Brent Zephyrine

Re­cov­er­ing from the death of a close rel­a­tive, trapped in a dream that blurs one's con­cept of re­al­i­ty and re­sort­ing to mur­der when the thought of be­ing fired be­comes too dif­fi­cult to bear-these were among some of the themes present dur­ing the screen­ing of ten an­i­mat­ed films pro­duced by stu­dents of the Uni­ver­si­ty of T&T (UTT) on Fri­day. Ten an­i­mat­ed short films, which formed part of the stu­dents' "fi­nal project" for the com­ple­tion of UTT's Diplo­ma in An­i­ma­tion Pro­gramme, were screened at the UTT Acad­e­my for the Per­form­ing Arts (NA­PA Build­ing) on Keate Street, Port-of-Spain.

Co-or­di­na­tor of UTT's De­part­ment of Dig­i­tal Me­dia Stud­ies Camille Selvon-Abra­hams, who laud­ed the pro­gramme of­fered by UTT as the on­ly one of its kind in the Eng­lish-speak­ing Caribbean, said the "fi­nal film" (of about two to three min­utes) was on­ly part of the process. She said stu­dents were grad­ed on their script, de­sign of char­ac­ters, sto­ry­board plan and an­i­mat­ics. Selvon-Abra­hams said the screen­ings al­lowed stu­dents the op­por­tu­ni­ty to "show off to the pub­lic, their two years of work­ing and un­der­stand­ing an­i­ma­tion con­cepts" and that she was pleased to an­nounce that this sec­ond batch of grad­u­ates was ex­it­ing a pro­gramme that start­ed in 2008.

One soon-to-be grad­u­ate, Brent Bachew, in his an­i­mat­ed short film-Ted­dy in Trou­ble-utilised an an­i­ma­tion tech­nique known as "stop mo­tion" in or­der to cre­ate move­ment (crawl­ing, walk­ing and climb­ing) in an ac­tu­al ted­dy bear. He said he used "ar­ma­ture wire in­side the ted­dy bear it­self" so that it was pos­si­ble to take suc­ces­sive pho­tographs of the bear's "mi­cro move­ments," then play them to­geth­er as one mov­ing se­quence (video). Bachew said this an­i­ma­tion in­volved him tak­ing "about 24,000 pic­tures" in or­der to ex­e­cute the process.

An­i­mat­ed screen­ings shown were:

1 Cy­borg Chick­en by Kelsey Noel

2 Dream vs Re­al­i­ty by Vic­tor Dolabaille

3 Far From Home by Gary Williams

4 Fired by Christo­pher Greaves

5 Idea by Mak­sei Al­ger­non

6 Mal­bueno by Paul Richards

7 Re­search and De­vel­op­ment of Char­ac­ter Mod­el­ing by Harold Bal­ly

8 Re­venge of the Cy­di­ans by Michael Rochford

9 Ted­dy in Trou­ble by Brent Bachew

10 The Short­cut by An­tho­ny Bap­tiste