by Maya Morris
Although almost everyone has seen the end product of animation, be it in Saturday morning cartoons or a Disney kids movie, the work and process of creating these films is not as well known.
“Animation is the art of emotion with visuals,” animation teacher Eric Latimer said. “Students draw imagery that comes to life and moves and tells stories.”
His classes, however, are not limited to just teaching animation skills. Latimer said he believes the courses teach life skills such as patience, clear communication and visual problem solving.
“We talk about the habits of mind,” Latimer said. “I think that that and the ability to look deeply and past the surface carry over into other aspects of life.”
Although the course is well liked among many of the students who take it, animation does not attract the largest crowd, junior Ben Batchelder said.
“Latimer scrapes by every year just to get the minimum amount of people into his classes so that they won’t shut him down,” Batchelder said. “It’s not celebrated enough in this school. As a result they don’t get much of an audience.”
To Latimer, the unpopularity might be caused by the limited amount of space in the classroom and the amount of patience the work requires.
Juniors Eema Karim and Ben Batchelder work on an animation project in class.
“We only have a limited amount of seats available for that class,” Latimer said. “So even if I had fifty students in the class, only sixteen could get in.”
According to Latimer, the limited resources available also contribute to the small classes.
“The class size is understandable because this type of art form requires a certain type of technology,” Latimer said.
Junior Eema Karim said that the association of confusing technology with animation is what repels most people, but that this is often a misconception.
“I think people think of animation as being really complicated, because it’s with a computer,” Karim said. “But it’s really not that complicated.”
According to Karim, working with technology is only a small aspect of the course’s challenges. She said one of the hardest skills to learn is the patience animation requires, and that even after spending a month or so on a project, one can still end up with a mere thirty seconds of animation.
Latimer said the slow pace of animation is inevitable and cannot be forced, but can be influenced by the level of detail in each project.
Juniors Ben Batchelder, Eema Karim and Owen Hyatt made a short film. Karim said animation requires perseverance.
“Once in awhile you get a student who does a two minute animation,” Latimer said, “but the real reason for that is because they were very careful with their choices and purposefully made their characters very easy.”
It is up to the students to decide the quality they want, which directly affects the length of their work, he said. The finished product of animation is what usually attracts people to the course.
“I think it’s appreciated because it’s a big draw when people get to see it,” Latimer said. “I have students who will come in with their friends and be like, ‘hey, check out what I did today’ and then it’s popular during our film festivals.”
However, Latimer said he would like to see animation better represented in the community.
“What I would like to see is for it to be more well known.”
Maya Morris can be contacted at [email protected].
