The UTD Mercury

Issue date: 10/3/05 Section: Life & Arts

Media Credit: Justin Hilbert Aaron Rathbun prepares to animate his drawings by photographing several pages of his artwork. Rathbun said his projects, though time-consuming, inspire his creativity. "I´m learning to take thoughts from my mind into reality," he said. [Click to enlarge]

To prepare for their homework, Bruce Barnes' students are watching the movements of vampires, zombies and superheroes.

As a handful of arts & technology undergraduate and master's students watch the screen, Barnes slowly clicks through a scene in the animated film "The Incredibles."

"Look at his posture. Look at the effort it takes to get out of his chair. He hates his job, he hates his boss," said Barnes of the character's slouching movements. "Even the timing on the lift of his eyebrow. "

Perhaps for some, the arch of an eyebrow or the defeated slump of the shoulders is a fleeting, unremarkable moment. But Barnes is teaching the students in his traditional animation class to know otherwise.

The class is being offered for the first time this year as part of ATEC's growing offerings in animation courses. A typical weekly project requires students to create a short animation sequence illustrating motions such as a bouncing ball or walking form.

Barnes, who worked on animated Disney movies such as "The Hunchback of Notre Dame," emphasizes the detail and thought required to convey the simplest of movements in traditional, two-dimensional animation.

Desmond Blair, ATEC junior, said he learned those principles when he had to add a few extra pages to his project to fully animate the sequence. The animations are created using hand-drawn pictures, a camera and animation software.

"There's a lot going on with a person's body that most people don't notice. You're not like right leg forward, left leg forward," Blair said.

Blair flipped through a thick stack of drawings. His idea, he said, is that his cartoon creature will jump, transform into a bomb, which will explode, and then reincarnate from the smoke.

Continued...

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