Bringing Materials to Life 

Story and photo by: Breanna Prince

This fall semester, junior Caroline Westfall, majoring in animation, took on stop motion animation class, ART 228.  

Growing up Westfall loved watching animation movies and storytelling through animation. She enjoys the traditional materials of physically working with things with your hands. 

“Because I haven’t done a lot with stop motion before, I wanted to take this class to learn more about the process and potentially apply what I learned in this class to my thesis at the end of my senior year,” she said.  

The idea of being able to touch materials hands-on when creating different shoots, admires Westfall.  

“I really love the feel of the materials,” she said. “Sometimes the clay wants to take you into a certain direction you don’t anticipate.”    

Coming to college, Westfall wanted her love with art and animation to tell a story. After college, she doesn’t have a set stone of what she wants to do with her career. She thought about pursuing illustration in kids books or educational magazines, advertising, and stop motion.  

“I plan on doing a jack of all trades,” she said.  

While taking the class, her favorite project she has worked on is called Chicken Knight. 

“I’ve worked with chicken night in 2d animation, so learning to use Chicken Knight with clay has been really fun and an enlightening experience,” she said.  

Outside of the stop motion animation class, she enjoyed using Chicken Knight to create more projects out of it.  

“My final project from last year where I made chicken night, I made chicken night explode, and then drown, and then get eaten by a snake, that was pretty amusing,” she said.   

While at CMU she enjoyed the collaborative experience her animation classes gave her.  

“Our professors encourage us to work on our own projects to establish what material we like working with, what style we like to work in, finishing out our production pipeline, and how quickly we can move on projects,” she said. “Now they have us work with teams, which brings its own other challenges with coordinating with people, but you can also make really cool stuff when working with partners, so that’s been really fun.” 

Here is the link to the trailer of her video game: