Between Chronicle And Legend: A Two-Scene Environment And Visual Effects Examination Of Physical Accuracy And Emotional Exaggeration On The Honey Creek Bridge Collapse, Alison R. Gaddy

All Theses

This thesis explores how truth and dramatization intersect in digital storytelling by comparing realistic and stylized simulations of the Honey Creek bridge collapse within the context of the Kate Shelley animated short. At the core of storytelling lies a tension between factual accuracy and dramatic stylization. We investigate that tension by examining how narrative truth is conveyed, distorted, or enhanced through visual dramatization by focusing on the psychology of audience perception and the motivations behind creative embellishment. The practical contribution of this research is the development of two distinct digital scene setups depicting the same Honey Creek bridge collapse event. …

Desert Ghost, Jessica Downs

All Theses

This thesis explores the relationship between landscape, memory, and the body through handmade paper installations inspired by the deserts of southwestern Utah. Drawing from personal experience of place and the loss of a childhood home, the work considers how environments are internalized and persist as shifting, sensory impressions rather than fixed geographies. The desert becomes a generative site for examining presence, transformation, and the passage of time, both geologic and personal.

I use handmade paper and installation to translate my experience of place into physical form. Paper serves as both material and metaphor; its fibers, textures, and muted tones emulate …

Enhancing Facial Expressiveness For Games Through Procedural Animation, Abhijit Varanasi

All Theses

Facial animation is one of the most important parts of bringing characters to life in video games and virtual experiences. This thesis explores a new approach to creating more expressive facial animations using procedural techniques and blended facial performance for more flexibility. The project uses FACS (Facial Action Coding System), which breaks down facial expressions into small, measurable muscle movements. By building a facial rig based on these muscle units, the character’s face can be animated in a way that reflects real human emotion. The animation in this work is not just pre-recorded, though it can respond in real-time to …

Harnessing Irrationality, Jennifer E. Smith

All Theses

My thesis work considers the presence of objectifying gazes in representations of women in Western visual media and pop culture. I reference film, television, short form content shared on social media, and pornography to identify and repurpose tools of objectification in my large scale drawings and animated GIFs. I compare the objectifying tropes present in contemporary entertainment media and pop culture to those present in the Western art historical tradition of the reclining female nude, mythology and folklore, and pornography. Using these comparisons, I discuss objectification in terms of passive and active, consumption and appetite, and idealization and devaluation. I …

Processing Self, Ethan B. Mckellar

All Theses

Processing Self is a body of sculptural and utilitarian ceramic work that explores the intersection of the materiality of clay with the expression of grief and vulnerability. In this work I utilize the process of building unstable ceramic vessels and the communal action of wood firing to translate the experiences of grief and care into physical forms. As I build, I manipulate the clay to its limits, allowing it to falter under its own weight, and display the breakage and damage. By committing to support each vessel through its creation, I make a promise to persevere, echoing the commitment I …

Dwelling / Knowing / Loving: Imaging The Immanent Present, Joel Pasquarelli

All Theses

This thesis serves as an attempt to articulate, understand, and testify to my experiences within the immanent present. Defined as moments where the world impresses itself upon my awareness with such a force that it eclipses all else, the experience of immanence is necessarily undeniable and ephemeral. These moments are accompanied by a combined sense of exultation in the world’s existence and poignant longing for something beyond. I feel as though I am embedded within something great and meaningful, as the material world acts upon me, yet I remain ever unsatiated by this experience as the world inevitably returns once …

The Uses Of Dramaturgical Research In Cinematic Storytelling, Asset Design, And Adaptation In Animation, Delaney L. Walker

All Theses

“The Black Hair” is a creative project that explores the convergence of cinematic adaptation, dramaturgical research, and animation design in retelling a traditional Japanese short folktale from the Heian Era. Rooted in the practice of theatrical dramaturgy, this thesis advocates for a research-driven creative pipeline by developing a culturally respectful and historically grounded approach to developing cinematic storyboards. By thoroughly examining the chronicles of history and the sociocultural context, the project seeks to foster deeper cultural appreciation while reintroducing a lesser-known narrative to modern audiences through a visual medium. The project draws stylistic and narrative inspiration from iconic Japanese filmmakers …

