Artist Biography
My name is Will Meagher and I am graduating senior at Endicott College earning my BFA in Graphic Design. Throughout my time at Endicott, I interned at Rusty and Ingrid Creative studio, a screenprinting shop with all original designs of the north shore, Seaside Sustainability, a non-profit protecting ocean fronts and the environment, and with the Town of Rockport’s Rights of Way Committee, creating and updating the towns trail guide from 1995 with maps made from scratch. I have enjoyed all of these experiences and have always been inspired by all different types of art. I was always drawing growing up and was also captivated by animation, which I chose to explore in my thesis. I am more comfortable with graphic design, but chose the challenge of exploring animation because I have always been inspired by the stories I grew up watching and wanted to come up with a fun narrative of my own.
Thesis Abstract
I have always been interested in animation since I was a child after growing up watching Disney and Studio Ghibli. I was captivated by all the different stories as well as the animation styles they were told through. I began researching and writing about the different types and styles of animation throughout history. After this I was ready to create my own animation. Although I am not an animation major, we have experimented with animation throughout our graphic design courses and I have taken a computer animation course here. Albeit a learning curve, my goal for this thesis was to create my own story, planned out through a storyboard, and to achieve 4 different styles of animation that change throughout the animation. The styles consist of 2D cartoon, claymation, watercolor collage, and flip book. The story is about a mad scientist creating a formula that makes animals as smart as humans. After successfully testing on a rat, it escapes and turns itself into an actual human! Then the rat man convinces the mad scientist to test on his dog. The dog and rat then work together to lock the scientist in the cage for the way he mistreated all the animals. The first style of animation is a digital 2D design. This 2D style features black outlines and bright colors which I was able to achieve with a drawing pad. The second style of animation is claymation, seen in Wallace and Gromit. This claymation features figures I designed out of clay with a wire skeleton. To create this animation, I had to set up a studio by using green poster paper as a green screen and different light sources to eliminate shadows while capturing each frame with a camera. The third style of animation is watercolor/collage as seen in The Very Hungry Caterpillar. This collage style of animation features watercolor textures with no outlines, on top of a hand painted background. The final style of animation is a flipbook. This flipbook style features traditional hand drawn frame by frame animation. I also worked on the sound design for the animation sequence.