Deep inside the Gatewood Studio Arts Building on the campus of UNC Greensboro, tucked away on the back hall of the second floor, is a state-of-the art studio where animators work on industry standard equipment to create 2D, 3D, and interactive projects.
No, Disney hasn’t rented space on campus. This is the new School of Art Animation Lab, created for and by students and faculty in the BFA Studio Arts Animation Concentration with funding by Innovate UNCG, an initiative that helps “turn ideas into impact” through selected projects on campus.
“We decided we would ask for the top end.” says School of Art Associate Director and Art History Professor Heather Holian. “If we got told ‘no’ we would live with that. But we made the case that this is a professional training program, so we need to offer a professional workspace.”
Holian is a Disney and Pixar scholar and teaches the history behind the art of animation. She, along with professors Dan Hale and Rodgers Dameron, who teach animation classes, knew they needed to expand their program and facility to meet the growing demand for the classes and to keep up with technology.
After just two years, the major has 35 students, with an average of ten new students being added each semester through the BFA cycle (after the students complete the School of Art foundations courses and portfolio review process.)
Hale says, “As our program has grown, we’ve built this wonderful sense of community, and we felt like we wanted and needed a home base and so we started thinking about how an actual lab would serve this purpose.”
While Holian and School Director Barbara Campbell Thomas worked on a departmental infrastructure grant for the lab, Hale and Dameron went to work on determining what kind of equipment and software they would need. The two had experience with the animation software Unreal Engine, having attended the Unreal Fest conference and serving as Unreal Faculty Fellows with UNCG colleagues in the School of Music, media studies, and computer science.
Hale says, “The festival was eye-opening. We realized that Unreal Engine isn’t just for making games, and many animation studios are starting to use that software. We got back here and started thinking about how we might be able to run Unreal Engine, but until this point everything in the School of Art was a Mac and the software just functions on a PC platform so much better.”
That’s when the team brought in the end-users—the students—to draw the big picture.
“We invited staff from the Innovate UNCG office to come to our class to see what we do now and where we could take this program,” explains Hale. “They sat in on our production meetings. They saw the project spreadsheet that stretched around the room, with all the checkboxes for the multitude of tasks. They witnessed the work driven solely by our students, created by students, and managed by students. They realized the professionalism exhibited by our students. I think that helped them understand that students who have this professional approach deserve a professional work environment.”
THE STUDENT PERSPECTIVE
When asked how they feel about the new studio, students past and present launch into excited conversation:
Amelie Novio (’25 BFA Studio Arts, Concentration in Animation): “Seeing the transition from the equipment we had to this new lab is so exciting. It’s so nice to see that as the animation program is growing, the technology is, too.”
Finley Lewis (’25 BFA Studio Arts, Concentration in Animation): “These computers are absolute workhorses. They are insanely good at running 2D and 3D software. I love how mobile the monitors are. Due to an accident, I have some trouble turning my wrist, so I have to use the left-handed setups sometimes and even then, I can tilt them, move them, they are just so accessible.”
Bella Ramirez (’24 BFA Studio Art, Concentration in Animation): We’re grateful to be a part of the planning for this studio and jumpstarting this new generation of animators here at UNCG.”
Vincent Vang (’24 BFA Studio Art, Concentration in Animation): “I have to admit I’m happy and a little jealous (he says with a laugh), but it’s good to see the hardware getting better and better for future students. The old iMacs were almost falling apart, then we got new computers, and it was like woah we got a new fridge, fully loaded with all the features. We thought that was great, but now, this new equipment is like getting a luxury mansion with free insurance! It’s amazing!”
Amelie: “We’re really grateful for how your class led the way for that.”
Vincent: “It really is great that you guys have these tools now.”
Finley: “It’s impressive that your class made such an amazing film with the equipment you had.
Bella: “Oh it was a process, we often had crashes in our After Effects, just because of how dense our content was. So much buffering! It really was too much for those Macs. They needed an upgrade for sure!”
Vincent: “This will definitely prepare you for future jobs. A lot of the equipment –the tablets, the computers, the programs-and the new space are reflective of what you’ll find yourselves using.”
A First-Class Production Facility and Additional Faculty
Funding for the project came in from Innovate UNCG at a little over $142,000 for the lab and the hardware.
