"Van" - AFPA, Spring 2020

Hey everyone, its been a while since production ended last semester and we're excited to finally put together something in memory of our first project! We had been wanting to not only highlight and showcase the work of our members, but also go into some detail and describe the process and thought behind the work we'll be showing as best we can. We thought it would be interesting even for people who were not entirely familiar with how other facets of production worked through their unique design problems.

Furthermore, we really just want to thank all of our team members for all of their hard work and contribution to the project. You all contributed more than just artwork, but also your time, and energy (possibly patience), even despite your other obligations of school and life. So many of you even worked between class, meeting with other team members, along with making time to attend the club meetings. We saw a great amount of teamwork and dedication and care into this project and we couldn't be more grateful for your efforts.

We also want to give another big thanks and recognition to our leads in each department for their leadership and commitment, and being a very active presence in the production.

Animation - Jane Lucero and Lily

Storyboarding - Kenneth Cheung

Narrative - Devon Stewart

Character - Victoria Geis

Now a little background on the project, being our first semester we experimented with the concept of having the club members pitch their own ideas that could be chosen for the club project. Initially we were worried we wouldn't have very many choices, but we were pleasantly surprised to see that we got more submissions than we thought we would. And so, for their guts to show off their ideas to the club, we want to thank them all again:

Alysha Nunez

Bubba Echols

Devon Stewart

Elsa Lievin

Michaela Green

Keely Walsh

Kenneth Cheung

Adrianna Xibille

This was the club's first semester, and as such our first project. We made known early on that there will likely be growing pains as we do our best to figure out how to do this thing best. A lot of thought was put into how the club would run before the semester started, but we inevitably realized we couldn't account for everything, and new problems came to our attention throughout the process. In practice is always more educational than in theory, and so we hope that, despite the hiccups we may have had during production, in the future we can take what we all have learned to do better each time.

Production this semester was cut short due to the unfortunate times we currently find ourselves in, and it was really a shame that this unpredictable event would come upon us in our first semester. But life throws its own curve balls and at the end of the day life is more important, and so we cut it short. Though the club is certainly not as important as everyone's well being, it was disappointing for some that we would not see our project to fruition. A lot of work was done and we were running strong!

So that being said, we had been trying to find the best way to go about recognizing the work of everyone who contributed, and, while its not ideal, one way we decided to do that was to create appreciation posts on the website. We also thought it would be interesting to include information about the process for those who maybe didn't get to see or know what the process was like for the other teams.

As for what's next, well, this semester is going to look a bit different than last considering the circumstances. Given how things went when this all started halfway through last semester, we can't expect it to work the same way, that would be unrealistic. We have been working on a compromise for the Fall 2020 semester that would hopefully be worthwhile and more accessible for students. We also want it to revolve more around community and learning as that is probably something we all will be missing this semester, being online and all. We believe that having more opportunity for critique and feedback from our leads, or other students, would be especially helpful and having a community of students that you can ask questions to. That was actually a big request that we had and in this new direction we feel we will be able to tackle that request much stronger than it had been last semester.

So what does this mean for film? Well, we still want to have our pitching process be the same, but unfortunately the tradoff would be that we won't be producing towards a final, cohesive end product. When a pitch is chosen, things will however focus more on the production process in each role, learning how these facets of production operate and their practices, all the while still shooting for members to bring their work to a finish. We hope that this will be helpful to students who maybe wanted to learn how to do something or get better at what they are already doing, while under the creative umbrella of a chosen project.

This is a temporary departure, and we hope things go back to normal next semester. But for this semester, we hope to be able to make this even more of a learning experience for the improvement of the artist.

That's all for here, we'll be sharing more info as time goes on so stay tuned. If you want to see the work from each of the teams, be sure to check them out in the other posts! We also want to make sure we acknowledge everyone who contributed work to the project, so if you see we missed your name, feel free to reach out and let us know. Likewise, if you see your artwork here but do not wish for it to be shown, then let us know and we'll be sure to take it down.