Papers and hands are full of pencil dust as a student finally finishes their animation. Two hours of hard work for two seconds of fluid animation.

Students who are looking for a career in animation now have the opportunity to gain experience in Animation 1, which teaches students the basics and helps them to become better animation artists.

“What I do is creating games and music on the side,” sophomore Clemille Peters said. “So I just joined the class because I thought It’d be a cool program to get better at animating.”

This is the first year that the school is offering the animation class, and it is currently being taught by Tanner Wright, who is also an assistant football and basketball coach.

“Football takes up a lot of my time, but I think it helps having a good support system like the admins,” Wright said. “Because they know and understand that this is the first year that animation is here.” 

Mr. Wright has been able to manage his time properly and adapt to new changes and challenges that he is currently facing.

“There’s only 11 kids here, and these kids are very adaptable and we knew that this class was going to be a learning curve for everyone, me included,” Wright said. “We have different software that we’ve never used and so they’ve all rolled as best as they can.”

Currently, the students have only been working on paper animations, slowly transitioning to digital animations. Paper animation is very different from digital, it involves hand drawing each individual frame using separate pieces of paper, and after that is it traditionally inked and scanned into digital format.

“We just finished a storyboard project and we’re still doing kind of the basics,” Peters said. “I might go a little overboard when we do digital animation because I get really creative when it comes to animating stuff.”

Some students struggle with paper animating, due to it’s slow process, which is mainly because there is no copy and paste feature.

“We haven’t done anything digital yet and so the hardest part of the project has been drawing the frames over and over again,” Peters said. “Because having to draw the characters over and over again with the background has been tedious.”

Sophomore Simon Olson is part of the animation class, and has had several experiences animating in the past.

“I’ve only done stop motion and it’s been pretty good,” Olson said. “But one time I stayed up all night to complete a 6-minute stop motion about two clay guys fighting, it was a daunting task, but I was able to overcome it.”

The class is open for students who are interested in learning animation next school year, and will be continued to be taught by Mr. Wright.

“It’s a cool class but it’s relatively small and I feel like more people should join it,” Olson said. “Keep working towards your goal, think about what others might think the story is about, and whether the animation is easy to follow.”