Hello everybody, welcome. Thank you so much for joining us today during our into the studios with animation and game art. Today we are here with Natasha, who is the Chair of Animation and Game art and we'll also have Aiden who is one of our students who is now a senior from animation and game art. As a reminder, if you have any questions during this webinar, please feel free to enter them into the chat area which is on the bottom right corner of the screen. We will bring that up during our Q&A.
First off, we will be doing the presentation with Natasha and Aiden and then we will jump into the Q&A at the end. So again, if there are any questions, feel free to put them in there.
But I am not. Hand this off to Natasha now. Natasha.
Thanks, Julia, all right.
I am going to play a short video which is a highlights reel from our department. I guess give a shout if it doesn't work, but here we go.
All right. That was our highlights. Real. Those are chosen from the past five years of Capstone senior projects from our department. It's a mix of individual and team projects and everything you see on screen was created by pcad students, all original concepts, original characters, original stories. They were entirely modeled, textured, shaded, rendered, rigged, animated, assembled by students. So we're very, very proud of the work that we do.
Julya Nichols
03:03:05 PM
PCA&D Animation & Game Art Department: https://pcad.edu/degrees/animation-game-art/
So we are the animation game art department. Throughout these slides you're also going to see some still frames from our students and the credits are up in the top right.
In the Aga program, you can choose between 2 tracks. There is the animation track, which is for film, TV streaming, things like that, looking at career paths such as character animation for film, character modeling for film set design and visual development. Or we have our gamer track, which is similarly for the video games industry. You're creating art and assets for video games, so character animation, character modeling for games, environment modeling, level design and visual development these tracks.
Are simply an informed path of classes that you can choose between.
For technology requirements, if you go to ourlinkpcad.edu/technology requirements, there's a couple requirements that are standard for all students, such as having a laptop. For AG students specifically, we actually suggest Windows instead of Mac as the operating system. We have both Windows and Mac Labs, so we are in our department. We just recommend that as well.
Did you wanna add to that eight and I heard you.
I heard a little chuckle.
Please, please, please, just just don't make it harder. Just get a windows for trust me. Just trust everyone here right now. Just get a windows.
Aiden approved Windows. We a lot of our software was originally built for Windows platform and so even though it's compatible on Macs, there tends to be a little more bugs. And also what we've been noticing in the past few years is the the specs that Windows machines come with just outweigh the costs that the Mac machines come with, so you get a little more bang for your buck.
So let's talk about the four year curriculum. We're actually going to start in foundation year. This is a new requirement. So if you haven't heard this 1/8 and it's been implemented in the past year, so foundation year, there's two classes you want to keep an eye on. That's foundation digital media and that's like general digital media skills, things like Photoshop, Illustrator, after effects. And then we have two. We have a choice between narrative figure or figure drawing, figure drawings, kind of self-explanatory. It's.
With studying and drawing the human figure, narrative figure is a little more geared towards things like storyboarding. So can you draw a figure in the scene talking about sequential art and film composition and things like that. So in order to enter our major, those are the two prerequisites is in your foundation year you earn a beer hire in either narrative figure or figure drawing and that digital media course. The reason why we have this in place is to make sure that AG students are students that can draw.
And also students that are technically savvy, so you're comfortable navigating a computer. If you're a transfer student, you can provide proof of similarly accredited classes or we also have an option to provide like a portfolio requirement or something else that would demonstrate that you are technologically savvy and that you like to draw.
When you enter our sophomore year, we're going to be building upon the core art and design principles that you go over in your foundation year. Those will always come back. Those always come back in all of our classes, all those important skills. You will be taking classes like traditional animation, computer animation, one and two. You'll be studying things like visual storytelling, film language, a little bit of sound. You'll be introduced to 3D software.
We'll be using both traditional and digital tools. So I mentioned there is a traditional animation class that is traditional drawing, but you're using it on a computer as well. And then software, the college is on Adobe Creative Cloud and then we also introduce Maya, Maya as our 3D software of choice.
Here's an example of a software level project. So we have a nice little house that was built by one of our sophomores.
We'll get into storyboarding and storytelling, film language, shot composition, and all those things I mentioned before.
You will continue on some of the sequences that were started in sophomore years. So for example, computer animation one and two. If you're an animation track, you're going to move into computer animation three and four. You'll be introduced to more rigging concepts, more acting and performance fundamentals. If you're a game art track, you're going to move from computer animation to into gaming one and Gamer 2. So those are classes that are specific to making game assets for game engines. You're going to learn unreal and.
