Years of work culminate tonight with the display of animation projects from graduate students at the Wexner Center.

These animations are thesis projects created by students in the Department of Design’s Digital Animation and Interactive Media (DAIM) program. The program is created to teach the most recent animation technologies.

“We are really asking the students to think critically about both how they work with the medium and how the medium works to convey more meaningful content,” said Alan Price, adviser of the program.

Joshua Fry, a student in the program, said, “It’s based around research and experimenting with digital design techniques.”

These students will be the first to graduate under the new curriculum.

“They were our first-year students when (we) revised the program,” Price said. The program was refined to familiarize students with new technologies and their emerging applications.

The projects were left to the student to determine.

“They have each done their own individualized research, their own focus of interest on how they want to work with subject matter and technology,” Price said.

Fry’s project brings sea creatures to land and weather patterns indoors.

“I was inspired by these sublime experiences driving from Bowling Green. (I am) trying to convey that experience through video animation,” he said.

Ryan Hale’s project is based on one of his relatives who is a surgeon.

“It is the viewers exploring as if they were looking through his eyes. I started with a book and adapted it to a screenplay,” he said.

Mary Twohig’s project explores childhood and the habits of the mind. Her inspiration came from memories of imaging wallpaper as mazes and other mind games.

“Sometimes the narration will disappear and that is the moment in the conversation when you quit listening and start imagining,” she said.

The projects required multiple pieces of software to complete. Programs created objects and sequenced the animations.

These projects constitute the largest undertakings each student has faced.

“It is definitely huge,” Twohig said. “We do a lot of research and examining our work process. It is not just, ‘Here is the film and you’re making it.’ It is ‘Here is the film and how it relates to all these different ideas.'”

Hale said, “I’ve spent two-and-a-half years of my life on this project. I have built everything in it. I worked 20 to 30 hours a week on top of my job. I am very happy that I made it.”

Displaying their finished products to an audience is an important part of the project for the students. Price said the medium they work with comes out of public performance.

“There was an open house where I got to show a semi-completed version of this (project),” Fry said. “It got me excited to see people’s reactions.”

Twohig expressed similar excitement for the event.

“It will be nice to show it on campus at a venue like the Wexner Center that is so well-known,” she said.

The screening will begin at 7 p.m. and is free to the public. Students will be available after for questions.