The BSC Graphic Design and Communications sophomores spent the morning hanging out with Shane Balkowitsch.

Balkowitsch’s hobby is wet plate photography, a technique that is only practiced by a handful of people today. The process is difficult, expensive and antiquated, but it is still amazing to watch more than a 130 years after it has been replaced. The images are shot on glass and have an amazing, almost 3D quality to them.

Animated .gif files are the earliest forms of animation on the web. At one point nearly every website seemed to have a corny animated globe rotating to represent the World Wide Web.

The sophomore GDC students used the ancient technology to create simple animations promoting the GDC program or themselves as designers.  The assignment helps prepare them for working with other animation software, but mostly solidifies how layer arrangement works in Photoshop. Click on the thumbnails to view the animations.

2014 is the fifth year that the Graphic Design and Communications department has created stop-motion videos for Halloween. The project is meant to teach collaboration and the importance of balancing time with creativity.

Students draw images on a marker board, then photograph each frame. They have a very short window of time to work with – only about 75 minutes to generate about 300 frames. The videos are rough, but very interesting considering the limited time involved.

Click the images below to watch the videos.