The Space Between: Engaging And Withholding The Self, Maya Mcdonald

All Theses

This thesis, The Space Between: Engaging and Withholding the Self, documents my journey in understanding the self through the act of oil-painted self-portraiture. Through an exploration of eye contact, body language, non-performative representations of self, and the tension between engagement and detachment, this body of work examines the complexities of visibility, agency, and self-perception. Using my own body as both subject and metaphor, I investigate the interplay between revealing and withholding, questioning the boundaries between what is seen and what remains obscured. Blending classical figure painting techniques with abstracted elements, my work engages in a dialogue between tradition and …

A Pilot Study On The Effects Of Aesthetic In Game Play Experience And Visual Attention In Virtual Reality, Makayla Middleton

All Theses

Video games have become very popular over the last couple of decades and the popularity is increasing year by year. Imagine a world where video games didn’t exist. Yes, the world would function as normal but we would take away the creative freedoms expressed in game play. The video game industry today has become larger than the music and film industry combined. With new technologies becoming available, the user’s game play experience continues to change.
The purpose of this thesis is to look at the growth and definitions of game play experience and see how it will change with virtual …

Material World, Nicole Weldy

All Theses

My thesis, Material World, delves into the use of the crochet unit as a construction technique for building forms. Through this, I aim to organize different materials in a way that responds to the challenges posed by the physical world. My artistic process is centered around honoring the inherent qualities of thread and uses these qualities to create form, lightness, and linearity. At the same time, I remain receptive to transformative processes such as combining three-dimensional (3D) printed lines and lace stiffener to push the boundaries of what thread can do. By combining manual craftsmanship with technology materialized as …

Autoethnography As Self-Portrait: An Autoethnographic Analysis Of Trauma-Sensemaking Through Art, Kally Werning

All Theses

This project thesis is centered around coping with early onset childhood trauma through an autoethnography of narrative and art creation. The goal of this project is to understand more deeply how the art making process synthesizes or disrupts trauma sense-making through the introspective lens of the artist as scholar. The project consists of an interactive art exhibit and this written scholarly analysis of the creation and display of this exhibit. This includes an introduction to my life as a trauma survivor and Greek-American woman, informed by communication scholarship and other relevant fields regarding narrative theory, Greek history, religious and trauma …

Refigured: Separations In Portraiture, Caroline Myers

All Theses

Utilizing traditional painting techniques embedded with digital syntaxes, Refigured: Separations in Portraiture, serves as a catalog of my experiences with communication in a hyperconnected world. Processing illegible information caused by my hearing loss informs the process of imposing similar boundaries within my paintings. Like a technical glitch, these obstructions create an illegible visual experience, with evidence of my process remaining as a clue for the viewer’s understanding of the image.

Though personal in nature, I expand from my experience with auditory communication to employ pertinent explorations into the sustained unpredictability of today’s ever-expanding medium that is technology. My paintings …

An Investigation Of How Lighting And Rendering Technology Affects Filmmaking Relative To Arnold’S Transition To A Gpu-Based Path-Tracer, Mohammad Saffar

All Theses

Computer Graphic (CGI) technology enables artists to explore a broad spectrum of

approaches and styles, from photorealistic to abstract, expanding the boundaries of traditional aesthetic choices.

Recent years have witnessed of 3D-CGI production shift towards greater physical fidelity driven by technological developments as well as consumer demand for realistic visuals; this trend can be found across various creative fields like film, video games, and virtual reality experiences with high-quality textures, lighting, rendering, and physics simulations providing enhanced levels of immersion for users.

Arnold is one of the famous rendering engines assisting artists to be more creative while producing photorealistic images. …

Procedural City Generation With Combined Architectures For Real-Time Visualization, Griffin Poyck

All Theses

The work and research of this paper sought to build upon traditional city generation and simulation in creating a tool that both realistically simulates cities and their prominent features and also creates aesthetic and artistically rich cities using assets that combine several contemporary or near contemporary architectural styles. The major city features simulated are the surrounding terrain, road networks, individual buildings, and building placement. The tools used to both create and integrate these features were created in Houdini with Unreal Engine 5 as the intended final destination. This research was influenced by the city, town, and road networking of Ghost …

Shade, Jonathan Bolton

All Theses

SHADE is an exhibition of graphite pencil drawings that place viewers on the precarious edge of meaning. Techniques of representational drawing such as form and perspective vaguely allude to latent, traceable narratives, then destabilize the viewer’s search with confounding two-dimensional spaces, and loosely defined forms. Small, mundane scenes such as campsites, diners, and bars, are enveloped or obscured by dense, graphite expanses of skin-like surfaces. These elements destabilize viewers’ convenient categorizations of darkness, fog, or space. The identifiable scenes have reduced contexts: facial expressions, interior décor, and landscape features. These are obscured or withheld to reduce visual justifications for the …

