Graphic design students show off animated films

Most people don't get too excited about slide shows. But for many graphic design students, it's the highlight of their senior year.

Film Follies, the free annual event showcasing senior graphic design student's projects, starts at 9 p.m. tomorrow in Keller Conference Center.

"It's kind of a good advertisement for the graphic design program," Nicole Cummo (senior-graphic design) said. "People that really don't know what we're about can see the kind of things that we do."

The pieces in the show consist of student projects from ART 470 (Time and Sequence).

Students from the class have put together 36 pieces incorporating slides, music and animation.

The animation, sometimes called scratch animation, is done directly onto 16mm film and timed in sequence with music.

Similarly, the slide shows use visual images and music to communicate an abstract or verbal idea.

Paul Gobble (senior-graphic design) and his group were given The Smiths' song, "Unhappy Birthday," by their professor and asked to convey the ideas of the song in images.

"It's really just a way of bringing onscreen what we felt the song was trying to say, and put our own spin on it and to make what was a verbal thing to make it a very visual thing," he said.

For Cummo, the visual nature of the work presents a problem that only an event like Film Follies can remedy.

"It's really hard to describe over the phone or to describe to people who don't really know what it is without them seeing it," Cummo said. "(At the Follies) they can get a good idea as to what exactly we've been struggling with all year long."