Brent Zephyrine

De­scrib­ing it "as a bless­ing" to the many as­pir­ing an­i­ma­tors in the coun­try, lec­tur­er and co-or­di­na­tor of the Uni­ver­si­ty of T&T's (UTT) De­part­ment of Dig­i­tal Me­dia Stud­ies, Camille Selvon-Abra­hams, lauds the col­lege's Diplo­ma in An­i­ma­tion as the on­ly pro­gramme of its kind to be of­fered in the Eng­lish-speak­ing Caribbean. "Our stu­dents have an op­por­tu­ni­ty to do some­thing that would have oth­er­wise been im­pos­si­ble since it is the on­ly pro­gramme (at uni­ver­si­ty lev­el) in the Eng­lish-speak­ing Caribbean in so far as an­i­ma­tion is con­cerned," she said. Selvon-Abra­hams, who spe­cialised in an­i­ma­tion at Gold­smiths Uni­ver­si­ty of Lon­don, said the two-year pro­gramme which be­gan in 2008, was on the verge of wel­com­ing its fourth cy­cle of stu­dents in Sep­tem­ber with the short-term aim of hav­ing it evolve to the de­gree lev­el.

"We're hop­ing to have a Bach­e­lor's pro­gramme with­in the next two years. It's al­ready in the works, it's just that it has to be val­i­dat­ed and go through the process," she added. Selvon-Abra­hams said UTT's train­ing was "not chalk and board" but "very much prob­lem- and project-based." She stressed on the rigours of a pro­gramme that in­volved prin­ci­ples of an­i­ma­tion, draw­ing from ob­ser­va­tion, cul­tur­al con­cep­tu­al­i­sa­tion, edit­ing and scriptwrit­ing. One stu­dent, Shan­non Fran­cis, said this about the pro­gramme: "One of the things about an­i­ma­tion is that to com­plete it suc­cess­ful­ly, you need to have pas­sion. Many peo­ple come in but not every­body makes it to the end." Selvon-Abra­hams told the Sun­day Guardian while they "start­ed with 25 stu­dents," they had "lost about ten be­cause not many of them can han­dle it." "We don't cut cor­ners. This is hard work and they (stu­dents) un­der­stand this from the be­gin­ning," she added.

Plat­form for an­i­ma­tors

Up­on her re­turn to T&T in 2002 as a trained an­i­ma­tor, Selvon-Abra­hams not­ed that "there were no plat­forms for oth­ers com­ing up" and de­cid­ed to cre­ate an an­i­ma­tion fes­ti­val-An­i­mae Caribe-as an av­enue for young artistes to show­case their many tal­ents. "It's a plat­form to get our young peo­ple who want to look at an­i­ma­tion as an op­tion and for those who want to broad­cast their own work so that they can have an av­enue. "It was about cre­at­ing a plat­form for peo­ple who are in an­i­ma­tion and for those who want to get in­to it," she said.

Re­fer­ring to all her stu­dents as "pi­o­neers" in the field, Selvon-Abra­hams took pride over the fact that over the last three years (since the pro­gramme's in­cep­tion), "an av­er­age of ten an­i­mat­ed shorts a year from T&T" was screened at An­i­mae Caribe-a feat she de­scribed sim­ply as "beau­ti­ful." She said while the road had been a tough one to trod over the years in T&T, things were "chang­ing dra­mat­i­cal­ly" and many of their an­i­ma­tion stu­dents were able to at­tract jobs in ad­ver­tis­ing agen­cies and pro­duc­tion com­pa­nies where their ex­per­tise was of­ten sought af­ter. "We (UTT) are called for our stu­dents. Em­ploy­ers call and make re­quests for an­i­ma­tors to work on projects and we would rec­om­mend cer­tain stu­dents de­pend­ing on their ca­pa­bil­i­ties," Selvon-Abra­hams added.

Ready to be­lieve...

De­spite these op­por­tu­ni­ties, an­i­ma­tion stu­dent Shane Young Sing ex­pressed great ap­pre­hen­sion func­tion­ing ef­fec­tive­ly as an an­i­ma­tor in T&T, at­tribut­ing his fears to the neg­a­tive re­cep­tion of one 15-sec­ond an­i­mat­ed short he aired for a lo­cal au­di­ence whom he said ap­peared to be more ac­cept­ing of west­ern cul­ture than our own. "One time I showed one of my projects to a few peo­ple and I in­cor­po­rat­ed our lo­cal di­alect and while they were very much in­to the vi­su­al as­pect of it, they hat­ed the voic­es (di­a­logue) and they were Trinida­di­an. That scared me," he said.

