Major Required Courses

This course is an introduction to the various elements of 2D traditional and digital animation. Through individual and group assignments, students will explore various tools and techniques while developing their skills of styles, concepts and have better understanding of the possibilities of animation. This course will also experiment with the use of interactive text, vector and bitmap graphics, photography, sound and video as it relates to 2D animation.

This course is designed to introduce the production of computer graphics as they apply to arts and design from studio perspective. Both technical and aesthetic issues will be addressed. Aesthetic issues will encompass concepts, composition, appreciation and historical context. Technical topics will include raster and vector imaging, scanning, retouching, printing, animated graphics, and other related topics. The Adobe CC software package will be used to illustrate the principles and techniques, and to produce the projects.

This course introduces the basic concepts, genres, famous works and some of the most significant eras in Western art from the Renaissance period to the Modern Age. It examines elements and principles of design and style of the visual arts, encompassing pictorial art, applied art, decorative arts and architecture. 

In this introductory course, emphasis is placed on cognitive and analytic approaches to the study of film. Attention will be given to “practitioner’s agency,” film form, film policy, and the institutions that support the making and viewing of films. Students are introduced to concepts and terms needed to articulate well-reasoned assessments of the aesthetic, ethical, and social merits and demerits of films.

This course introduces students to the history of animation, and to the ways animation forms and styles have developed over time. The course covers animation from its prehistory, before the invention of film, to the present day, including both traditional hand-drawn animation and digital animation.

This course will present the fundamental concepts, issues and techniques of three-dimensional computer animation. Students are required to not only be able to navigate the software interface to create animated sequence, but also to create expressive motion. In the course, students will observe and analyze motion and explore different animation techniques in order to create believable, expressive motion. Animation, because of its time consuming nature, requires planning and organization. The course will explore the world of 3D computer animation from initial concept to final production. It introduces the language, principles, aesthetics and 3D tools used in the creation of animation within the context of art and design. The Autodesk Maya software package will be used to illustrate the principles and techniques dealt with.

This course will present the fundamental concepts, issues and techniques of three-dimensional computer modeling and rendering. Both technical and aesthetic issues will be addressed throughout the course. Aesthetic issues will encompass concept, composition, light and color, framing and historical context. Technical topics will include: coordinate systems, transformations, primitives, patches, polygons, NURBS surfaces, hierarchical grouping, lighting, rendering, and texture mapping. The Autodesk Maya software package will be used to illustrate the principles and techniques, and to produce the projects.

Storytelling and Storyboarding is an essential part of new media production. This course introduces to students characteristics and techniques of creative storytelling, helps students to gain hands-on experience in producing multimedia artifacts, and develop different formats of storyboards that will best serve the intended media. Students will learn to translate concepts such as shot types, continuity, pacing, transitions and sequencing into a visual narrative. Exploration of cinematic vocabulary and storyboard technique in the creation of both personal and professional expression are emphasized.

Artists have always used technology as new ways to express themselves and art and technology have become more and more intertwined over time. Since 1900, many contemporary artists adopted new types of media and technology to create their works. The growing influence of technology is a creative force.

This course will explore the relationship of art and technology through the study of art history from modern art to mixed-media art, net art, digital art, computer animation, computer- generated imagery (CGI), interactive installation, robotic art and so forth.

Different artists and their applications of different technologies will be studied to explore their relationship to transforming culture and society. Students will gain broader understanding and critical awareness of different concepts and developments of art and technology from early experiments by futurists and constructivists to most recent practices like interactive games and expanded reality experiments with wearable and portable media.

This course deals with advanced issues of 3-D computer animation. The subject will stress professional techniques and workflow methodology to maximize students’ realization of their ideas and concepts. Students will develop highly accurate timing, to achieve their individual style of animation. The subject should improve students’ insight into what makes an animation succeed, whether it is computer generated or not. It should also improve students’ abilities to themselves produce successful 3-D computer animation. The Autodesk Maya, Adobe CC software packages and Advanced Skeleton Plugin will be used as an example and to produce the project.

In the workshop, students are expected to consider themselves as professionals. Moreover, they are expected to be considerate and helpful peers to their classmates, to share knowledge, to be attentive and to provide thoughtful commentary during critiques, to participate heart and soul, to present work in progress professionally, and to turn in the project on time and in a professional manner.

This course offers an introduction to some of the main theoretical issues occasioned by the technologies of virtual and augmented reality. Issues to be addressed include: What is virtual reality? How does one engage with such a reality? What technologies are used in ‘building’ a virtual or augmented reality? And what are the ethical questions that such "worlds" pose?

This course introduces students to the concept, history, and techniques of interactivity in art and design, with an emphasis on interactive designs in computer animations. The course will explore the participatory and performative nature of interactive art and designs from various perspectives, including media studies and human-computer interaction studies.

This course aims at exposing students to the possibility of interacting within digital arts by exploring both history, practice of generative art, and computational creativity. It starts with an overview of programming interactive computer graphics and drawing algorithms. A goal of this course is to enhance students to understand and develop practical skills in producing artworks by using programming as an artistic medium.

The Capstone Project requires the planning and execution of an animation or digital arts project; for example, a short animation film, a simple video game, or an installation that makes use of new media (for example, video). The precise nature of the project will be determined by the student in consultation with his or her supervisor(s).

This course offers a production-based introduction to the principles of virtual and augmented reality. The course is a combination of lectures and lab-based exercises, where the fundamentals of VR /AR technology is described and practiced. During the course, students will, as a project, design a basic Virtual Reality application.