Animals have enjoyed a prominent place in art for as long as humans have been creating it, beginning with the caves in Lascaux. Along the way they have figured prominently in myths fables and allegories, fulfilling symbolic roles in a wealth of picture books, and appeared as frequent players in visual metaphors employed by editorial illustrators. This course will provide opportunities for students to work within a variety of illustration genres, finding their own approach to working with representations of animal life. There will be in-depth exploration of creature anthropomorphism and its uses- from social and political satire to its capabilities in a wide range of storytelling methods. From JJ Granville to Spiegelman's Maus, to children's book greats like Richard Scarry and Arthur Geisert, the human-animal/animal-human is an enduring motif that will continue to be reinvented and expanded upon. Students will have the ability to channel projects and assignments towards formats of their choosing - including painting and other gallery-based practices, children's publishing, artist books, comics and zines.

This course fulfills the Illustration Concepts Elective requirement for Illustration Students.

Elective

This course is a short introduction to the use of game engines for the production of realistic interactive environments-- whether for architecture, industrial design, VR, or animation. The class is intended for people who are already comfortable with 3D modeling and texturing and will cover the basics of scene creation, modeling, the particular requirements of PBR texturing, animation, and simple interactivity through the use of blueprints. Topics will include basic setup; import of 3D assets, including materials, animations, polygonal models, and custom hit-detection meshes; setup of input methods, lighting, sky-boxes, and atmospherics; and output to various devices. Professional workflow considerations and naming conventions will be covered, as well as an overview of useful third-party software for modeling and texturing.

Students must register for workshops during the registration period and add/drop regardless of start date of class.

Elective

This course is a short introduction to the use of game engines for the production of realistic interactive environments-- whether for architecture, industrial design, VR, or animation. The class is intended for people who are already comfortable with 3D modeling and texturing and will cover the basics of scene creation, modeling, the particular requirements of PBR texturing, animation, and simple interactivity through the use of blueprints. Topics will include basic setup; import of 3D assets, including materials, animations, polygonal models, and custom hit-detection meshes; setup of input methods, lighting, sky-boxes, and atmospherics; and output to various devices. Professional workflow considerations and naming conventions will be covered, as well as an overview of useful third-party software for modeling and texturing.

Students must register for workshops during the registration period and add/drop regardless of start date of class.

Elective

This hands-on course will prepare Seniors for life after RISD and the start of their professional careers. With a focus on discovering and articulating each individual's personal goals in connection with students’ selected senior studio (Interior Fabrics, Fine Art Textiles, Apparel Fabrics), students will develop strategies to put them on course towards a fulfilling, sustainable and growth-oriented career. Students will be engaged with many of the concerns a practicing designer faces, financial, social, legal and other-wise as they navigate the various industries they derive their livelihood from. A primary concern of the course will be developing skills and materials that students can use in the pursuit of opportunities, including design or art portfolio, design briefs, grants and residency applications, work and process documentation and archiving, and website development. Additionally, guest speakers and Textile alumni will provide students access to experts in relevant fields.

Developing interactive video installations, non linear visual experiences, immersive environments, VJ performance systems, and experimental tools require a very different approach than more traditional linear film and video forms.

This class aims to demystify the practice of programming, equip students with problem solving skills and introduce different approaches for programming media tools. Students will learn about a variety of different techniques for generating visual imagery. This includes creating real time 3D environments, texturing, using pixel based math, instancing, and creating vector designs. Students will also learn about a variety of different projection mapping techniques, including 3D environmental scanning, 3D mapping, and corner pinning. The class will also cover the integration of peripheral sensors like LiDAR scanners, hand scanners, cameras, midi controllers and Arduinos.

Open to non-majors; please contact fav@risd.edu to register.

Elective

Okay, you have an idea! What do you do with it? We'll take you through the steps: from writing a logline, developing a pitch deck, pitching and selling. Through lectures, demos, discussions, and weekly assignments, students will develop a hands-on understanding of professional elements of pitching your idea in a professional, industry context, learning from a renowned leader in the field.

Please contact fav@risd.edu for permission to register.