He added: "It had me think­ing whether we were ready to be­lieve in our­selves be­cause it would be very sad to re­alise that my own coun­try doesn't want me when all I want to do is this." On a more promis­ing note, class rep­re­sen­ta­tive Avinash Ja­gas­sar, who is cur­rent­ly "work­ing on a com­ic book util­is­ing lo­cal su­per­heroes," said his in­ten­tion be­hind the con­cept was not self-seek­ing but geared to­wards cre­at­ing a brand both he and his class­mates could iden­ti­fy with and be proud of. "I want to have my class­mates help me with the dif­fer­ent forms of art­work since it was not in­tend­ed to be any per­son­al mon­ey-mak­ing ven­ture for me. I just want to get us out there so that even if the book flops, I can still say that we did it our way," he said.

Prin­ci­ples of an­i­ma­tion

In de­scrib­ing the com­plex­i­ties of an­i­ma­tion, Young Sing iden­ti­fied an an­i­ma­tor's ma­jor chal­lenge: "We have to meet the same frame count as is seen on tele­vi­sion in or­der for peo­ple to ac­cept an im­age of a slap for in­stance, so we need 24 draw­ings to make one sec­ond of mo­tion just to get that same smooth­ness that we see on TV. "Or, we can split that in half (down to 12 frames per sec­ond) as is seen on Tom & Jer­ry. "So it doesn't mat­ter what you draw, even if it is not the best por­trait ever, once you can get it to move at cer­tain frame counts that we are ac­cus­tomed to reg­is­ter­ing, you've got a lu­cra­tive an­i­ma­tion."

He said the num­ber of frames de­pend­ed on the speed of the an­i­ma­tion which he said could be lim­it­ed by a "quick mo­tion" process called smear­ing where the tran­si­tion be­tween frames ap­pear more dis­tant as though in a gap move­ment or "mo­tion bur." Soon-to-be sec­ond-year stu­dent Kyle Stephen in­formed the Sun­day Guardian that there were "12 prin­ci­ples of an­i­ma­tion" that they fol­lowed, some of which con­sist­ed of con­cepts in­volv­ing "tim­ing, spac­ing, sec­ondary move­ment, light­ing and oth­er things that bring about a re­al­is­tic feel to the an­i­ma­tion." He said while there "is the lazy man ap­proach" where the ges­tic­u­la­tions of an­i­mat­ed char­ac­ters are lim­it­ed to "mouth move­ments," if "qual­i­ty work" was to be achieved, "you have to go the long way."

"I an­i­mat­ed the tra­di­tion­al way (pen­cil to pa­per sketch­ing) but I go to the com­put­er (us­ing the graph­ic tablet tech­nol­o­gy) af­ter­wards to do a lot of touch-ups and draw though I still think the old way gives the an­i­ma­tor a clos­er con­nec­tion to his work," Stephen added. De­spite this, he praised the graph­ic tablet for its time ef­fi­cien­cy, pre­ci­sion draw­ing and re­al­ism as it pro­vides "a feel as though you're ac­tu­al­ly draw­ing on sev­er­al frames or sheets of pa­per which can then be played out in dig­i­tal se­quence like a movie." Saman­tha Farmer, the lone fe­male stu­dent in­ter­viewed, cit­ed her own pref­er­ence for the tra­di­tion­al type sketch­ing, in that while "it takes a lot of trees (pa­per) and pa­tience," such "may work well" where com­put­er tech­nol­o­gy may be dif­fi­cult to op­er­ate or pose cer­tain re­stric­tions.

The boom of toon

Fu­ture an­i­ma­tor Hosan­na Sookra, who iden­ti­fied the two dig­i­tal soft­ware pro­grammes utilised in their an­i­mat­ed cre­ations-Toon Boom and Au­to Desk Maya-said it was al­so pos­si­ble to an­i­mate quite ef­fec­tive­ly with home-made al­ter­na­tives like Pho­to­Shop and Win­dows Me­dia Play­er. Toon Boom, which is used by most graph­ic artistes for 2D an­i­ma­tion (the tra­di­tion­al style), drew Sookra's in­ter­ests in ways he nev­er imag­ined since he had been ini­tial­ly drawn to the pro­gramme through his fas­ci­na­tion of 3D gam­ing.

"I love video games and al­ways want­ed to cre­ate my own but I've found my­self open­ing up to 2D a lot more than I thought I would," he re­vealed. Ac­cord­ing to his col­league Stephen, Au­to Desk Maya, on the oth­er hand, al­lows the 3D an­i­ma­tor to "go through every de­tailed step to build what he sees and even what he can­not see," with an in­ter­face that "al­lows him to put in re­al life tex­tures which can be im­port­ed from the In­ter­net." Young Sing added: "It is very im­por­tant for artistes in 3D to not see an ob­ject or char­ac­ter as a whole but rather as a cir­cle, a square, a rec­tan­gle and a poly­gon here and there, just wait­ing to be put to­geth­er."