Nepantla: The Space In-Between, Samantha Shamard

All Theses

The word Nepantla is from the Mesoamerican Nahuatl language and is used by theorist Gloria Anzaldúa to describe a space of mixed, and borderland identity. Nepantla: the space in-between creates a physical manifestation of my experience as a mixed Latina woman raised in American suburban culture. This series is made up of ceramic objects on wall-mounted altars made of wood panels adorned with wallpaper and paint. The surfaces utilize visual references and color schemes from 90s girls’ bedrooms and Mexican pop-culture. Ceramic bones and cacti mounted onto the altar forms are all made through molded ceramic processes, which for me …

To Be A Cloud, Huan Laplante

All Theses

The intersections between Buddhism, queerness, and art making support one another in their power to unveil the impermanent nature of the self. My work rests at these moments, taking refuge in the ability to simultaneously release and rebuild a sense of self that exists beyond the boundaries of individualism. To Be a Cloud documents my journey of looking into the origins of the self and reflecting upon the transience of body and mind. Utilizing a broad range of sensuous materials such as textiles, handmade paper, and charcoal, paired with the repetitive motions of stitching, tearing, and mark-making cultivate a rhythmic …

Aiii Sài Gòn Hông?, Jackie Ta, Ngoc Uyen Phuong Ta

All Theses

“Aiii Sài Gòn Hông?”

In Saigon, “Ai… hông?” is a phrase that street vendors often shout to advertise what they sell for the day. This body of work, “Aiii Sài Gòn Hông?” (Translates: “Saigon, anyone?”) invites the audience to take a glimpse into the vivid everyday life in contemporary Vietnam through a perspective of a Saigon local. Utilizing the modalities of painting and sculpture, I collect, accumulate and organize parts of the streets and marketplace by manipulating and amplifying certain key visual elements. The goal of the work is to reconstruct an experiential space that speaks not only to the …

A Comparative Study Of Physical Cinematography That Influences Layouts In Animated Production, Daniel C. Hudson

All Theses

What makes good cinematography? There are many examples of cinematogra- phy that stand out in the minds of viewers, yet many cant exactly say with certainty why these shots are considered great. Is it because they convey the visual and emo- tional content of their stories successfully, the technical brilliance of the frame, or both? Whether realistic or exaggerated, the range of cinematography tools and tech- niques are proof that creativity and an eye for detail are the most important elements in great cinematography. Cinematography includes composition, movement, lighting, and other visual information within the frame. This is true in …

The Mvohc Project, Brooke Day

All Theses

ABSTRACT

A Mvohc is a Morphic Vessel of Human Consciousness. The Mvohc Project traverses' theories of spatial identity in tandem with creative world-building as a method for examining the intricacies of the human condition and reimagining reality. My creations are designed to promote autonomy over the contemporary world's ever-evolving societal complexities to empower individuals, foster imagination and communication, and create space for positive change. This body of work incorporates fleshy biomorphic sculptures inspired by science fiction, deep-sea marine life, and the human body. The abject creatures are partnered with constructed audio-scapes that encompass the frenzy of an overarching internal monologue, …

Artificial Kingdoms, Lindsey Elsey

All Theses

Fairy or folk tales and fantasy appear to be innocuous means of entertainment in contemporary society. Often relegated as pap for children, this view belies the gruesome origins, cultural significance, and means of personal expression and identity that is afforded to the author and reader/audience through the construction of fantasies. Through the creation of environments and experiences that center on porcelain vessels and sculpture, I explore the expression of uncomfortable desires and situations in the guise of fantasy. In some instances folk and fairy tales act as a means of escapism; an expression of desire for the fleeting and the …

Painting With Turbulence, Chuqiao Wang

All Theses

Inspired by a study that identified a strong similarity between Vincent van Gogh's and Jackson Pollock's painting techniques, this thesis explores the interplay between science and art, specifically the unpredictable behaviors in turbulent flows and aesthetic concepts in painting. It utilizes data from a GPU-based air flow simulation, and presents a framework for artists to visualize the chaotic property changes in turbulent flows and create paintings with turbulence data. While the creation of individual brushstrokes is procedural and driven by simulation, artists are able to exercise their aesthetic judgments at various stages during a painting creation. A short animation demonstrates …

