The Digital Media Major at the University of Central Florida

I wake up, yawn, and casually step foot out of the oh-so-comfortable down blanket I am encompassing. Ten o’clock in the morning can feel like dawn when you’re a college kid off the typical eight hour schedule. I walk into the kitchen to make myself a bowl of cheerios when in steps my roommate, Annie Capps, from a hard night out. She looks tired, exhausted, and completely drained of all her lively personality; all I can do is shake my head at her, wishing I had that kind of endurance. Annie wasn’t out all night drinking or partying with friends, she was back from an eighteen hour stretch of animating, creating, modeling with an entire group of animation majors, who all have this kind of devoted stamina, that underachievers, like myself, can only dream about.

Annie Capps is an animation major through the Digital Media program at UCF. This basically means that she is training to create live animated screen plays with computer models, not dissimilar from the fun fictitious characters we all know, Nemo and Shrek.

“I’m not a concept artist, I like modeling, I like the tedious stuff” Annie confesses when showing me some of her project pieces.

Annie seems to enjoy the work that requires hours and hours of designing small pieces and parts of larger objects. She claims that her favorite thing to do thus far is modeling; for all of the non-animation majors out there, modeling is the process of creating the intricate construction of each character and prop in an animation. This process can be paralleled to the old way of making cartoons, when artists would spend hours drawing out each panel to create only one short film; now the characters are created once by a modeler, and animated separately by…well… an animator. She can do both of these processes, but she considers herself an expert in the modeling field.