The lab is equipped with 20 Dell 3680 Workstation PCs featuring 24 core Intel 13900K processors, 64 GB RAM, and 20 GB NVIDIA RTX 4500 GPUs. The machines are liquid-cooled to manage the temperature in the space and provide a quieter working environment. Each station also includes 22” Wacom Cintiq Pro drawing displays and a 27” 4K Dell monitor, along with mechanical LED light up keyboards and mice, which Hale readily admits “work great, but also just look cool.”
The computers also feature many of the software packages found across the animation and game industries, including Toon Boom, Maya, Unreal Engine, and the Adobe Creative Suite.
“Everything we have is what you would experience at an animation studio or a game studio,” says Holian. “And Unreal Engine headquarters is located just up the road. David Wyrick, Director of Innovate UNCG, is hoping to strengthen that relationship which might mean internships and jobs which would be wonderful for our students.”
Hale adds, “Our collective goal is giving students the tools to tell the stories that they want to tell, the stories that have meaning for them. There may be other schools in the state that have the equivalent of what we have but no one has anything better.”
Expansion didn’t stop there. Along with new equipment and software programs, the School of Art requested additional faculty with expertise in game production to expand the animation curriculum. They applied for and received approval for a post-MFA Fellow that also came out of Innovate UNCG.
Varun Saxena is a narrative writer, game designer, and educator based in Brooklyn, New York. Originally from Mumbai, India, one of his most notable personal projects is Waiting for Evening, a game that immerses players in the rich tapestry of an intergenerational family in colonial Bombay (present-day Mumbai).
At UNCG, Saxena is teaching Interactive Media Production using Unreal Engine, a course that Hale says the school wouldn’t be able to offer otherwise.
“Last spring we wanted to begin integrating Unreal Engine into the curriculum, so I took my Intro to 3D animation class over to the UNCG ESports arena to do some work there. But now, with the new lab and a new faculty member, we can spend more time on that process as a class. It’s allowing us to create new curriculum solely in interactive media or non-linear narrative. Stories that allow for the viewer to actively make choices and that requires a different level of thinking. I think it’s important to have Varun here and to have these courses that help expand our minds about the possibilities.”
A Long Time in the Making
According to Hale, it takes a dozen drawings to make up just one second of animation. Seniors in the animation capstone class will work on their projects for an entire year because, as Hale says, “It just takes that long to make animation.”
And likewise, the Animation program itself was a long time in the making. Holian began teaching the Disney Pixar class in 2008. Students were already asking when the School of Art would offer an animation major. During that time, Holian began going to Pixar for research and became friends with one of the animators there. She told him about her conversations with those students.
“He said you’re so well-positioned at UNCG for an animation program because it would be embedded in a School of Art,” recalls Holian. “You have the art history component, and you have all the other arts available. Animators could take drawing classes and collaborate with students in dance, music, and theatre.”
The animation program became a serious topic of conversation and planning in 2012 by Holian, then School Director Chris Cassidy, and former Chair Lawrence Jenkens (when the school was a department in the College of Arts and Sciences). In 2020 Hale was hired to begin building the curriculum, and for the first time, in the Fall of 2022, students were able to choose animation as a concentration within the BFA in Studio Art. In 2023, Dameron came on board, and this year, Saxena is part of the team.
“This program had so much support from Lawrence and Chris, and now Barbara Campbell Thomas as Director of the School of Art and CVPA Dean bruce mcclung. You need administrators with vision who can see the possibility and take the risk,” says Holian.
It has taken all of us pulling in the same direction to make this dream a reality. The hope that this would become a successful program has been fulfilled. The student demand is there.”
In storyboarding, this would be just the beginning frames. What’s next?
“I don’t know that there is a limit to the interest, to the growth,” muses Hale. “The more we offer, the more students seem to want it. Our classes are full, and we have wait lists. It’s not just the BFA students in the Animation concentration who want these classes. Students in our BA program want to take our classes, we also have students who are in drawing and printmaking who benefit from classes like concept art, storyboarding, and sculpture students excelling in digital 3D modeling.
There is profound interest. Think about it. You can’t make a clown fish perform like the one in Finding Nemo without animation. That’s where we are now- realizing the power of animation as an art form.”
Animation All Around
We asked our student/alumni group what they love about animation and to share some applications beyond the classroom.
