Sterling resident Edson Saenz spent most of Saturday in a computer lab at Northern Virginia Community College (NVCC) just before school started on Monday.
The NVCC student and four others participated in a day-long animation marathon to create a short cartoon film by the end of the day Saturday.
"It flies by. When you like something you do, it's not work, it's fun," Saenz said as he sat in front of a computer in Room 210 of the Waddell Building. "I just love animation.… It's neat to see two-dimensional characters come to life."
NVCC adjunct instructor Miguel De Angel of Fair Oaks led the eight- to 10-hour workshop to introduce students to the animation field and to promote the community college’s animation classes.
"The marathon is my ideal environment. There is a bunch of people coming together for the passion of the art form. We’re doing this for fun," said De Angel, a free-lance illustrator, multi-media artist and animator who has taught Animation I at NVCC for the past two years. He also teaches at the Reston and Vienna community centers and offers individual instruction.
ANIMATION I is the first of two animation classes required for NVCC’s multi-media and communication design programs. De Angel teaches students the gravity and mechanics of the human body necessary for creating believable and realistic cartoon characters and logos. "When you have a foundation to make things look like they’re real life, you can make a logo much more believable," he said.
Animation is typically thought of as giving movement. "It’s not just about movement. It’s trying to give personality behind the character and [show] the character thinking," De Angel said.
He teaches basic animation principals and explains how to use two main animation programs, Director and Flash by Micro Media. "My goal in the class is teaching them the basics of animation, so they can apply that to anything, whether it’s a character or a logo or letters."
The day-long workshop is a compressed version of the 16-week class. De Angel started the workshop in March after attending California’s World Animation Celebration, which includes an animation marathon contest. He offered the first workshop to 20 students and the second on July 19 to five students. He invited the students from the second workshop to return on Saturday to continue the video they started.
TYPICALLY during the workshops, De Angel acts as director for a short movie as he seeks ideas that he and the students combine into a coherent story. The students depict how they visualize the story, either by planning a scene or drawing out a character.
They decide how to combine different ideas to design the characters and scenes, along with deciding on camera angles and background. "They get hands-on experience doing it and then being part of it," De Angel said.
During the second workshop, De Angel had equipment available to record sound. When sound is added, it is the major factor determining the length of each scene after the dialogue is laid out. With or without dialogue, the action from each scene has to be story boarded, laid out in a comic strip format to determine where the characters will be placed and what they will be doing during the scene.
At that point, the drawings are scanned and digitized for further computer work. They are placed in one or two frames depending on the speed of the characters’ movements. A movie or video typically has 30 frames, while most films have 24 frames per second. In the workshop and the class, the students worked with 10 to 12 frames to maintain fluid movement. Students from the first workshop created a one-minute film, while students taking the second workshop created one that lasted 1.5 minutes.
"They’re on deadline.… They have to have something to roll out by 4 or 5 in the afternoon," said Beverly Blois, chairman of the Humanities Division for NVCC. "It gives them a nice preview of the working world in the graphics world. They gain on-the-job experience while they’re still in the hands of their instructor."