Building both game cinematics and simple prototypes in game engines.
In December, we have the junior real reviews. So in other programs, for example, if you were an illustration major, this would be called a portfolio review. Here in ago, we put together a little reels just like our department has a reel, all the highlights of the strong pieces of their work. You're going to do the same with your junior pieces.
You're also going to, in spring, start the senior sequence. So the senior sequence is visual development 2 preproduction, which are prerequisites into the senior studio one and two. They all fit together as a 3 semester sequence which builds your senior Capstone project.
We also highly encourage looking at internships and mentorships as a requirement. There's now no penalty for not doing one. However, we really, really emphasize to at least look and apply to places. There's a lot of emphasis right now in the field in finding these internships. It is a lot more common to find paid positions. It's a lot more common to find remote positions. So it's out there and we really want to get our students connected. We've also had students do some really cool things before.
I think we often tell the story of Chris Morris, who interned up in Rock Lititz for Major Omega Studios, and they could not wait to hire him. So he finished his senior year and then went to work for them right away. He's still there. He's designed the hyper deck.
Is it called the hyperdoc at Hershey Park? And then the SpongeBob VR ride, which is in select malls across America, so he's doing some really cool stuff as well?
Here's some samples from the junior year classes. So this was our visual development class and one of our seniors who actually graduated last year. So recent project and part of their pitch packet that they pitched for their film God Slayer. These are the two main characters, the God of Death and Ace, the protagonist. We have some environment samples here as well, and if you look at their final film, you can actually see these pretty close like shot.
Overshot the fully developed shot versus these original sketches.
Then a couple of extra pieces. I thought this was fun.
Notice that the colors change throughout the piece to imply different emotional cues.
So that brings us to our senior year. I mentioned the pre production class in junior year. So each junior will get to decide if they want to be in a group or if they want to be independent. They provide they produce 2 pitches that are then presented in front of faculty and at least one of them has to be greenlit to move on. Whichever one they choose moves on to fall and then they are in production, which is where Aiden is at right now. He's with me.
You pitched all the stuff and now you got to make all this stuff. So that's one of the one of the things we like to say too is there's nothing free in animation. So unlike in a a film shoot, you can show up on location, you can bring your actors in and they all, each, you know person contributes a little bit to the piece animation. You have to control everything. You have to make everything so.
So in our senior year in my class, senior studio one and two, it's a little bit, you know animation and it's a little bit filmmaking, it's a little bit computer graphics, but the real heart of it is long term project management. So in this program we we break everything out, we document everything we use an agile ish approach is what I like to call it. So Agile is a style of project management methodology and we break everything into manageable pieces and we hit all of our deadlines one at a time.
So that brings us to senior projects. Let me pause for a second. Aiden, do you want to chime in on, you know, perhaps the junior to senior experience since that's something that you just went through?
Oh no, I think that junior year especially like the second-half of it, like from all that, it was a grand old time. It was an intensive time as a thing though. Like it wasn't just a, wasn't a nice just like, well, you know, just nice and easy. Like you put like you, you put, you got out what you put into it. So you know, if you put a lot of time into it, work out what you need to do, a lot of your summer will be a lot easier because all things are already done to go with.
If you like kind of flow it in of like, well, you know, I have some fun ideas here, then a lot of your summer is going to be a lot of fixing, touching up, getting things done, all that kind of stuff. And you know, we're just like a couple weeks into like our senior thesis right now. And yeah, it's honestly it's pretty manageable. You've been putting up with us.
I'm hoping it stays that way.
But right now I'm fine. Right now I'm not like, Oh no, but I'm yeah.
Well, it's it is designed to be manageable. You mentioned doing summer work and we do have summers off in our our two semester calendar. So some students leverage that. Some students, especially if we flag them as a high scope project if that's a way that faculty can let students know, hey you're biting off a lot here. So I hope you have time and your outside life that you can possibly sink more into this. The whole thing is is designed to be completed in the the number of credit hours that.
That we have, but it is a very time intensive major at the same time. So I think that's something important to to really phone home with people is, you know, if you procrastinate on a painting and then you have to stay up all night and finish it, we've all been there. But if you procrastinate on a film, it's a little bit different because we're dealing with hundreds of hours instead of 10s of hours and some of that we cannot make up even if you've tried to stay up for a week, right? And we don't want you to do that at all.
Yeah, please don't. Don't, don't, don't.
So it is, it is one of those majors you have to you have to work at it every day. So it's we we like to really emphasize that it's it's a serious type of student that enters our our program.
