School of Arts and Sciences Review Winter 2014 | Page 18

Write on Course

A Closer Look

English and computer science departments team up to
offer course that mixes creative writing and animation

By Julia Andretta, ’15

T

he fall 2013 semester brought
with it a much-anticipated new
course. Cross-listed in English and
computer science, Creative Writing Narrative and Computer Animation is a fun exploration of why arts
and sciences work so well together.
Dr. Lauren Matz and Dr. Dalton Hunkins have teamed up to expand a popular
workshop that they have offered at
events such as Girls Day for middle
school girls and SBU’s summer academic
camp for high school girls into a 15week course for Bonaventure students.
“Students who enroll in the course
should expect that by the end of the
course they will have created several
short animated films from scratch,” says
Visit us online:
www.sbu.edu/English
www.sbu.edu/ComputerScience

Matz of the English department, who is
teaching the creative writing side of the
course. “The students are learning how
to write in that special way that you
need to write to do a screenplay for an
animation film. We go over a lot of the
basic narrative techniques that are specific to writing a screenplay for cartoon
characters, and Dr. Hunkins teaches the
students how to do simple computer
programming using a program called
Alice 2.3 from Carnegie Mellon University.”
“The software that is being used for
the class is easily learned independent of
a student’s background, as demonstrated
many times by the middle school girls
who attended Bonaventure’s Girls Day
events,” says Hunkins, professor of com-

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School of Arts and Sciences Review

puter science who is teaching the animation side of the course. “The workshops at Girls Day were at most 70 minutes long, so there was not enough
time to do more than introduce the girls to the computer animation technology, and as a result their productions were mostly just demonstrations of
technique. The luxury of time allows for more focus on practices in creating
short stories intended for delivery as computer generated animations.”
Students watch several famous animated short films in order to get a feel
for the genre, as well as delve into Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as a vehicle for learning about creative narrative style.
It does not come as a surprise to either of the two professors that arts and
sciences mesh so well in courses such as this one.
“Arts and sciences have always worked really well together,” says Matz. “I
think it is probably a more recent development that we’ve been compartmentalizing those things. It seems to me that people who are good thinkers
with a lot of curiosity about the world are always integrating arts and sciences.”
Hunkins and Matz are thrilled to collaborate on this fun, creative, department-crossing course.
“I know this has been Dr. Hunkins’ dream for maybe decades – that he
would be doing something like this in conjunction with a professor from the
English department, and I think it’s a wonderful idea. I’ve enjoyed every
minute of working on it so far. It will stretch both of us as faculty members,
and that’s good – it’s really good for faculty to keep moving with things,”
says Matz.