Elective

This course offers an intensive exploration of sustainability in design through cross-disciplinary case studies, critical discourse, and reflective studio practice. Open to juniors, seniors, and graduate students from all majors, it invites participants to bring in-progress or prior studio work as the foundation for inquiry. Rather than initiating new work, students will reframe and develop existing projects through lenses of ecological literacy, systems thinking, and environmental humanities. Emphasis will be placed on developing language, grounding work in theory, and situating practice within broader cultural, political, and ecological contexts. Students will also explore pathways for design entrepreneurship, systems scalability, and potential product development within existing frameworks.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $150.00

Elective

This is a hands-on, project-based introduction to computers and digital multimedia for artists. The course is designed to be an ongoing discussion on art, design and personal work informed by digital images, sound, video, animation, interactive multimedia, and the Internet.

Elective

This course is a study of the theories and methods of character design as applied to narrative forms. This class asks students to push beyond stereotypical designs to develop two-dimensional characters that are both personally and culturally resonant and imaginative. Particular emphasis is placed on the expressive power of abstract forms and color. Through exploring individual perceptions of good and evil, success and failure, as well as beauty and ugliness, students create characters that are highly original. Research, thorough craftsmanship, and sophisticated design are stressed.

Please contact fav@risd.edu for permission to register.

Elective

This course is a study of the theories and methods of character design as applied to narrative forms. This class asks students to push beyond stereotypical designs to develop two-dimensional characters that are both personally and culturally resonant and imaginative. Particular emphasis is placed on the expressive power of abstract forms and color. Through exploring individual perceptions of good and evil, success and failure, as well as beauty and ugliness, students create characters that are highly original. Research, thorough craftsmanship, and sophisticated design are stressed.

Please contact fav@risd.edu for permission to register.

Elective

Experimental Filmmaking has as much in common with song and sculpture as it does with cinema, and stresses process over script. The course is designed as a hands-on production experience where visual and audial ideas can be tested, combined, discarded, manipulated, investigated. Emphasis is placed on the unique properties of 16mm film as aesthetic material, as well as on the time-based conceptual potential of digital media. The course includes a brief overview of the techniques, theory, language, and history of Experimental Cinema.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $100.00

Please contact fav@risd.edu for permission to register.

Elective

Art/Archives/AI examines AI not as a neutral tool but as a system shaped by labor and histories of extraction. In this studio-seminar hybrid, students move from archives to “handmade datasets,” investigating how collections are assembled and classified and how counter-archives respond to erasure. Through hands-on experimentation with models, they approach archival gaps as sites of speculation and intervention, asking what has been lost, what tales are incomputable, and what narratives might be reconstituted or refigured.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $250.00

This course is open to non-major Senior or Graduate Students. Please contact the instructor for permission to register.

Elective

Thousands of years ago, in the highlands of Peru, indigenous farmers developed an amazing plant that provided high protein yet needed very little energy to cook – it was the nuña, a bean that pops like popcorn! Now, thousands of years later, those same qualities could provide global environmental and health benefits, both reducing our fossil fuel use and our consumption of animal protein. But how can we encourage people to eat these amazing little beans?

In this studio, we will explore that very question, using human-centered design research and iterative experimentation to respectfully build on this ancient indigenous technology. Part foodways research, part food design, we will examine the challenge from top to bottom using seeds developed by the USDA to grow in non-equatorial climates. We will do everything from experimenting with how to prepare the beans to designing research-based deployment strategies and packaging, using design to help lower the barriers to environmentally-sound healthy nutrition.

If you love hands-on experimentation, are interested in design for social good and want to learn more about qualitative design research, this is the course for you!

This studio is a Reassembling Industrial Design (REID) Special Topic Studio, which meets the graduation requirement for an SEI tagged class.

Major Requirement | BFA Industrial Design

Witness trees, as designated by the National Park Service, are long-standing trees that have witnessed key events, trends, and people in history. In this joint studio/liberal arts course, students have the unique opportunity to study and work with a fallen witness tree, shipped to RISD from a national historic site. The course will involve three components:

1) a field trip to the tree's site at the beginning of the semester

2) classroom-based exploration of American history, memory, landscape, and material culture

3) studio-based building of a series of objects from the tree's wood, in response to both the site and students' classroom study

Overall, the course will explore both how material artifacts shape historical understanding and how historical knowledge can create meaningful design.

This is a co-requisite course. Enrollment includes both FD 2451 and HPSS S732. Students will receive 3 studio/non-major studio elective credits and 3 Liberal Arts elective credits, for a total of 6 credits.

