Art and Design Commons^™

From Script To Screen, Samira Shirkhani

Master of Fine Arts in Digital Media Culminating Experience

For my capstone project, I made a short animated film. In this film, we follow the journey of a young writer facing the pressures of a project deadline. As she sits in her home office, the character struggles to concentrate on her work amid some distractions. From the outside noises filtering through the window to the persistent drip of water in the bathroom and a bug buzzing around her face, a series of obstacles disrupt her focus. The writer wants to eliminate each obstacle, actively working to create an ideal environment conducive to productivity. As she successfully tackles each issue, …

Crimes In Different Mediums Of Art, Chloe Milhouse

ENGL 1102 Showcase

There are a few different ways we see crime and art come together as one without even realizing it and there are other topics that showcase crime punishment as well. Crime can be portrayed through music. When certain artists sing about their crime-like behaviors, this can lead to people also doing that same crime because they listened to it in a song. Crime can be derived from art itself, causing people to react emotionally and criminally to something they’ve seen. Lastly it can be represented through film and TV showcasing elements of human behavior for society to see. All of …

Always Judge A Book By Its Cover, Abby Miller

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The goal for this honors project is to build my illustration portfolio and to explore the world of children's book illustration. This project will facilitate my improvement in design layout, theming, and illustration. I would love to pursue a job involving children's book illustrations at some point in the future and completing this project would help me to understand the challenges that come with designing such covers, it would improve my ability to illustrate in a purposeful manner, and it would strengthen my portfolio overall.

The Art Of Animation: How Animation Is Creating A Better Film Industry, Judah Cooper

Senior Honors Theses

With the progression of streaming services in recent years, the art form of animation has gained traction, continuing to develop into exceedingly creative forms through the work of talented artists. Animation has developed alongside the film industry, achieving great success in the process. This thesis will define animation and its place within visual effects, critically analyze categories of character design, theme, and story while demonstrating their relationship with animation, and contrast animation with live action films to understand its strengths and differentiations. The research concludes that animation has great benefits to offer the film industry and should be continued to …

Connective Movements, Ian Keliher

Masters Theses

Connective Movements describes the winding, associative thoughts gathered from long conversations with colleagues and internal dialogue with writers, philosophers, and filmmakers. Using the visual essay, I follow points of interest through labyrinthine and idiosyncratic logics. Collage and montage results in an assemblage of visual ideas both analytic and personal. Although the outputs vary, my body of work has been informed by a sustained inquiry into moving image with a focus on small moments and subjectivity: cloudwatching can spin into thoughts on communication, or simple, everyday words burrow into experience and memory. With this aim, I use the constituent parts of …

An Analysis On The Florida Project, Capucine Rosier

University Honors Theses

The Florida Project is a contemporary movie filmed by independent director Sean Baker. This movie tackles different social and institutional issues across America, specifically the outdated welfare system and the rise of homelessness among young children. This paper is determined to analyze the different social and ethical concerns filmed throughout the movie and offer my interpretation of the film. Digging deeper into artistic pieces is essential as hidden messages are portrayed in every way. Censorship and display through art have been a form of individual expression since the beginning. This thesis will discuss how the filmmaker filmed and showcased the …

Spit Brimming With Futures, Penny Molesso

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

SPIT BRIMMING WITH FUTURES is an immersive video and audio installation that uses ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) to investigate the intersection of transgender and neurodivergent identity, expressing an urgent need to imagine stories about transgender, autistic people that affirm our agency and autonomy amidst a political climate that weaponizes neurodivergence to delegitimize trans experiences. The American political right’s vilification of transgender people is used to uphold structures of white supremacy and heteropatriarchy that become destabilized when rigid binary gender categories are challenged. The political right has a vested interest in keeping trans people out of public view, thus weaponizing …

The Evolution Of Computer Generated Images And Special Effects Design In The Jurassic Park Trilogy, Samantha Renee Pearson

Whittier Scholars Program

Based on Michael Crichton’s unpublished novel, The Andromeda Strain, the awe-inspiring Jurassic Park trilogy (1993-2001) emerged from Steven Spielburg’s determination to make extinct characters come to life again. Early on in their careers, Crichton and Spielburg met at Universal Studios while working on Duel (1971) with ambitions to direct a film that would completely immerse their audience into a dinosaur-encompassing world. About five years later, Spielberg attempted to form a digital rendering for his film Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), but later concluded that “‘The technology wasn’t there yet'” (Mottram 20).

