Submitted by BONNIE MITCHELL
Professor, Digital Arts
Bowling Green State University’s Bachelor of Fine Arts Digital Arts seniors will debut their first annual showcase of animations on April 25, followed by a screening of films by seniors in the Theater and Film Department. This showcase will highlight their creative achievements in 3D animation, 2D animation, stop motion, mixed media, and live action.
The BGSU Animation and Film Senior Showcase will begin at 4 p.m. with an animation screening at the Donnell Theater in the Wolfe Center for the Arts on BGSU main campus, with an introduction and awards ceremony led by the Charles Kanwischer, director of the School of Art. The screening will showcase a variety of student-created animations that reflect their unique visual storytelling abilities and technical skill.
At 6 p.m., a reception will provide an opportunity for attendees to meet the artists and discuss their work.
The evening continues at 7 p.m. with a special Film Screening featuring projects from Film Production students from the Department of Theater and Film.
For the first time, Digital Arts students wanting to focus on animation had the opportunity to dedicate a full academic year—two semesters—to developing their capstone projects. In total, the finished animations comprise more than 95,000 individually drawn or rendered frames.
To develop a 2D animation, students must develop a good story, create a storyboard using cinematic language, and then draw each individual frame.
Stop motion animation involves building puppets with bendable armatures, constructing sets, and arranging lights. To bring the characters to life, the animator must move the puppet in small increments then take a picture. This process must be repeated thousands of times.
Then all the photographs are combined to create the animation. 3D animation also involves concept development as well as producing 3D geometric models of all objects in the scenes.
If the piece involves special effects, complex physics simulations must be created. Then, the entire animation must be rendered out on the computer which sometimes takes hundreds of hours.
All of the students must work with post-production to composite the various layers and add the finishing touches.
Students had the opportunity to work with voice actors in the Kuhlin Center Stanton Audio Recording Studio and music composers from the College of Musical Arts. The animation students also added sound effects and sometimes their own audio compositions to the animations.
In addition to the annual BGSU Film and Media Film Festival, the Department of Theatre and Film will present a diverse collection of original films created by the department’s graduating filmmakers. As a Bachelor of Arts program, film production students work in a multitude of areas in the film production process with interests including writing, directing, cinematography, and editing among many other departments and positions.
Throughout their college career they create a multitude of projects that illustrate their developing technical skills, narrative interests, and creative voices. The films to be screened include class assignments, personal films, independent studies, and collaborative projects that were hand selected by each graduating filmmaker and represent their creative voice and narrative interests.
Each project is a testament to their hard work and dedication to the collaborative cinematic process while highlighting a wide range of genres, storytelling forms, and stylistic interests all produced while attending BGSU.
This showcase is a testimony to the talent and dedication of BGSU’s animation and film students, serving as the conclusion to their year-long capstone projects, and representing their creative personalities. Through a variety of animation and film techniques, these students have developed their individual creative voices while refining their technical and storytelling skills.
With a dynamic lineup of original films, the 2025 Animation and Film Senior Showcase is poised to be an exciting celebration of the future of animation and filmmaking. The event is free and open to the public, welcoming both the BGSU community and members of the public to experience the artistic talents of the next generation of animators and filmmakers.
For more information, please visit https://www.bgsu.edu/arts-and-sciences/school-of-art/galleries.html
