RMU showcases student animations at Row House Cinema, highlight local animation community
PITTSBURGH — From tape mummies moving in stop motion to chaotic cartoon cats, a wide variety of local student-made animations were put on display Monday at Lawrenceville's Row House Cinema.
Artists from Robert Morris University invited friends and faculty to view over 40 minutes of animated shorts at the theater, showcasing the various different styles of animation produced by students on the campus. The featured projects were made possible by funding from the Hollywood-based International Animated Film Society Animation (IAFSA) Educators Forum, which awarded a grant of $3,000 to the animation labs at the university.
"It's an opportunity for animation educators to get funding to make work or support student work," said Timothy Jones, director of RMU's Academic Media Center and a media arts professor. "And in our case, we wanted to support student animation on campus, in particular, supporting ways of making animation education more accessible to students on our campus."
The reel showcased a wide range of art styles unique to each student, including projects such as animated riffs on classical art pieces or their art pieces interacting with real-world locations. A large part of the showcase was also dedicated to LEGO stop motion, with artists using the building blocks to express creative ways animation can be used to highlight the features of the toys.
In addition to the impressive visuals, students were given the opportunity to discuss their process with the audience after the show and the explain dedication that animation takes to produce. For recent graduate Sarah Gabany, the constantly expanding paper canvas in her project "Light" led to plenty of late nights in the media arts labs on campus.
"It wasn't easy," Gabany said. "I was there for a week from like 10 p.m. to 3 a.m., so I got really tight with the janitors."
The grant from the IAFSA has helped expand the resources available to students in RMU's animation labs with new technology and animation software, Jones said. In addition to the technical needs around the lab, the grant provided the necessary funds to hire a lab assistant to help students learn more about the medium of animation.
"It's been a really enlightening experience," said Emma Crites, the lab assistant at RMU. "It's been interesting for me to learn how other people play with all the technology. I'm a very hands-on person, but some people aren't. With the assistance of Dr. Jones, I created a little workflow for the process."
While creating this workflow and helping with classes on campus, Crites was also able to see a lot of the RMU students' animation processes.
"Some of my favorite projects were the LEGO projects," Crites said. "I didn't get to see every project in progress, but for some of them, I happen to be in the lab at the same time and see everybody playing with the little pieces."
Professors and faculty at RMU who spoke at the event discussed the university's role in introducing students to a new community of animators rising in the Pittsburgh region, giving artists a way to enter the animation field no matter what their choice of major may be at the college. While the university provides the equipment and offers experts to teach animation, they want to allow all students a way to pursue their passion.
"There's a growing, sort of thriving animation community across all the campuses," Jones said. "That's really one of the things that RMU wanted to be a part of. We have a wide range of different kinds of production, from stop motion to 3D and 4D graphics. It's really about allowing for our students to be part of that community."
Looking forward, the university hopes to continue expanding its animation program and potentially host a yearly showcase of their work to the public.
"I think the sky's the limit," Jones said. "We have students doing a wide variety of work from experienced design work to more immersive content. We're really driven by what the students want to learn to do for their professional objectives."
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This article originally appeared on Beaver County Times: RMU showcases student made animations at Row House Cinema
