Two college students cut long pieces of wire that, after some twisting and turning, would become skeletons for their puppets.
A few other students worked at a table in the center of the classroom, reviewing sketches showing frame-by-frame the transformation the characters would undergo.
They’re all students in the stop motion animation class at the Savannah College of Art and Design. The course teaches the process used to create clay-animated works such as Gumby and Wallace & Gromit.
The college’s Atlanta campus never taught the course before because it didn’t have space. But this class and dozens of others are now offered at the college’s new Digital Media Center that opened last month.
“I’m a huge Gumby fan and I’ve always wanted to take this type of animation course,” senior Monica Ellis said. “When you’re creating art you need space to design and space to make a mess.”
The center is a three-story, 60,000-square-foot midtown facility that used to be home to the Atlanta NBC affiliate. The building, purchased last year, adds to the college’s already strong presence in the city’s arts district.
A grand opening celebration is scheduled for Wednesday although renovations will continue for about a year, said Matthew Maloney, associate dean of film and digital media.
The additional classroom space will allow about 250 students to get hands-on experience in animation, television production, interactive design, game development, visual effects and other areas, Maloney said.
“The few of those courses we offered were taught in classrooms that also served as the home for English and civics,” Maloney said. “That just wasn’t working for our students. We needed to have our own space where students could get their hands dirty and explore the different art forms.”
The renovated building includes space for exhibits, large-scale sculptures and interactive projections.
It will include a library dedicated to game history — everything from Pong to Donkey Kong to Guitar Hero. Students will learn how the games work, study the flaws and redesign them, Maloney said.
The goal is to give students the opportunity to understand how the different mediums work and to encourage them to build on their own ideas, said animation professor Becky Wible Searles.
“We want them to get excited and get into it,” Searles said. “Students want to make this stuff.”
In her clay animation class, students create poseable puppets out of clay or other pliable materials.
Along one wall, Searles set up a display table of animation used on Nickelodeon and in the movie “The Nightmare Before Christmas.” She also lined up mouths for a puppet’s face that could be swapped out to express different emotions.
When students worked on the puppet’s skeleton, called armature, last week they were in the early steps of a process that would take a couple of weeks to complete.
“It is so different from the other classes I’ve taken,” junior Jorge Florez said. “It’s so much fun.”
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