AAMT Program
Applied Arts & Media Technology
By taking AAMT classes at KVCC, you are starting your journey to learn how to illustrate, design, and animate within professional workflows and pipelines.
Note: While these pages are focused on being part of a fully-animated show/film, these concepts still apply to visual effects used in most modern movies, as well as video game creation and even modern product design.
AAMT 173 - Storyboarding
Explore the foundations of how to translate a story idea to a visually animated scene.
AAMT 132 - Character Design
Discover how to populate your story with likable characters and a believable world.
AAMT 111 - 2D Animation
Explore the process of putting your ideas into an actual 2D-Animation workflow.
AAMT 131 - 3D Animation
Find out how to translate your ideas into a working 3D-Animation pipeline.
AAMT & Animation Pipelines
Courses in KVCC's AAMT program are geared to prepare you for working in professional workflows and introduce you to the logic of real animation pipelines.
Pipeline Origins
The Animation Pipeline is a series of tried-and-true, industry-approved steps to create a piece of animation. Some of the starting steps have overlap with story-writing, because most animations are meant to tell a story.
The first animation pipelines started way back in the early 1900’s, with fully hand-drawn 2D animation. Then pixar broke ground with Toy Story, creating the first 3D animation pipeline.
Since then, we’ve had two major versions of the pipeline, one for 2D and one for 3D.
Until very recently, all animation pipelines were extremely linear. That is, each step in the pipeline generally required the previous step to be completely done, because any additional changes or tweaks would often involve redoing work in the later steps.
In extreme scenarios, any changes and tweaks might entirely invalidate all work done in later steps, making those artists have to start over from scratch.
Modern Pipelines
As of the past few years, developments in methods and technology have allowed animation pipelines to become much more flexible. This is particularly applicable to 3D pipelines, but 2D pipelines have seen some benefits as well.
By “flexible”, we mean that pipleine steps are no longer as linear as they used to be. It’s easier to make changes and adjustments to any step of the pipeline, at any point.
Due to this flexibility, more often than not, a majority of modern pipelines tend to be 3D. But 2D animation pipelines do exist, such as for the TV show Bluey. In particular, Bluey is a good example of a very flexible 2D animation pipeline.
Evolution of 2D Animation Pipelines
Evolution of 3D Animation Pipelines
