Animation

Opertura is the collaborative unit of self-taught artists, Aya Yamasaki (she/her) and Jason Brown (he/they). They create hand-drawn animations and related media that reference phenomena of the natural world to tell straightforward but layered stories using playful characters. Their work has screened domestically and abroad.

Jenna Caravello is a Los Angeles-based artist and assistant professor in Design | Media Arts at UCLA, working with VR, motion capture, animation, and video game platforms. Her single-channel and interactive works explore computer culture, video game logic, cartoon language, and the role of narrative in personal and digital memory.

Andrew Chesworth is a filmmaker living in Burbank, CA. He co-wrote and co-directed the Oscar-nominated animated short film One Small Step at Taiko Studios. Prior to that, he was an animator at Disney on such films as Frozen, Big Hero 6, Zootopia, Moana, and more. Andrew is also an experienced character designer and director of animated commercials. His latest independent animated short film The Brave Locomotive qualified for Oscar consideration after winning at LA Shorts Fest. Currently, Andrew is at Netflix as a character lead on an upcoming animated series.

Precipice is a multimedia miniature installation that uses rotoscope animation to critically examine how the performance of self interacts with cultural scripts of bureaucracy. The piece chronicles an interruption in the bureaucratic process which turns the viewer's attention to the individual's activity within the collective. Through my research I explore how miniature scale may be used to manipulate a viewer's experience, examine the representation of the everyday as a site for the profound and the uncanny, and introduce the potential for agency found within futile repetitive actions. In conclusion, through my culminating thesis project, I examine how these ideas converge on the stage of bureaucracy and its relationship to the topics outlined throughout the paper. Through the use of shifting scales, quotidian subject matter and repetitive actions, Precipice illustrates the alienation and derealization caused by cognitariat labor and posits the experience of bodily discomfort as a potential site for agency under these conditions.

This thesis recorded the two years works I have done in the MFA program. I explored the using of colors, forms and the meaning of making things. We can appreciate both large and small aspects of nature (both the oceans and the grains of sand), I look at design both from the overall big picture and each minute detail. I chose poster as my main medium of expression because it is the most straightforward. The main three parts of my works is the mid-term review, the library exhibition and the thesis exhibition. I made several different works to challenge the possibilities and the deepness of design. I also worked in professional design studio as GTA job, so both sides can be improved for me as a designer. In the future, I will keep developing my voice in art and design world.