The graduate students in the Animation and Visual Effects Master of Fine Arts program in the School of Visual Arts and Design at UCF represent a range of traditionally and digitally trained artists with foundations in film, illustration, drawing, painting and sculpture.
The current project in development is an animated narrative featuring a story about a fearless young space explorer written to accompany the UCF Orchestra’s performance of the Second Movement of Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony debuting April, 2020 during UCF Celebrates the Arts at the Dr. Philip’s Center for the Performing Arts. The film features the story of a young explorer who dreams of space travel. Only after building a spaceship and living among the stars does she realize that she yearns for the comfort of her garden at home.
This exhibit displays artworks by the 13-person team that includes surreal landscapes, imagined space phenomena and foreign worlds. Included are digital prints of an array of pre-production development imagery, several proof of concept images, early production stills as well as a work-in-progress reel. These elements represent the various stages of producing a hybrid 2D-3D animated short film.
Students: Indianna Alvarez-Sanchez, Ana Beltran, Savannah Berry, Clinnie Brinson, Christina Christie, Emma Cuitino, Imani Dumas, Hannah Huffman, Ira Klages, Desiree Rangel, Nate Shrage, Damian Thorn-Hauswirth, Dillon Williams
Advisors: Jo Anne Adams, Cheryl Briggs, Darlene Hadrika, Dr. Chung Park, Dr. Stella Sung
Special thanks:
Sam Flax for donation of frames and framing services.
Klages Kreations for donation of printing services.
UCF School of Visual Arts and Design
Software Used: The Foundry Nuke, Autodesk Maya, Adobe Creative Suite, Procreate, Toon Boom Harmony, Pixologic ZBrush, Adobe Substance Painter, Solid Angle Arnold
]]>On the Brink: Wildlife Disease Epidemics
Anna Savage, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Biological Sciences
UCF Department of Biology
Wednesday, April 22, 2020 at 6:00 p.m.
Tuscawilla Country Club
1500 Winter Springs Blvd.,
Winter Springs, FL 32708
Abstract
Emerging infectious diseases are threatening wildlife populations worldwide, and the genetic, environmental, and evolutionary drivers of disease emergence remain elusive. Cold-blooded animals appear particularly vulnerable to disease outbreaks, and this may be linked to their dependence on environmental temperature for maintaining physiological processes such as immune function.
In this talk, Dr. Savage will describe some of the ecological and evolutionary drivers of disease in frogs and sea turtles, including experimental and field-based analyses. Using genetic and genomic characterization of host and pathogen populations in an ecological context, she will highlight the immune processes that are contributing to disease emergence and persistence, emphasizing similarities and differences across diverse host species.
Biography
Anna Savage, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of biology at UCF. She earned her doctorate in evolutionary biology from Cornell University in 2012. Prior to UCF, she was a molecular evolution postdoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian Institution. Her research aims to understand the evolutionary potential of natural populations to adapt to changing environments, the diversity of heritable genomic features that can lead to these adaptations, and the relationship between phenotype and genotype when adaptations occur.
She is motivated to pursue unanswered evolutionary questions and is broadly interested in research questions situated at the interface of disease ecology, population genetics, immunology, genomics and conservation biology.
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