Fast-forward to 1990, Spielburg was fixated on …

Realm Of Remembrance, Brandon Vanbach

Senior Projects Spring 2023

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College.

In September of 2021, I turned 21 years old. During that time I also discovered a 8mm video tape in my childhood home. Unbeknownst to me, this tape, which hadn’t seen the light of day since its conception, would end up consuming my life.

The tape was a home movie filmed by my mother and her partner at the time during an outing to Vietnam in 2005. The footage consisted mostly of landscapes and claustrophobic close-ups of distant relatives. Rarely would I enter the frame. But I wasn't interested …

Everything Comes Full Circle, Lilan Yang

Masters Theses

Following Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas (1984) filming locations from Houston, Texas to Los Angeles, California, I use a 16mm Bolex camera to capture the vastness of the American West. The footage draws me to reminisce about snippets of my everyday life. I contemplate how we perceive the world through analog optical apparatuses and how memories are multidimensional yet fragile. Our recollections of people and places can be distorted, unrecognizable, and fictitious. These memories would eventually diminish with the passing of time. By converting the filmmaking back and forth between analog and digital filmmaking, with the loss of information during the …

Mrs. Florence Mante's Amazing Grace School, Daniel Keith Davis

LSU Master's Theses

Mrs. Florence Mante’s Amazing Grace School is the story of both Mama Florence and the children that she has dedicated her life to. Mrs. Florence Mante is the Ghanaian cofounder of the Amazing Grace Preparatory School. The West African school is committed to developing African leaders and ending the cycles of poverty in the village of Kodiekrom. My thesis focuses on using interview-driven artwork and collaborative storytelling to depict the unique challenges and triumphs of Mama Florence’s life in Ghana. Digital illustrations, a narration from Mama Florence, and music take the viewer on her deeply compelling journey, raising awareness for …

Vitality, Bernadette K. Curl

Student Projects

Vitality is a study of life, joy, and motion. It is in response to the portraits of models in endless magazines made to look as though they mourn their own vitality, standing stock-still and vaguely bored. These images are also made as archival evidence that, as Phil Ochs said: “In such ugly times, the only true protest is beauty.”

These portraits were made under studio lighting on medium format, high speed, black and white negative film, and medium format, colour positive film. The materials are chosen for their ability to capture truth over fact.

I asked my subjects beforehand to …

..., Claire Alfonso

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Words are fickle, easily misunderstood, and often put us at a loss... but we all have so much we feel we need to express. This begs the question: Is there any safe way of communication? Can anything ever really be communicated how you mean it? Will you ever see the reflection of what you feel, think, and dream outside of yourself? In response to this existential dilemma, I imagine an alternative language of images, sounds, color, feelings, and non-identification. My thesis is a meditation on the issues with standard language and the idea of alternative language. In my argument I …

Culture In Disney Films: A Comparative Analysis Of Color, Composition And Rhythm, Megan Paul

Interior Design Undergraduate Honors Theses

As a student of design, I take inspiration from everything around me. The media I consume, the places I visit, and the people I meet.By choice or not, I and my generation are subject to the various forms of pop culture, film is one of them. Film is one of few art forms which combines several methods and elements of design to produce a cohesive result, as opposed to a singular medium. This forms the connection to design thinking and is the foundation for the study.

Another critical component to pop culture is the ability to reach the masses. Due …

Forever, Thomas Long

School of Art Undergraduate Honors Theses

FOREVER is a short drama film following a time loop within a mysterious cabin that acts as a catalyst for the film's own loop format, with the work repeating and building upon itself in a gallery setting. This is a culmination of a multimedia research process between cinematic arts and experimental media practices.

