Tweets for Today

• 15:00 omg so much church dramaaaa #
• 19:27 Whose bright idea was it to try to give life insurance to a college student? No average college student would ever qualify! #
• 10:04 Today's Metro Lesson: Coatesville, PA is going to shit in a bucket. #

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Intern Cory - January 26, 2009

Originally published at The Fast Money Round. You can comment here or there.

I forgot that this class is on Mondays and Wednesdays. Fridays are so boring!

Today’s assignment was due for the class today. They were assigned a storyboarding project, where they drew 8 keyframes of a short animation. To my surprise, the entire classed finished it. Way to go, guys! There was a lot of feedback thrown from both me and Prof. Camomile as well as coming from the students and it seemed like the students took my advice seriously (thank goodness; I wasn’t bullshitting them either).

We explained the idea of “in-between” frames, or “tweens” in class today, and handed out their next assignment: using the keyframes they presented in class, draw 5-6 tween frames on unlined 3×5 index cards and bind them with a binder clip. We’ll also be working on that on Wednesday.

My assignment is to come up with a streamlined way to present the Flash interface to the class, some of which haven’t used MS Paint, let alone Photoshop. After this assignment is finished, we’ll present the class with the next assignment: a Flash collaboration with the entire class, Rube Goldberg style. So, wish me luck!

As an aside, I’d like to digress and talk about a conversation I had with a graphic designer from New Haven. He and I were talking about coming down and speaking to our Undergraduate Seminar class. Unfortunately, he can’t make it, but it did spur an interesting discussion. In class today, the animations that most of the class drew centered around violence: a chef had his arm cut off, multiple car crashes, stick figures fighting. One student even cited his inspiration as StickFight.com (which isn’t going to get a link from me). “The total encouragement of wanton violence and blood and gore as ‘cool’ and homophobia as hilarious is just so, so low,” he says. I’d have to agree. A lot of these animations and games substitute violence as a plot or a punchline, and that is such a cheap way to move your story along. Of course, there’s middle ground, as with everything, but to encourage it? I think that’s silly. If any of the students in the class read this, if you can go the rest of the semester without one bit of violence in any of your work, I’ll push for extra points for you.