basic animation production.  Emphasizes creating movement and expression utilizing traditionally or digitally generated image sequences.”

Professor Delany Jackson teaches ARTV 1303.  Back in August she sent an AllSPC email letting advisors know that this class might be a “cool” elective for students who need one in their schedule.  “Artistic skills are encouraged but not required,” she wrote.

This semester, Jackson says some of the students in the class cannot draw, while others, she says, are extremely talented.  Projects that students tackle throughout the semester are often done on the computer.

“The students use a variety of different Adobe programs to create many of their projects,” she says.

But at the beginning of the semester, several projects were created the old- fashioned way without computers.

“The class does not only base their work on computers with every class,” Jackson says, “but they have also done flipbook projects, stop motion where they make a puppet.  It’s all about mixture of different things.”

Graphic arts student Gabriel Hernandez digs his flipbook project out of his backpack to show what he created.   It depicts a bouncing ball that travels in very small distances, page by page.

Jackson says this was one of the first projects of the semester to show students how something works frame by frame.

“A flip book is essentially you just have a book or a stack of sticky notes or a pile of paper basically,” Jackson says, “and you do like you would a frame by frame animation on paper.  So, when you flip it, it makes it look like a sequence of motion going from page to page.  It looks like animation.”

Another early semester project was puppets.  These don’t look like traditional, fuzzy sock puppets.  They appear to be made out of hard cardboard, and the most important parts of them, Jackson explains, have to do with the moveable joints.  These were created so students could learn about stop motion.

“In stop motion you move it,” she says, “take a picture, move it, take a picture, move it… so when you play them in sequence it looks like it’s moving.”

Stop motion, Jackson explains, is heavily used in the animation industry.

“You’ve seen Tim Burton,” Jackson says. “All of his stuff is stop motion. All of theirs is like clay, and they just kind of like squish things a little bit. And they have like little puppets with bendy arms of clay so they look smooth instead of like little skeletons. But it’s the same concept.” 

Today, students are creating something called rotoscope animation on the computer.

“Rotoscoping is when you take a source video,” Jackson says, “whether it be like a cat or a dog running or a person dancing which is what we’re using for class, or a car moving.  You have a video that you’re using for your source material.  And then you use it and trace it frame by frame to make an animation.”  

She says you see a lot of rotoscope animation used in music videos.  The sequences students are producing in class begin with videos of themselves each dancing the Macarena.

Gabriel Hernandez is a graphic arts student in his second semester.  He says he likes this class, and it’s required for his major. 

Freshman Andrea Garcia is also enrolled in the class, and her major is also graphic arts.

“Growing up you watch cartoons and anime a lot,” she says.  “I used that for inspiration to start my graphic arts journey.”

She says she’s not sure where the graphic arts journey will take her for her career.  Right now, she says the class has its challenges.

“Keeping up with work,” she says, “making sure your files are not mixed up in the wrong place, and learning to get used to the school Mac computers.”

Jackson says occasionally students in this program can connect with SPC alumni who’ve made it in the industry.

According to Wayne Beadles, an SPC associate professor of design communications, Damon Martinez is a former SPC graphic arts student who went from Texas to California for his animation career.    

Martinez says he didn’t know what he wanted to do until he saw the movie “Terminator 2”. He says he went for additional schooling in California but his career path ultimately led him to DreamWorks. 

“That was in 2015 and I’ve been with Dreamworks since then,” he says “with breaks in between.  My department is called Image Finaling, sometimes referred to as Paint Fix by the industry, IMF internally.  I’ve served as a team lead and my experience has me at a senior level artist.  I’m still there, trained many people, just finished “Trolls 3” and currently working on “Kung Fu Panda 4”.

So, just like the sequences shown in flip books, stop action puppetry, or rotoscope animation, students in ARTV-1303 are creating stories of their own. Each student is building a future full of skills.  Sometimes a future is built one frame at a time.