The Making Of Everyday Hollywood: 1930s Film Influence On Everyday Women’S Fashion In Nebraska, Anna Naomi Kuhlman

Department of Textiles, Merchandising, and Fashion Design: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This research examines the influence of film fashions on middle-class, Nebraskan women’s dress during the Great Depression (1932-1940). The Great Depression challenged the middle class: while standards of living remained high, the economic means to achieve those standards diminished. Despite the crisis, women strove to keep up with current fashion trends. While previous literature has examined how Hollywood directly affected trends and styles of the 1930s in major American metropolitan contexts, the manifestation of trends in the dress of middle to lower socio-economic classes in Middle America remains under-examined. Against the backdrop of Depression-era hardships specific to Nebraska’s agricultural economy, …

Film And The British Empire, Mckenna Broadhead

Fall Student Research Symposium 2021

My research focused on film and the way it has changed because of imperialism, more specifically the imperialism of the British Empire. During the time of the British empire, film became an important form of propaganda. As a result, many of the cliches we often see in movies, like 'Gunga Din' were created. These cliches were used to emphasize the importance of Britain's role in shaping foreign lands and their people.

Cloak Wood, Thomas Brett

Masters Theses

Over the last two years, I have been developing films and video games that hybridise techniques of live action and animation. This has primarily been done by reconstructing and modifying scenes from 3D photogrammetric scans that I make of objects, people, and places, allowing me to assemble new, imaginary spaces informed by the actual architecture and dimensions of my surroundings.

The film Cloak Wood was entirety is shot on 16mm Kodak stock. The physicality of this analogue technique confers the modified virtual space and its inhabitants with the aesthetic integrity of the actual. The virtual space, constructed from real objects …

Fracture Patterns: Communicating The Surreal Through Dance Film, Chloe C. Lesh

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis project and its associated dance film were created in a surrealistic time period initiated by the pandemic. The resulting everyday surrealism ignited my interest within dreams, nightmares, and surreality[1], and how these cerebral and psychological experiences translate to physiological responses and movement. My dance film fracture is the manifestation of these themes. The film presents surrealistic imagery in an abstracted narrative and connects to personal struggles with surreality brought on by the pandemic. The movement, as well as the rationale for the choreographic, filming, and editing choices are explained. Dance films by Neels Castillon and …

Remixing The Archives: Indigenous Interpretations Of History And The Future, Marcella Ernest

American Studies ETDs

This dissertation examines how Native art makes critical interventions that are aesthetically and intellectually arranged with the intention of displacing the master narratives. The project tracks how film and photography—historically used by non-Native people as a tool of colonialism—are being reclaimed by the visual and sonic scholarship of contemporary Native artists. The project shows how multidisciplinary artists use technology to remix audiovisual archives from a specific time in American history: portrait photography and ethnographic filmmaking at the turn of the twentieth century, Hollywood’s frontier representations of Indianness in twentieth-century motion pictures, social guidance classroom films from the 1950s, and digital …

Japan’S 2d Trauma Culture: Defining Crisis Cinema In Post-3/11 Japan, Matthew C. Hill

Theses and Dissertations

This paper labors to expound the link between the socially mediated “trauma process,” or the creation of collective trauma through social discourse, and the proposed moniker of “crisis cinema” that has often been deployed by media scholars with no clear parameters. This paper, then, endeavors to evince the trauma process’ relevance to crises and disasters, explicitly define a paradigm by which crisis cinema can be understood, and subsequently utilized by a larger patronage, and showcase the pair’s reliance on one another. This is approached through the locus of the March 11, 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster and a selection of …

Francesca, Madison B. Jones

2020 Symposium Creative Works

Created using instant film, this piece was taken apart and destroyed before a new image was formed. Looking at the image from the back and scraping and sanding at the layers of chemicals was an attempt at finding some remnant of the original image. It is delving into the idea of the importance of content within an image and explores the resurrection of an image in a new way.

