Updated: 5-18-08

In pursuing my Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Computer Art at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, I created the Fate of Children animation as my thesis project. It took approximately one year to complete, from concept/storyboard to final animation. It was shown at the UAF Art Gallery from April 21st through April 25th, during which time I held three public screenings of the animation at choice locations on campus. The screenings consisted of me showing the film to the audience, followed by a fifteen minute presentation detailing various aspects of its creation and a question/answer session.

When I began work on The Fate of Children, I did not understand it. I had a rough idea of what animating it would be like, perched at a computer for hours on end with a Stylus in my trembling hand. But my vision was incomplete, seen through rose colored glasses: I imagined sipping coffee late at night, listening to relaxing music, tapping my foot as I worked through frame after frame. I did not imagine guzzling coffee as if it were a lifeblood elixir, my only hope to survive another sleepless night, hundreds of frames unfinished in sketchbooks, lying like dead leaves under my feet. The work is about violence, war, and cycles of aggression: orphans left in the wake of war, only to become murderers and martyrs. War escalates until it ends, through uneasy peace or the true peace of destruction. It is not about our world, it has no time period or place, only sequential events, like the turning of another frame in the process of animation, faded line-art from the past becoming the harsh reality of the present.
The Fate of Children is a digital animation, using ideas borrowed from traditional animation techniques: background plates, character plates, the interplay between coloring and lighting. It uses newer digital methods of animating characters piece by piece, but it also uses much older methods such a rotoscoping, the process off drawing frame by frame over live action footage to achieve realistic motion. It uses three-dimensional art techniques to produce realistic camera movement through two-dimensional imagery. It is developed from my years learning digital art here at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and from my love of animation and film.
The world of this animation is without hope. But it is this hopelessness that I which to convey: disillusionment with violence and the paths it corrupts, the lives it takes.
Our own world has hope, this work is a recognition of that hope. Through recognition and feeling we understand something, and through understanding comes control: of ourselves and of our lives on this Earth.