I just think it just goes to just to reiterate one more time since you said it wasn't gonna say it again.
You can try your hardest to be like, oh, I can probably do it in a night. Don't don't do that to yourself, please. Trust me it it doesn't as much as you want, but I might get the animation done like, you know, like a night. And it just just do it bit by bit. It will turn out much better that way. If you just do like over a night, be like, that's fine. I guess. Moving next one now. Don't do it to yourself, please.
Animation is a very long expensive process and there's a big conversation right now in the industry which some people are picking up on if you, if you followed. Like you know especially in games industry we do not like to crunch and it's a design problem if you if you design your projects well you should not have to crunch. I mean maybe you stay an hour late every once in a while, but but yeah that's that's been a big thing in the past couple of years is how do we not burn people out? How do we keep people excited?
And in manageable amounts of work. So anyways, that brings us to the senior project, so let's talk a little more about that. I did mention it's part of A3 semester sequence that really starts in the junior year.
There's two options. If you're an animation track student, you would produce a short film, and that's, you know, a beginning, middle, end, you know, self-contained. If you're a game art student, you produce a game trailer, which is kind of like a a game cinematics piece, and it's meant to hype up the pitch that you're pitching so it doesn't have to have an end, right? Some students have chosen to fake some of the gameplay. So the piece that I was showing before? Daisies, God, Slayer.
Least we had. We actually did not use a game engine. We just used after effects and we kind of layered overlays on top of it. Another sample, Dan Cardona, who was in the trailer that I showed in the very beginning, there was a robot kind of running around different buildings. He did actually bring that all into Unreal Engine. And then.
Some parts of it are interactive, some parts are just cinematic and overlays again.
So it does not have to be an interactive piece unless you want it to be.
Some examples of senior shows in the past. This is in our gallery space, and you can see all of our lovely posters. And each of the posters has a little, like, you know, watch online at this place. And then we had these vintage movie seats one year with a projector setup where we could screen all of our pieces. We also have links at the end of this presentation where you can watch them. They're all live on YouTube and live in our screening rooms or online screening rooms.
So here's some more more of those posters.
And just to brag, we have had some awards and recognitions in the past couple of years.
So here's a couple of those.
We do highly encourage our students to submit to film festivals after they graduate, and as you can see, some of them yield recognitions.
And here's those links, Julia. I think you have them as well if you want to post them at some point.
Oh, we have 2022 up two. I should mention that. Same same URL just with the two.
Julya Nichols
03:17:56 PM
2022 Videos: https://pcad.edu/senior-show-2022-videos/
Julya Nichols
03:18:10 PM
2021 Videos: https://pcad.edu/senior-show-2021-videos/
A big part of our program is connecting students to potential, you know, foot in the door opportunities, getting them to network with each other, getting to them to see the broader community of animation and games industry. One of the ways that we do that is through our SIGGRAPH student chapter. So ACM SIGGRAPH. I know there's a lot of acronyms in this title. Pcat is us. ACM SIGGRAPH is the Association of Computing Machinery and Special Interest Group in computer graphics.
Julya Nichols
03:18:27 PM
2020 Videos: https://pcad.edu/senior-show-2020-videos/
So there's a whole list. There's about 100 different Sigs, special interest groups, and I think computer graphics is the coolest one. We have one of the largest conferences, so SIGGRAPH is an annual North American conference, and there's one in Asia as well. And there's over 100 professional and student chapters across the world, including ours at Pcad. Actually in our area in the sort of like East Coast, Pennsylvania and New Jersey area, there's a number of student chapters and we try and reach out to them and say hello.
And every once in a while, we'll collaborate on an event. So in addition to Picard, there's also Drexel Upenn, Rowan TCNJ.
I'm sure I'm missing some.
Off the top of my head, but those are a few. You can visit chapters at siggraph.org and see the whole map of places. And a cool thing about that as well is when students graduate, if they decide to relocate to another city, they can plug right into either a professional or student chapter in the area. So for example, if you go to grad school, you might find a SIGGRAPH chapter there if you move to one of the major city hubs. Like there's one in DC-1 in New York City, one in LA, one in San Francisco and Silicon Valley.
All the major hotspots will have a digraph chapter that you can plug into. There's also a large online presence as well, so the students get access to all of the online events that other chapters are doing. So the Washington DC chapter does a lot of online stuff, the LA does a lot of online stuff. It's a really nice big family here. That's the graph. I also participate as a committee person. I've been a member since 2013. I have attended conferences since 2015. I have a whole stack of photos.
The big one in the before times was 2019. We had seven students with us that year, so there was.
