Full Sail
How the Digital Arts & Design Curriculum Teaches Motion Graphics
Graphic design foundations and hands-on projects teach students to build motion graphics, which are used in a variety of industries like film, advertising, social media, and more.
The earliest motion graphics were used to create title and ending animations for movies, but today, motion graphics appear everywhere from TV commercials and social media posts to business explainers and beyond. At Full Sail, students in the digital arts & design curriculum learn design fundamentals, as well as animation and basic video production techniques, to explore the skills needed to create professional motion graphics.
In a nutshell, motion graphics are 2D or 3D animated designs. According to Eric Rosenfeld, Full Sail’s Digital Arts & Design Program Director, motion graphics are widely used in a variety of industries.
“[Motion graphics] aren’t just in television or film, they’re also all over social media... You might make a hundred different GIFs [with motion graphics] to go along with a single commercial for social media campaigns. Some companies also do very complex and advanced animations about their business [to create digital explainer videos]. And then of course if you go to a concert, you're seeing graphics everywhere. If you go to the airport, there's digital signage everywhere… There are animation elements to almost everything,” he says.
Full Sail’s digital arts & design classes focus on hands-on applications of motion graphics. They take a design-focused approach, with students tackling graphic design basics in their early classes and shifting to animated design and video production skills later on. The project-based courses offer ample opportunities for students to get a feel for building motion graphics using the same tools and workflows they’d encounter in the workforce. In one of the course projects, students choose a product and create storyboards, designs, and animations for a mock advertisement. They also practice making motion graphics for movies and television.
“For one of the projects, the students will develop a fictional TV show. They just have to pick a genre and a title, and then they create all the branded elements around that TV show. And then they animate the teaser trailers [using motion graphics] as well as the title animations for that TV show or movie,” Eric says.
Digital arts & design students also use professional software like Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop to build the assets they’ll be animating, as well as a combination of Adobe After Effects and Maxon Cinema 4D to animate those components. Using a variety of tools on their classroom projects gives them a glimpse of the diverse ways that motion graphics are created and used in the real world – and the many different artistic strategies they can use when they’re making a new design.
“The cool thing about the [professional] motion graphics world is every project has to look different,” says Eric. “And so sometimes you might do a purely 3D piece, sometimes you might do a flat 2D animated piece. And then sometimes you might want to bring some traditional animation that looks a little bit more cartoony and add it to those other elements in order to give a new style or a new look for your client.”
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