"Jaguar McGuire (and his Cat)" is a quick few minutes of animation, a slapstick short about a down-on-his-luck daredevil and his unsatisfied feline. But behind the cartoon that screens Friday at SCAD-Atlanta’s first AtlantAmation event is a team of more than 50 people and a year and a half of labor.
“We’re just finishing today,” Tina O’Hailey, SCAD-Atlanta’s associate chairwoman of animation, said Monday. “It’s amazing.”
Amazing that the man-and-his-cat story is in 2D and 3D? Amazing that there are at least six other shorts appearing? Or maybe amazing that after years of sending animators to work, this is the program's first festival of shorts. Organizers hope to make it an annual event.
Animations scheduled to show on Friday cover about 90 minutes with different styles and stories, some fun, some heartbreaking, O'Hailey said. (They're not all cartoonish; some may not be appropriate for children.) The evening ends with a question-and-answer session with filmmakers.
Here, O’Hailey explained more about SCAD's animation program and the collaborative project:
Q: What does it take to put together 5 minutes of animation when classes change every semester?
A: "Jaguar McGuire" started with a group project last January [2009] when we made this story out of a brainstorm of everybody's ideas. We found a director, a grad student and an undergraduate art director. We worked for 10 weeks to get it up on its feet, then into the summer. Just this past January, when we realized this was a great film, we decided we needed to make this. I ran a production class with 10 students in it officially, but students were coming in from all over, alumni were coming in, faculty jumped in. We've had at least 50 students working on it.
Q: What are students learning in the animation program?
A: We start them out in traditional 2D animation, paper and pencil. Then we take them into 3D. From there, they're able to branch out and go into whatever medium they like. They learn stop-motion, digital 2D. The whole culmination of their time with us is that they have to make their own film. They have touched every single thing.
Q: What do you think of the shift from 2D to 3D?
A: You have 2D trends, 3D trends. We're trying to transcend it so it's just animation on the screen and you can do anything to make it look how you want it to look. It's all animation. We're trying to set our students up to do the next art direction.
AtlantAmation short animation festival. 7 p.m. April 9. $8, $5 students, $2 SCAD students. Earl Smith Strand Theater, 117 N. Park Square, Marietta. 770-293-0080, http://blog.scad.edu/atlantamation .
About the Author
The Latest
Featured