Bella: “A lot of animators say they love animation because it’s a way to make their art come to life, and that’s something that resonates with me. I like the viewer’s ability to interact instead of just watching. I want to be able to tell stories that make people happy or make them sad or that give them comfort. It’s crazy how far animation has progressed, evolved from 2D works to 3D works to mixed media. There are so many different avenues for me to explore as a creator.”
Vincent: For me it’s all about knowledge and research. I attached myself to animation when I was 19, while looking at apps on my phone. It made me think, ‘This is something I could make a career of.’ Learning new ways to animate is fascinating to me.”
Amelie: “I grew up watching a lot of animated content. I’m grown now and I still watch a lot of animated content. I think knowing the process and seeing the finished product is what I like best.”
Finley: I think animation is the most effective form of storytelling you can do. It takes aspects of theatre, film, visual art, music. Anything you can think of can go into animation and create a story that almost anyone can empathize with.”
Bella: “Animation is in front of you all the time. Say you’re sitting there watching tv and a pharmaceutical ad comes on. Many of those are created in Illustrator and animated. Sometimes you’ll see animation on top of live action in those ads.”
Amelie: “One of the most popular places you’ll find animation is in video games. They’re all driven by story tellers and animators.”
Finley: “Just about anything you see in entertainment that follows a narrative is going to involve storyboarding which is a big part of the animation curriculum.”
The professors chime in.
Hale: “On your local television news there are graphics, motion graphics. It’s not character animation but it based on the same principals of timing and spacing.”
Holian: “You also see it in the medical field. Modeling and rendering are becoming increasingly important in medical exploration. Animation is often used in all kinds of instructional videos. And there’s 3D printing. 3D printing is based on 3D modeling.”
A Destination School for Animation
“One of the goals I’ve always had, one that’s always been in the back of my mind but now seems tenable, is seeing UNCG be the destination school in the South for animation,” says Holian. “We can give a top-notch education that is equal to these other programs and with this new lab we are very competitive. And that is going to continue as we add faculty and as we continue to expand our curriculum.”
The students we talked to for this article are, like most of the students at UNCG, from North Carolina. Bella and Vincent grew up in Charlotte, Amelie is from Durham, and Finley from Kernersville. Holian says that strikes a chord with her.
“As a state school, our mission is to serve the students of North Carolina. And when you have students here saying we want to study animation, it is on some level our obligation to provide it. The great thing is we are a public school, we are a diverse school, and we also have reasonable tuition. There are a lot of private schools with animation in the Southeast and they are phenomenally expensive, and out of reach for many of our students.”
“That’s why I didn’t go to SCAD (Savannah College of Art and Design). I got a ton of scholarships, but I still couldn’t afford to go,” says Finley. “But I was extremely psyched to transfer here just as the animation program was announced. I looked at the class requirements for the degree and thought this is exactly what I’m looking for. I had done so much research on schools and I love the timeline here. You start out with foundations and then move forward in a way that makes sense.”
Bella says being able to collaborate with other parts of campus is a bonus. “When we began the process of our capstone project, the film Of Lochborne, we knew we would need music. We put out feelers within the School of Music. A student composer came forward with exactly what we wanted. Having that community at UNCG means we are so interconnected with people of creativity.”
And it’s all right here in North Carolina. Hale says that’s exactly the point.
“We are building a program we hope will not only draw students from all over, but also a place that will attract the recruiters from California. Heather and I have been working with Marc Russo at NC State to unite animation programs in North Carolina and eventually the region to put on an animation-centric film festival. It might be hard to get a Pixar recruiter or even a midsize studio to make a trip just to see UNCG student work, but if we can build this larger community and a festival then it becomes one-stop shopping where they can see all the best films made in our state and the Southeast and meet our students who are every bit as talented as the students in California. That’s the ultimate goal–making animation something you can learn and do here and get hired to do from here.”
“As we realize each step forward in our dreams for the program, it just makes us dream bigger,” says Holian. “Walt Disney used to say ‘It’s kinda fun to do the impossible.’ I think back to a time when we were told that an animation program wasn’t going to happen here. We just weren’t going to take that answer.”
A ribbon-cutting ceremony and tours of the new animation lab are being planned for later this semester.
Story by Terri W Relos
Photo credit: Sean Norona