This was in LA. I think four of them were student volunteers, which means they perform duties within the organization and direct people around the conference in exchange for a free ticket, and then some attended on their own accord. And I really treat it like a vacation every year. Not that I'm relaxing while I'm there, but I do get to travel sometimes people will kind of build out an extra few days and get to see the city that it's in. Every other year SIGGRAPH is in LA and then on the off year as it travels around to different.
Major cities. So this past year I was lucky enough to attend. We were in Vancouver. It was very beautiful. They've been in New Orleans, they've been in Anaheim, which is also in California.
We are really crossing our fingers that they come back to the East Coast because in 2020 they were in Washington DC and then it was cancelled. It was very sad, but that's on their radar. So we're really hoping they'll come back and we can drive instead of fly because it's expensive to fly.
Eden, have you participated in our chapter at all? Have you attended events?
I know that I'm, I mean, I'm going to some of the club meetings now, but.
Then yes, some of them, like somebody haven't gone like these events at all quite yet.
Cool. Are you on the discord too?
I own the discord. I also realized. I guess I signed up for it at some point because I get ACM messages all the time.
I forgot about it because I was like what is these?
Once you sign up you get like 5 newsletters which is awesome.
They are fun though. They are very fun though.
But it's super interesting though.
Most of them you can unsubscribe from, especially if they're just ACM. But as a student club I should mention so we're we're part of a chapter that's part of a professional network. We're also student club. So our chair this year is Taylor who's doing an excellent job and we also have an active discord. When we are in shutdown, I would often see students hanging out in the discord voice channels and helping each other out with homework and stuff like that. There's a couple channels specifically for like if you're my project 8 year.
Some work, a nice upperclassmen can help you if you message them in the help channel. There's a means channel. It's not all you know. It's not all projects and learning and demos. It's also just hanging out and getting to know all the other nerds in your major. So it's it's very important to me. It was something I did in undergrad. I think it's a really special organization, and it's really important to meet people that are, you know, as a student. You get to meet other students and other programs and kind of like complain about the same things as a professional.
It's important to meet other professionals that are not my direct colleagues so that we can kind of get a sense of the larger picture that's going on. And also traveling is fun, so if you're able to travel, that is a nice bonus as well.
So we do have a website, pcad.siggraph.org. If you want to see more photos of like what club meetings look like, that exists as well. We've also part of the awards that I had mentioned a couple slides back. We get featured in the faculty submitted student work category at SIGGRAPH, which is kind of cool. So some of our student films get displayed in a big like international conference display, which I also think is very cool.
Julya Nichols
03:23:34 PM
PCA&D SIGGRAPH: https://pcad.siggraph.org/wp/
So that brings us to the end. Here we have a short link if you want to learn more. We're also on Instagram. I am not a very good social media manager, but I've been posting reels which are very cool if I say so myself. So if you want to see some snapshots into the sort of, you know, projects that the major puts out and things like that, you can follow our Instagram, you can go to our YouTube, the General School. YouTube has the.
The department reels as well, and other examples.
What else? There's also the Aga subject guide. Maybe I can pace that in the chat. Those went live over the summer.
Natasha Warshawsky, Chair
03:24:27 PM
https://pcad.edu/subject_guides/animation-game-art/
If you want more and if you want our free software list, you can see all the recommended softwares and then some of the free or low cost alternatives. If you want to get started before you even you know, set foot in the classroom, that's here as well.
Thank you both. That was such wonderful information and I know that a lot of the incoming students always enjoy hearing your knowledge.
So we did get a few questions in. The first question that we have is when students are working on a personal projects, are they limited to a specific style or do they have the freedom to kind of just do what they want?
Hmm, good question. We try not to be so from a materials point of view. We specifically do not call our classes like Photoshop one, Maya one. They are computer animation one, they're digital media. So the tools are always changing. And even though you're introduced to a certain set of skills through specific softwares and specific step-by-step instruction, we try not to limit students in that way too. So it's it's definitely the.
Like learn the rules so you can break them sort of thing. When it comes to style choices, again, I think that that boils down to and maybe Aiden can speak to this as well, there is a certain method that is taught, but it doesn't have to be. You know, when it comes time to your senior project, you probably saw from a real, there's a pretty wide range of styles represented as well. So there is, there is a sort of like set of rules we learn and then we were allowed to break them.
Absolutely. Well, yeah. Like, like the moment like in junior year came up, you were just like, let's just like go crazy. And that we did.
And like, yeah, it it gave her to like, just like so many different takes, like.