An Echo Of Light, Anaka Marie Wetch

Senior Projects Spring 2020

My senior project film an Echo of Light is an experimental 16mm film exploring light as both a metaphysical and physical process. I became interested in light during my studies in holography, which is a medium revolving around the interference of light. I studied holography independently and with the guidance of professionals in the field. My holographic work is oriented around the natural world and its micro-constituents. I examined and photographed substances, such as salt, pyrite, and quartz with the scanning electron microscope at Bard. These materials have striking crystalline geometry which I intend to explore through the light dependent …

Apocalypse Lakardowo: Ecocritical Analysis In The Film Lakardowo Mencari Keadilan, Aulia Maulida, Abdul Basid

International Review of Humanities Studies

Human-nature interaction today enters a worrying stage. Film as a literary work begins to record this interaction. The film Lakardowo Mencari Keadilan to be one of them. This research uses the content analysis method with an ecocritical approach. This film is a research primary data source supported by various related references. The analysis emphasizes the study of environmental literature which focuses on apocalyptic reading with pastoral views that surround it through Creswell spiral analysis methods: data management, reading, and note-taking, classification and interpretation, then data visualization. In this research, Lakardowo's environment in the film Lakardowo Mencari Keadilan reflects the impact …

Kai Duc Luong Interview, Stuart Hutson

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Artist Bio Born in 1975 in Phnom-Penh, KAI-DUC LUONG fled the oppressive Khmer Rouge regime from Cambodia to Vietnam to France, where his family settled in Paris, in 1978. KAI-DUC operates between Chicago and Paris. His artistic projects include video (art / doc / film), photography, and mixed media installations. His unconventional path as a self-taught outsider artist, trained in digital communication & systems engineering, gives him a unique perspective, at times questioning subject matters through the understanding of transmission and systems (e.g. the primary emotions, the five senses, the stages of grief, the art industry). His works have been …

An Echo From The Living Room, Makayla Nichole Songer

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

We are unable to interface with reality as it is. Everything that encompasses our understanding of reality and ourselves—from our physical perceptions to our memories—are subject to innate flaws that make a complete grasp of reality impossible. an echo from the living room is invested in the idea that reality itself is malleable, taking influence from altered states of reality such as dreams, nightmares, and memory. Drawing from the personal experiences of recurring nightmares and living in a haunted house, as well film, the uncanny, and the multiple, an echo from the living room strives to create space for these …

Duik Bassel In Usage In After Effects And An Animated Short Film, Kennedy L. Galpin

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis was made with the goal of creating a 2D short film in the end, with mainly using a program that is not normally used for character animation: Adobe After Effects. With the usage of an originally French plugin called DuIK Bassel (v16.0.9), I was able to create a model in Adobe Photoshop and then put it into After Effects. When the files were imported, the plugin would then assist in the rigging process, wherein I would be able to create the character’s rig and make the 2D model within the program. This document discusses the entire creation of …

Advancing Film Through Art & Design: A Study Of The Influence That Film And Fine Art Have On The Independent Film Market, Jamall Rashaud Mcmillan

Masters Theses

The Influence of Graphic Design and Fine Art in Film is a exploration into the impact that an investment of the arts has on film and more specifically the independent film market. Most independent filmmakers have to develop their productions with little to no budget. In doing so they must work to create a marketable film to the best of their ability. There in-lies the issue; they are doing it to the best of “their” ability. The issue that is in focus with the notion of ability is that a major component that is left out of the equation to …

Lindsay Kropp, Senior Art Exhibition Portfolio, Lindsay M. Kropp

Senior Art Portfolios

The Senior Art Exhibition was on display in the Baer Gallery in the spring of 2019. This work consists of package design, advertising brochure, stop-motion film, and sculpture.

Katie Hopkins, Senior Art Exhibition Portfolio, Katherine Hopkins

Senior Art Portfolios

This document archives the senior art exhibition of Katie Hopkins ‘19. A reception for the 2019 Senior Art Exhibition occurred on Friday, April 12, 2019 in the Bush Art Center Galleries to celebrate the accomplishments of the graduating art class. Contained in the portfolio is Hopkins’ artist statement that accompanied her exhibition, a photo of her work in the context of the Baer Gallery taken on the night of the reception, and close ups of her three pieces: the oil painting Space Dog, four film stills and the tagline of the short film Withdrawn in lieu of the actual media, …