About Motion Graphics at Art Center College of Design
The Motion Graphics class at Art Center offers undergraduate and graduate students of all majors the opportunity to learn how to do broadcast quality animation graphics. We work with After Effects software, which allows students to design anything that can be shown on television or in feature films, such as show opens, TV commercials, music videos and experimental films. After Effects is a professional-quality tool that allows students to transfer their print-based graphics skills to moving imagery. There is a big demand for students who are educated in the use of this software in the entertainment industry job market - including film, video and interactive fields.
Strong Photoshop skills and comfort on the computer are required.
We work primarily with Adobe's After Effects software, but also combine tools; additionally studying Illustrator, Photoshop, Painter, and Premiere. It is understood that students enter the class knowing one program (Photoshop) well, and will be learning the other programs for the first time.
Some of the techniques we cover are:
• How to storyboard and create type elements in Illustrator
• Making alpha channels in Photoshop for motion-based programs
• Animation timings
• Special Effects
• Traveling Mattes
• Layering moving imagery
• Borrowing transitions from Premiere
• Capturing and image processing video
• Wiggly Animation in Painter
• Rotoscoping
Two projects are assigned in this class - a countdown film leader and a company logo. Students leave the class with a video tape-based portfolio.
All students post thumbnail Quicktime movies of their end-of-term projects to the Art Center world wide web site. These pages can be found under the "Student Pages" area at http://www.artcenter.edu. Motion Graphics, plus other computer graphics course descriptions can be found on the site as well.
Motion Graphics is taught by full-time computer graphics instructor, Lynda Weinman. She has been creating motion graphics since 1980; working with clients from Paramount Pictures to Apple Computer. Weinman writes for a number of computer magazines, including MacUser, The Net, Digital Video, Step-by-Step Graphics and New Media Magazine. She is currently finishing a book called Designing Web Graphics (New Riders/MacMillan 1996).
Feel free to visit the art center web site (http://www.artcenter.edu) or call the campus for a catalog.
Art Center College of Design
1700 Lida Street
Pasadena, CA 91103
Phone: 818-396-2200
Fax: 818-405-9104
Admissions: 818-396-2373
Career Resources: 818-396-2320
Corporate Relations: 818-396-2393
The following students provided work for inclusion on this CD.
