CTAN 522 John C. Hench Animation & Digital Arts Seminar Syllabus Wednesday 6:30-8:30 PM, Stark Theater SCA 108, Spring 2009

NOTE: no food or drink (including water or gum) will be allowed inside the theater at any time.

Instructor Lisa Mann [email protected] office hours by appointment Student Assistant Thomas Huang [email protected]

Description

The John C. Hench Division of Animation & Digital Arts Seminar serves as a weekly academic forum in which distinguished special guests connected to the field of animation and digital arts relay their expertise and exchange in a dialogue with students. It is hoped that exposure to USC faculty, international artists, and industry professionals will engage students in a meaningful discourse on the art form and facilitate a clearer vision of their own career goals.

Course Requirements and Expectations **

Each student is expected to research and prepare two questions each week pertaining to the subject/presenter that can spark interesting discourse. Students will be asked at random to read their questions and must be prepared for this each week.

Each week, (excluding classes 1, 14, 15, and 16), students will create a postcard interpretation of the seminar presentation or topic and deposit it into a seminar folder on HAL. The postcard can take the form of a brief critique although text must be artistically incorporated into the graphic design.

Please save a 355 dpi tif format of every postcard image you create on your own hard drive, but downsize to a jpeg format for the HAL folder: \\hal\CTAN 522-Seminar, and save your postcard inside the postcard folder for the appropriate date. Make sure to get your postcard onto Hal by Wed. at noon each week. We will be showing the weeks postcards that evening in class.

No final exams, however, the last two Seminar classes are held during exam week and are designated for Hench-DADA student screenings. All Hench-DADA students are expected to attend.

For the final presentations on April 29, each student will make a two or three- minute presentation of your most successful postcard design from the semester. A successful design is defined as capturing the spirit, philosophy, or style of a particular guest and depicting how that guest transformed you or your artistic process in some way. You will present your postcard and describe the image as well as your transformation.

Participation and Attendance

Participation and attendance is mandatory. Students will sign in when they enter SCA 108. Cell phone calls or stepping out to make a call is not acceptable while seminar is in session. Please turn off all cell phones. No food, drink, water, or gum will be allowed in the theater.

Grading

This is a credit/no credit class based on weekly attendance and completion of postcards, and the final presentation. Students will be allowed only two excused absences.

CTAN 522 Schedule Spring 2009

Class 1. January 14: Introduction, welcome, student screenings, pizza party CTAN 301, CTAN 450c, CTAN 448, CTAN 544, CTAN 592, CTAN 599

Class 2. January 21: Hench-DADA Faculty Presentations Trixie Sweetvittles, Larissa Bank

Class 3. January 28: The 10th Annual Animation Show of Shows Presented by ACME Filmworks founder Ron Diamond, the 2008 program features cutting-edge animation in a variety of styles from all over the world. Among the 11 short films are Koji Yamamura’s acclaimed Franz Kafka’s A Country Doctor (Grand Prize, Ottawa Festival, 2007; Grand Prize, Hiroshima Festival, 2008); La Maison en Petite Cubes (The House of Small Cubes) by Kunio Kato, which received the Grand Prize at the 2008 Annecy Festival; and Benjamin Renner’s A Mouse’s Tale, winner of the 2008 Cartoon d’Or, the most prestigious pan-European prize.

Class 4. February 4: Mike Johnson Mike Johnson is a stop-motion animator who has worked on films such as James and the Giant Peach and The Nightmare Before Christmas, the animation short The Devil Went Down to Georgia, and TV programs such as The PJs. Most recently, he co-directed Corpse Bride with Tim Burton. In 1996, he set up his own animation company, Fat Cactus Films. He currently teaches stop-motion at the California Institute of the Arts.

Class 5. February 11: Mark Osborne Mark Osborne is the Oscar-nominated Co-Director of Kung Fu Panda. He is also the director of the Oscar-nominated More, the first stop-motion animation in IMAX format. Osborne directed a majority of the live-action material for the Spongebob Squarepants TV series and feature film.

Class 6. February 18: Emily Hubley Independent animator Emily Hubley has been making animated shorts for thirty years. Her hand-drawn films explore personal memory and the turbulence of emotional life. Her first feature film, The Toe Tactic, screened at SXSW Film Festival, New Directors/New Films in New York City, and the San Francisco International Film Festival. A daughter of pioneer animators Faith and John Hubley, Emily worked on Faith Hubley's films at The Hubley Studio, Inc. from 1977 to 2001.

