Ringling College trains the animators of the future

It’s admitted-students day at the Ringling College of Art and Design, the day incoming freshman get their first in-depth look at their creative home for the next four years.

Those interested in computer animation have certainly heard of Ringling College’s lauded computer animation department, which has produced countless animators who have gone on to animation studio behemoths, such as Disney, Pixar and DreamWorks.

But seeing is believing. As the students exit the elevator onto the third floor of the Ulla Searing Student Center, their mouths drop open. “Wow” is the most commonly used word as they tour the heart of the computer animation and game art department. 

The department’s halls are wallpapered with movie posters from contemporary animated classics such as “Toy Story,” “Tangled,” “How to Train Your Dragon” and “Frozen” — proof of Ringling’s pedigree of past students. Twenty years’ worth of movie posters fill the walls, with plaques underneath each poster listing the names of the Ringling alumni who had a hand in the movie’s making.

Two new films whose posters will be added to the wall this year are the short film “Feast” and the feature-length film “Big Hero 6.” They are both Disney films, and both won Oscars in their respective categories at the 2015 Academy Awards.
So what’s the secret behind the computer animation department churning out countless industry-ready animators? Real-world experience.

In the department’s non-traditional classrooms, computers line the walls, ready for students to use.

“If you walk around and look at the classrooms, it looks like a studio,” says James McCampbell, who heads the computer animation department at Ringling. “So, it’s an easy transition after college.”

This professional environment with 22 faculty members is combined with a full curriculum of courses including six courses on computer animation, as well as courses in drawing, 3-D design, traditional animation, the history of computer animation, film and narrative, concept development, animation preproduction, general art history and a final short animated thesis film.

Since the dawn of  the modern computer-animation age in 1995 with the release of Pixar Animation Studios’ “Toy Story,” McCampbell has been at Ringling College teaching and advising. In the last 20 years, McCampbell has adapted his individual courses and the department’s curriculum to the rapidly changing technology industry.

When he first arrived at Ringling, computer animation had to be done on a now-defunct processor called a silicon graphics machine, which cost approximately $275,000. Ten years later, the cost of the animation technology decreased by $200,000.

“The curse of new technology is having to take the time to learn all those new things,” says McCampbell. “How do we rewrite the curriculum so that it incorporates and adopts that new stuff? The blessing part is that the new stuff enables us to do things we couldn’t do before. Now your imagination can run a little freer.”

McCampbell became interested in art and design through his architect father. His mother also gave him and his sister drawing lessons every day.

He earned a B.F.A. in graphic design from the University of Tennessee. He worked as an art director for various advertising agencies, but the workload took a toll — he often wouldn’t leave the office until 1 a.m.

McCampbell has always loved computers, and when computer animation software came out in the late 1980s he taught himself the basics. He saw Ringling’s ad for a computer animation faculty member in Post Magazine and knew he had found his new path.

“My first class gave me the nickname of ‘The Anvil’ because I came down on them so hard,” says McCampbell. “I held them to professional standards and spoke to them the same way that I would have spoken to the artists who had worked for me. I suppose I was unconventional.”

Students from their freshman through junior year learn the basic animation, technology and storytelling aspects of the art form. In the semester before their senior year, students develop and create the basic story tenets for their own short film. They spend their senior year writing, directing, animating and producing their two-minute animated pieces.

Two minutes may not sound that long, but using the standard 24 frames per second, 2,880 frames are needed to create one short story.

“On a typical top-shelf animated feature film today, there might be 100 to 150 animators working on that film,” says McCampbell. “And the film only runs 90 minutes. It will be in production from anywhere to two to five years, or in the case of ‘Tangled,’ almost a decade. It took that many animators just doing the animation, not any of the lighting and the texturing, just the animation to do 90 minutes, and this student, not a professional, popped out two minutes in two semesters. Proportionally, you can see what an amazing feat this is.”

Seniors Kevin Temmer and Isabella Pinho have been producing their short films since last spring, beginning in their pre-production class. They say their senior year has been filled with late nights and plenty of caffeine.

Temmer’s film is “Aloha Hohe,” an animated musical set among an aboriginal tribe in Hawaii. An avid ukulele player, Temmer composed and wrote two original songs for his short, which he calls a love letter to the Disney movies of his youth.

Pinho’s film, “None of That,”  centers on a nun who breaks into an art museum to censor all the nude artwork. Her film was a group project, which presented its own unique set of challenges.

“It was completely different from anything else I’ve ever done,” says Pinho. “It was an experience that requires commitment. I learned a lot about myself and what’s required to work in a group.”

It’s this marathon achievement that has produced animators who have gone on to work at animation powerhouses. For McCampbell and his students, seeing the growing string of movie posters on the wall each year is a daily dose of animation inspiration.

 “Story is at the heart of everything that we do. Everything,” says McCampbell. “I frequently say in talks with incoming freshman parents that human beings have that at their core. After everyone has had enough food, water, the next thing that they want is to be told a good story. It’s central to everything that we’ve got going on.”

How to train your students
The goal of the Ringling College of Art and Design’s computer animation department is to train students to work in the conditions of the mainstream animation studios such as Disney, Pixar and DreamWorks. Here are just some of the vast number of films on which Ringling alumni have worked:
“Frozen”
“Big Hero 6”
“Wreck-It Ralph”
“How to Train Your Dragon, 1 and 2”
“Monsters University”
“Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs”
“Rio 2”
“Rise of the Guardians”
“Epic”
“Mr. Peabody and Sherman”