Education

Team and individual instruction
A team of instructors, including Sergio Toporek, Ron Sernan, Bun Lee, and Chad York, teaches the discipline, bringing individual specialties such as typography, compositing, production, and sound to the classroom in separate courses. They jointly assign a creative project and collaborate on critiques of the students’ work.

The complete production process
The expectations for students grow term by term, involving them in increasingly complex aspects of video and motion graphics production. In the first term, students execute a creative assignment scripted by the instructors. In the second term, students create a brief motion graphic based on their own creative concept. By the third term, students are expected to create a 60-second motion graphic composed primarily of original content that reflects all aspects of the production cycle.

Students submit a production book that includes a written plan, a storyboard, and a script if the piece uses live actors. If any production components are not created by the students themselves, they must provide copyright permissions. While students work together in brainstorming their creative concepts and help each other with specific tasks, each must complete a project at the end of the third term in which they’ve performed duties as writer, producer, director, editor and audio engineer.

A useful toolset
The students use a range of tools to accomplish their assignment, including the Adobe® Video Collection and the Adobe Creative Suite. Adobe After Effects® often plays a central role in the motion graphic production. Some students incorporate live-action video and use Adobe Premiere® Pro for editing. Many students use Adobe Audition® for basic sound editing and signal processing.

The toolset enables the students to execute highly personal visions that allow viewers to share in their emotions or their humor. Miles Nurse explored the challenges of working in 3D space within Adobe After Effects. He used graphics and text to represent various emotions he experiences as he progresses through design challenges from anticipation to completion in Six Phases of Design. Peter Thomas created Talisman as an audiovisual interpretation of an ancient alchemical text, with an open narrative so that viewers can complete the experience with their own interpretations. Pius Jung Kit Chan’s motion graphic, Enslavement, was inspired by his roommate’s online game addiction. He tells his story strictly with images. Tae-Eun Han animated Adobe Illustrator® images in Watching Music to provide a visual sense of how classical music inspires him. Mark Miller created Healthy Choices as a tongue-in-cheek public service announcement designed to get viewers thinking about the way they live their lives. In his motion graphic, Mechanic Flower, Andrea Garcia Tovar used Adobe Illustrator and After Effects to create a flower-shaped mechanism that pulses with its own music like a DJ.

Designers with muscle
This complex project, supervised and supported by a team of instructors with various professional expertise, helps student find their individual creative voices, develop technical proficiency, and understand the production process. Steven Webster, department head, believes it helps them become “designers with muscle.”