What Adds Up To Being: The Work Of Tanna Burchinal, Tanna L. Burchinal

All Theses

My practice takes form around embodied experience. I affect signifiers of the human body within the ordered grid, the scientific text, and the logic of the machine, to highlight the interdependencies of physical bodies and those social constructs that produce and influence identity. We are a part of these constructs that both extend and limit; we are enacting and interacting with them. I do not aim to eradicate these structures of power (without them, our identities are in chaos). Instead, I point out the pitfalls of these constructs that are perceived as unchanging, by making interaction and experience integral to …

Sustenance, Brenton Pafford

All Theses

Utilizing the ceramic process I create objects that facilitate experiences in the domestic space. Developing sculptural elements that evoke memory traces, and in heightening the everyday to an aesthetic, I place value on the overlooked, under-thought items that sustain existence. 'It is the realm of these submerged memory-traces that creative art moves, bringing them into the orbit of everyday life and making them available to the experience of others by formalizing and projecting them onto elements of the familiar world which can receive and transmit them.' - Rawson The objects I created for this exhibition are rooted in memory traces, …

Liminal, Nina Kawar

All Theses

Throughout life everyone experiences both physical and psychological pains and adversities. In time, the body, mind and spirit are capable of healing. It is within this liminal space between infliction and renewal that the self endures an elusive process that is part of the human condition. Within my installation I have constructed a metaphor for the physical and psychological stages of healing through form, materials, color and process. The spatial environment evokes the literal and metaphorical notion of restoration through a visual, olfactory and physical experience. As the viewer navigates the space, it is the fragmentation and suggestion of form …

Invisible Labor And The Preservation Of Dignity, Laken Bridges

All Theses

My art seeks to question the social value of labor. Throughout history, labor hierarchies influenced by social class and economic stigmas have informed how laborers are viewed in the United States. Physical jobs such as menial and domestic work are a common form of invisible labor that experience debasement and stereotyping. In my art, I use labor-based and ordinary objects as a metaphor for the worker, linking the value or disposability of the object to the societal value of labor. This critique of labor is enhanced by the manipulation of text, by the formal tools of scale and perspective, and …

Popular American News Media Explained Through Visual Arts: Using Drawing As A Tool For Humorous And Obligatory Cultural Critique, Joel Murray

All Theses

Through my drawings, I focus on jostling the passive American viewer out of her/his complacent acceptance of the images delivered by popular media outlets. Using humor as a multi-functional tool, I combine and reinterpret recognizable media artifacts to comment on the content that makes up American culture. This body of work is a cultural critique, pitting the ridiculous and superficial entertainment we (Americans) so easily ingest against current and crucial moments in time (i.e: political protests, violence, death, etc). Often times, the current media landscape is saturated with fast-cycling images and stories that do not promote careful contemplation. Instead, these …

Getting Sandy: Creating Collapsing Sand Effects For An Ode To Love, Pisut Wisessing

All Theses

This thesis presents an artistic approach of creating collapsing sand effects in Brown Bag Films' animated short, An Ode To Love, directed by Matthew Darragh. A combination of rigid body simulation and fluid simulation tools, which are available in Houdini 3D animation software version 13, was used to successfully complete the task. A detailed design and implementation process to achieve the effects is documented in this work.

Long-Term Multi-Dimensional Interactive Time-Lapse Photography Using Microsoft Kinect, Daniel Mccoy

All Theses

In this thesis, a method is presented for the capture and interactive presentation of long-term multi-dimensional time-lapse photography. Time-lapse capture is commonly used for the observation based study of relatively long term phenomena such as plant growth and weather patterns. In terms of filmic devices, the visual time compression effect is complementary to slow motion and is nearly as prevalent. In this project, commonly available camera and computer equipment is used to capture images autonomously with minimal system supervision. A set of images is established, using long term, short interval continuous capture at a fixed position. Results are presented demonstrating …

Efficient Control Of Assets In A Modern Production Pipeline, Timothy Curtis

All Theses

Managing large collections of assets created in today's CG productions is no easy task. This thesis examines basic production hierarchies and identifies problems that arise without proper workflow and asset control. The possibility of hundreds of assets being created in several workflows each week creates the potential for extraordinary time waste and user error without a system to track and manage the files being produced. It is becoming increasingly necessary to utilize methods during production that enforce naming and storage standards to prevent catastrophic data loss. This thesis presents an implementation of a customized database used to track all of …