This course is open to junior, senior, fifth-year, and graduate students. Contact the instructor for permission to register.

Elective

Lighting for the Moving Image is a hands-on workshop in lighting for film and video. Students are exposed to a broad range of equipment and techniques while they explore the overriding concept of light as an essential narrative element in motion picture. Workshops and discussions focus on the emotional impact of lighting as it pertains to a given story. Class time is divided between film screenings, one-day workshops on specific techniques, and an extended in-class group project in which students present light as the key narrative element.

Estimated Materials Cost: $100.00

Please contact fav@risd.edu for permission to register.

Elective

Color key artists must have the ability to take an audience on a thrilling roller coaster ride that they came for. This course is for artists interested in the intersection between story and color for cinema. The most critical skill a color key artist needs is taking a story and quickly roughing out emotional story beats. Students will explore the fundamentals of color and light and how they are used in filmmaking to tell a compelling narrative. Assignments will address visual storytelling principles to craft colorscripts, color keys, and emotional story beat paintings, all of which are needed in a 2D or 3D animation production. The class will go through the processes of using color theory and lighting techniques to create powerful and emotional statements for film. Though this course is focused on animation, these lessons can apply for any story-driven project including live-action, video games, children's books, graphic novels, etc.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $0.00 - $50.00

Elective

Previsualization is an essential tool in both animation and live action filmmaking. Whether it is a feature film or a commercial, a television show or a short film, it's critical that storyboarding is the first directorial step of translating the written word to the screen. In a medium where collaboration is the norm, a story artist inherently becomes one of the most influential figures in a film's production, as every department builds upon the foundation of their work. In this course, we will go over the building blocks of visual storytelling and traditional filmmaking, culminating in a final project at the end of the semester. Lectures and screenings will explore the tenets of story structure, visual language, film grammar, and performance, all of which will be integrated into weekly assignments that exercise tried and true techniques of storyboarding method. The lessons in this course will give you a firm understanding of the art of storyboarding as it applies to the film and animation industry, and also a greater understanding of how to visually communicate with a level of clarity that you had not known before.

Elective

Evolution is the process by which living organisms change over generations of time. This course examines how evolution occurs through natural selection, mutation, and genetic drift, beginning with the search for the origin of species (speciation) by artist-naturalists Charles Darwin, Alfred Wallace, and Henry Bates. Their observations of animal diversity (species variation, island geography, and mimicry) provided evidence for common descent within the animal kingdom, and led to the development of the theory of evolution by natural selection. Studies of the fossil record paleontology yielded more evidence. Eventually, the genetic basis of evolution was explained by Gregor Mendel's discovery of heritable traits, later named genes. Today, studies of evolution continue on a molecular scale with DNA and RNA (genomics) and proteins (protenomics). Students will be graded based upon responses to study questions, participation during class discussion, performance on two written exams and a project on scientific visualization.

Elective

Transparent Matter is a hands-on studio focused on materials and processes that engage states of transparency and light. Specifically, this course invites students to engage in experiments that combine glass, light, kinetic movement and physical/virtual space. Collaborative work practices, material agency, video sketch-booking and time-based thinking (often catalyzed through a transparent medium) will inform explorations into optical phenomenon.

The class will approach the hot shop as a location that will promote new studio processes and generate interdisciplinary thinking and making. Relationships between physical material and philosophical approach will be explored through handling glass, light, optics, lenses, and projectors. Through guided studio practice, readings, research, lectures, screenings, demos, and discussions, students will learn conceptual, technical, and performative principles. Lectures based on the use of transparency in contemporary art will contextualize various ways material and metaphor inform one another.

Estimated Materials Cost: $100.00

The course is open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior, Fifth-year Undergraduates from all disciplines across RISD. There are no pre-requisite courses required.

Elective

Students in this course become engaged with sound as a partner in the language of time-based media. Through selected screenings, readings, and concept-driven design projects, the students develop ideas they can use as design principles in planning and working with sound. In addition, students get a hands-on overview of working with sound in a contemporary production environment, focusing on microphones, field recorders, and DAW software. Students learn to be better listeners and to be aware of how sound affects their perception of the world around them, as well as becoming technically competent to execute their creative ideas.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $50.00

Please contact fav@risd.edu for permission to register.

Elective