Goodness gracious, I know that that Noah right now is really almost like like like AMA, I'm a rubber hose style right now. And like, it's just, it's so strange to look at. I'm like, I I love this though. This is amazing. It's Immaculate. Yeah, honestly, we're just like, we're just all over the place and I love. I love the differences of it.
OK. So the next question that we got in is specifically for Aiden. Aiden, what is one of the favorite things that you like? What is your favorite thing of being a student of the ABA department?
On the spot here, and my favorite thing here, think of Aga in general.
I think being able to come to someone instantaneously and being like, I don't know how this, I don't know why this isn't working and them knowing exactly why it's not working. And I mean that like technology wise, I'm like, so my little guy exploded in Maya, how do I fix that? And they go, did you, did you clear your history?
Maybe I didn't. I didn't do that.
I don't know it's like the the immediate like that like I know how to fix this and like this I know like.
How to elevate this as well because like it's a lot of times they come to Daniel Cardona as well, who works as right now as an.
He is our dedicated department tutor. I'm glad you brought him up.
Department here. Yeah, and like, yeah.
You're going to alumni of the program, and he exists to run extracurricular sessions and students can request tutoring hours with him. So again, that's sort of like if your computer ate your homework and you don't have time to get to your professor. You can set an appointment with Dan and Jump on a a Google meet call and he can help figure that out. He's been great.
He's always there and I'm just like, Dan, why isn't this working? And he was like, well, you got you just a little bit and like, ohh, thank you, thank you. Appreciate. Like, why isn't this, like, look, like, correcting, like, I gotta change this. And like, I don't know, just like that immediate, like helpfulness. It doesn't have a place of mean or just that immediate critique is very helpful. Plus, I just love critique in general. So I just love being told like, well, can you do a little differently? Like, OK, give it to me then. I want it. Please.
I think that's my favorite aspect. It's just that in general.
I'm glad you said that. There is, there is a lot of critiquing points in the program. You know, we have the junior year review, the seniors go through 4 critiques, the juniors have two and their production class and they'll say behind the scenes sometimes we're worried a little bit about critique burnout, but it is an important part of art school. And I would say that's one of the things that sets us apart from like following a tutorial on YouTube, which anyone can do, but they may not be able to, you know, enhance their work or learn from other people as well. A big part of critique.
Who is watching your peers and seeing all the mistakes and and improvements that they're able to make because that compounds that kind of, if you've heard of the 10,000 hours rule that helps kind of undercut those number of hours is learning from other people as well. So I'm glad you like critique then. That means we're doing something right now.
I did. I'm just like, whatever, have that, that critique of my first pitch, I was like, this is this was very helpful.
It's like it was I'm talking right now. My first pitch was like a bit of a mess, but it's a lot better now because I had a summary to work on it. So yeah, no, I always love a good crit, so yeah.
He answers the final question that we have is for Natasha, and it's similar to Aiden's question of what is your favorite thing about being the chair of this department?
Took over as chair last year, so this is my second year serving in the department and I really don't think of it as as like a power trip. I'm in charge of everything I think of it as I'm a faculty on a team and I'm the one that does the admin stuff as well. But I will say that I was also the first adjunct hire in the program when we started in 2015. So it's been really special and I've adjusted around in other places as well and I always, you know, came back to pcad.
People ask if you didn't know, I'm based in Philly and sometimes people are like, why are you driving 2 hours to to work here? And it's it's because picked special and because I really believe in the program. The students here are much warmer and much hungrier for success, I've noticed and a tighter community, and that's really special, especially in a really nerdy, you know, program like us, it's easy to get kind of like.
I don't want to say that that other programs I've worked with weren't as supportive, but they're they can be bigger and a little colder and and people don't know each other by their first names or people are very competitive. They see how competitive the field is and they don't want to help each other as much. Where pcad, it's everyone's looking out for each other. Everyone's like successes is shared with each other.
So that's what I like about it. I like I particularly favor this institution, but I also have loved watching us grow. We were originally called Digital Media when I was hired and now we're animation game art and the curriculum has like really in a short amount of time become very, very strong. So that's that's been the most exciting thing for me.
Awesome. Well, thank you both so much. I know your knowledge is great and I know that the students always enjoy hearing from you.
Thank you so much for that wonderful presentation and thank you anybody who is joining us live and or watching this recording in the future. Of course, if you do have any questions after this, please feel free to e-mail admissions at pcad.edu and we can connect you with whoever you want to talk to and answer any questions that you have moving forward. But other than that, thank you everybody. Have a wonderful day.
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