Class 7. February 25: Animation and legal issues; Z-Brush Demo Cameron Garrison, entertainment copyright attorney from the firm of Lathrop & Gage L.C., lectures on infringement and release issues. Paul Gaboury, Technical Specialist at Pixologic Inc., will demonstrate the latest version of the painting software Z-Brush.

Class 8. March 4: a52 Visual FX company Since its inception in 1997, a52 has developed and produced imagery for some of the world’s best known commercials and music videos for clients such as BMW, Coke, HBO, Nike and The Strokes. Home to some of the industry’s most talented artists, a52 has created award winning visual effects through the seamless integration of 2D and photoreal CGI. 3D VFX artists Chris Janney and Paulo de Almada present and discuss the studio’s recent work.

Class 9. March 11: Duck Studios Duck Studios is an innovative animation/design studio that produces commercials, live action, film/tv titles, music videos, and short films. Artist Jan Chen and others present their work created using Maya, AfterEffects, and Photoshop.

------March 18: SPRING BREAK—NO CLASS

Class 10. March 25: Walt Disney Animation Studios’ Eric Goldberg Long-time Disney animator Eric Goldberg will discuss character design in his presentation "Getting Character Out of Your Characters". He is the author of the recently published book, Crash Course in Animation. Pat Beckman is the WDAS Schools and Outreach Manager who will provide students with preparation tips and tools for a career in the animation industry.

Class 11. April 1: Yvette Kaplan Animation director, character designer, and writer Yvette Kaplan will present her work for MTV, Blue Sky, Nickelodeon, Film Roman, and Lionsgate. She has directed and written such shows and features as King of the Hill, Ice Age, Beavis and Butt-head Do America, Arthur, and Doug.

Class 12. April 8: Animation installation and performance art Miwa Mitrayek and other Installation/performance animators talk about their art and process for the Visions & Voices event, Animated Spaces | Animated Bodies.

Class 13. April 15: Michael L. Fink Mike Fink, the Oscar-winning senior VFX supervisor of The Golden Compass and the Oscar-nominated Batman Returns, presents his body of work and discusses the future of the VFX industry. He has recently become senior visual effects supervisor of Frantic Films VFX.

------April 22: NO CLASS

Class 14. April 29: Final Presentations of postcards

Class 15. May 6: Student screenings CTAN 201, 450c, CTAN 508, CTAN 579, CTAN 495a

Class 16. May 13: Student screenings CTAN 401b, CTAN 547, Thesis

**Credit to Kathy Smith for some of the written segments of this syllabus.

*****NOTE:

MISSING AN EXAM, INCOMPLETES: The only acceptable excuses for missing an exam or taking an incomplete in the course are personal illness or a family emergency. Students must inform the professor before the exam and present verifiable evidence in order for a make-up to be scheduled. Students who wish to take incompletes must also present documentation of the problem to the instructor or teaching assistant before final grades are due.

Statement for Students with Disabilities Any student requesting academic accommodations based on a disability is required to register with Disability Services and Programs (DSP) each semester. A letter of verification for approved accommodations can be obtained from DSP. Please be sure the letter is delivered to me (or to TA) as early in the semester as possible. DSP is located in STU 301 and is open 8:30 a.m.–5:00 p.m., Monday through Friday. The phone number for DSP is (213) 740-0776.

Statement on Academic Integrity USC seeks to maintain an optimal learning environment. General principles of academic honesty include the concept of respect for the intellectual property of others, the expectation that individual work will be submitted unless otherwise allowed by an instructor, and the obligations both to protect one’s own academic work from misuse by others as well as to avoid using another’s work as one’s own. All students are expected to understand and abide by these principles. Scampus, the Student Guidebook, contains the Student Conduct Code in Section 11.00, while the recommended sanctions are located in Appendix A: http://www.usc.edu/dept/publications/SCAMPUS/gov/. Students will be referred to the Office of Student Judicial Affairs and Community Standards for further review, should there be any suspicion of academic dishonesty. The Review process can be found at: http://www.usc.edu/student- affairs/SJACS/.