While many students headed into Glenn G. Bartle Library Thursday night to begin studying for finals, some stopped outside of Library Tower to see animations projected on the building’s exterior.
Over 100 students gathered on the Spine at 9 p.m. to watch a collection of animations created by students taking Cinema 286F, also known as Animation 1. Using a technique known as “mapping,” the front of the Library Tower became an interactive canvas for 30-second animations by 15 students.
Using programs MadMapper and Adobe After Effects to help visualize the building as a template, the students spent three weeks developing animations that aligned with and played off of the building and its windows. Each student had to create his or her own animation by the end the semester.
The animations varied in topic, from abstract-colored geometric patterns intertwining with the windows to a series of human silhouettes scaling up and down the building. At one point, a giant wasp landed on the tower, followed by a series of books falling. The projections were accompanied by live music from student musician Ken Herman, a senior majoring in English.
The students put up posters and shared a Facebook event to draw attendees. By the time of the screening, about 100 people were spread across the Spine and around the Hapur Quad fountain to watch. Anthony Sileo, a junior majoring in psychology, said he was impressed by how precisely the animations lined up.
“I really liked how they synced up perfectly with Bartle’s windows, and you can see bright-colored shapes and objects come out of the squares on the windows,” Sileo said. “They coordinated the entire show really well.”
According to professor Ariana Gerstein, work had been conducted in previous semesters in the basement of the Fine Arts Building, so projecting onto the Library Tower presented a new challenge.
“We didn’t know if this would work,” Gerstein said. “We decided that since our normal working space is in the basement, we had to go from the lowest point to the highest point on campus. So if we were gonna do it the first time, we were going to go as high as we could possibly go.”
Moises Diaz, one of the animators and a junior majoring in history, said the project was not as hard as she thought it was going to be, and that anyone interested should try.
“I made a series of silhouettes because I’m really drawn to the simplicity of them, and I thought that the black contrasting with the white would look great,” Diaz said. “But the hardest part was putting the fade effect into the whole thing.”
Attendee Katherine Leon-Molina, a junior triple-majoring in Spanish, political science and economics, said she thought the event came at a perfect time.
“I heard about this event and I thought it would be a great way to de-stress from finals week,” Leon-Molina said. “I think we should have events like this more often, because it gets students outside and makes them spend time together and relax during this time of year.”