World Building

The term "world building" has often been used to
describe the art direction decisions of video
game designers or large studio film productions
in the science-fiction/fantasy genres, but more
recently this term is being used by individual
artists making personal work in animation, comic
art, and gallery installation. In this class, we
will look at the process of creating short films,
animated and live-action, as the building of a
world governed by aesthetic "rules" determined by
the artist from the onset. These rules may be
dictated by constraints in software, available
materials, time, but all these limitations will
be consciously considered for the sake of
conveying a more coherent vision. Questions
posed to the class might be: How could the
palette of the film be limited to 2 or 3 dominant
colors? What effect does CG work that rejects
the time consuming labor of photorealism create?
How might sound be used to project a world
extending far beyond the camera frame? Could the
entirety of the narrative be expressed in a
single shot composition?

We will explore world building in the manner that
it is more dominantly discussed within
science-fiction media (William Gibson, Jean
"Moebius" Giraud), as well as utopic/dystopic
visions imagined by feminist, queer and minority
artists/art movements (Afrofuturism, Margaret
Atwood, Jacolby Satterwhite, and more). We will
discuss "internal logic" in contemporary
narrative animated shorts, and also the
idiosyncratic visual guidelines found in various
works of outsider art.

These discussions will frame the way the class
engages several practical demonstrations on
producing and integrating animated and
live-action assets. Students will be encouraged
to use traditional hand-drawn media, Adobe After
Effects, Flash, Photoshop, Premiere, and Cinema
4D with an emphasis on experimental ways to
misuse, mask and mix these softwares to express
singular aesthetics. This class is intended for
animators and non-animators alike, so technical
comprehension of a specific program is not
compulsory.

Students will be assessed based on two individual
projects - ideally one minute-long films - that
will be workshopped repeatedly as an exercise to
reduce aesthetic elements to the leanest amount
necessary to express a coherent vision. Weekly
class-wide critique sessions of works in progress
are essential for this course. The purpose is to
teach each artist how to articulate exactly why
certain details in a film aren't working or why a
certain world seems unbelievable rather than a
vague "feeling" of incoherence.