Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1512296
26 KEYFRAME A F T E R H O U R S opposite page: Segments from Donner's comic, Mix, Mold, Fire! this page, from top left: Students roll 3D printed cylinder seals over clay to make impressions; Donner at the Seyitömer Höyük Rescue Excavation in Turkey; Students shape clay into bowls and cups; Archaeologists study Project CLAY handouts at the annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. She notes that the site director in Turkey interpreted the site as being gender inclusive due to some of the human remains found. It's also thought that some of the communal workspaces probably included family workspaces. "This helped us feel like our choice of having a young protagonist could work [because it was] grounded in the scientific findings on the site," Donner says. "But it was also really important to us that it be a strong female voice as the main character, in terms of gender representation and inclusivity." Donner's experiences with archaeology have infiltrated her own creative process in animation. She's currently developing an unannounced animation project at Nickelodeon Animation Studios and says that as she and her partner, Kyle Neswald, created "our world as it exists in the moment of the story, we started thinking about, 'How did it get this way? How did this world evolve?' We dug deeper and deeper and deeper and, before we knew it, we'd written a history." Project CLAY has become a success, partnering with Harrison's lab in Tampa to create Activity Boxes for Florida classrooms. The educational tool meets the requirements of Florida's state teaching curriculum for sixth graders. Harrison and Donner also co-authored a chapter of the 2022 academic research book, Comics and Archaeology. Donner, who teaches in the Experimental Animation program at Laguna College of Art and Design, considers Project CL AY to be her "side hustle" and "a passion project." But she admits that it has shifted her focus a little bit when it comes to what kind of animation projects she chooses to explore. While she was already thinking about educational components and responsible storytelling before she met Harrison, she says: "Any time I explore another culture, whether it's just traveling and meeting people from another culture, or in this case, looking back in time at the evolution of a culture and how that culture is expressed through its artifacts, it makes me really consider the experience of the 'other' and try to reach outside myself and understand someone else's life experience." Learn more about Project CLAY at www.usf.edu/arts-sciences/labs/ access3d/lab-projects/projectclay.aspx. – Whitney Friedlander