Chris Perry is a computer animator and professor at Hampshire College in Amherst, MA. Formerly a programmer with Pixar, Perry drew from his professional experience to design an unorthodox approach to the educational process. Under his guidance, a group of students undertook the production of a short animated film. Each student was assigned a specific role in the production from animator to producer — even musical composer — and often remained in that role for the duration of the course. Lectures, graded assignments, and exams were replaced with daily screenings of the latest version of the film and open critiques of the progress being viewed. Work was collaborative, learning was done laterally through experience, and the whole process was overseen by Perry, who served as the film’s director and writer.
An original storyboard by student Chris Bishop
Final frame
The production spanned over several years of Perry’s class, and saw a number of new students join the project as others graduated and moved on. The finished film looks more like a product of a professional studio than a college classroom. As a testament to the adaptive and dynamic nature of the process, a by-product of the film is an open source tool for production management called Helga. Programmed from scratch by students and tailored to the needs of the film, Helga is a powerful software platform that facilitates coordination on every level, from queuing renders and managing assets, to crew communication.
Titled The Incident at Tower 37, the 10 minute film is making its rounds on the national independent film festival scene and has already won several awards while undoubtedly challenging the traditional learning process as well as the model for independently produced animated films.
[images courtesy of bit films]
by Jean Lin
3 Comments
I don’t think this is in anyway “an unorthodox approach to the educational process” unless I just happened to attend 2 film schools where they have been using the same techniques to teach film production for decades.
I graduated ten years ago and we never once thought that by having an actual film production with all of the roles being filled by students we were “undoubtedly challenging the traditional learning process and structure.”
It just makes sense and any teacher can tell you that it is part of most teaching methods to teach students by letting them participate in the process of what is being taught. I’m no John Dewey, but I would call it collaboration.
While many of us in creative industries have had the good fortune of attending schools and institutions that do not follow traditional curriculum and encourage collaborative learning, we would argue that on a whole, the orthodox concept of an undergraduate college classroom still revolves around lectures, exams, and letter grade evaluations. It was not our intention to imply that Perry’s class was the first of its kind, only to applaud these students’ achievement. The post has been edited to clarify this, and hopefully to draw more attention to what we feel was most important in the first place: the finished product. After seeing this film and hearing its story, we simply hope that with this film’s (and others like it) success, we’ll be hearing many more stories of independent collaboration in all creative mediums and industries.
- otto
GO HAMPSHIRE!!! Love seeing Hampsters out there making cool stuff!!!