Animation club fosters creative collaboration

By Willow Symonds
Staff Writer

When renaming their club last semester, the Washtenaw Animators Initiative – formerly known as Animators Anonymous – began with creating the abbreviation: WAI, pronounced ‘why.’

“If anyone wants to understand what our club is for, then they can ask WHY,” club President Amari Anest joked.

In their Feb. 2 meeting, WAI hosted a show-and-tell. Attendees could discuss their own project or someone else’s creation, as long as it included animation or was “animation-adjacent,” in Anest’s words.

“People forget how varied animation is as a medium,” Anest said. “People who might not think they’re super into animation might be surprised.”

For example, WAI member Stefon Stubbs majors in social work at EMU, but he found a way to apply his career path to a video game concept. On Feb. 2, Stubbs presented “HIGH SCORE,” accompanied by high-energy techno music. His moving slideshow ventured through a pixelated world where numbers decide one’s social status and influence.

While this may sound like a social commentary, the game’s purpose instead revolves around self-improvement.

Main character Fibonacci starts at level one (“the most common social class”) and players navigate her life from there. However, she suffers from anxiety, especially over her future. While players might not eradicate her disorder fully, they can learn ways to manage her symptoms and gain life skills. Doing so helps them level up and reach their chosen goal, whether that’s becoming a CEO or going to the moon.

Many details still need to be processed, but Stubbs wants to incorporate other media into the game, such as podcast snippets and book passages to teach people valuable skills applicable to real life. He isn’t sure if he would record this podcast or write these books himself, but he has many references for existing self-help media.

Another decision Stubbs set in concrete is HIGH SCORE’s animation style: 3-D pixelated with a futuristic Japanese aesthetic. Since he has “limited qualifications in animation,” as he told The Voice, he chose this art form because it’s “simplistic without all the geometry and [he] just really likes how it looks, especially on a PC.”

In the feedback section of his presentation, Stubbs mentioned a non-playable character called Icarus, who’d climbed to the social ladder’s highest rung: level 10. When Icarus tried to reach the moon without the proper skillset, he fell back to level one, becoming “disabled” and stuck just above the deadly level zero.

Anest pointed out how using a physical disability as in-game punishment could be insensitive to disabled players. “Like all things self-help,” she advised, “you need to be really careful about what information you’re putting out there.”

Though Stubbs thought of Icarus’ plummet as a “sports injury” and didn’t mean to associate it with disabilities, he still “respects [Anest] for calling that out.” This is one reason why Stubbs attends WAI meetings – not just because EMU has no animation club, but also since WAI’s officers and members are “really good to bounce ideas off of.”

Club secretary Nelson Portis complimented HIGH SCORE’s multimedia aspect, noting how this will attract different types of people.

Portis himself is a 3-D animation major, but his main show-and-tell on Feb. 2 involved a comic book pitch. A collage of 2-D supervillains demonstrated the concept’s art style, and once he explained the universe’s main idea, he scrolled down to his notes.

He “loves writing and creating narrative structures,” made evident in his expansive world-building Google Doc. A lot of what he creates is meta, as his storytelling and world-building refer to itself by the genre’s conventions and cliches. This comic series, currently named the D.o.t.W (Destroyers of the World), shows themes of anti-establishmentism through an alternate America.

Club attendees laughed at his jokes and suggested character ideas – if the teenage supervillains are this world’s equivalent to notorious rappers, then would the superheroes be based on K-pop idols? Or would these “superpowered boy bands” just be villains committing crimes with hardcore training and excellent choreography?

After the club meeting, one member approached Portis and told him that, even though the comics technically don’t exist yet, they still want to draw fan art of the characters. These characters include a dead-party-girl-turned-possible-devil’s-apprentice, Superman if he were a Michigander, and the Surf Nazis, the latter of which he named after an ‘80s C-grade horror movie.

As a first time club president – and a first time club member, period – Amari Anest has learned to manage not just WAI’s meetings, but also how to keep the club’s momentum rolling—even if said momentum moves at an inconsistent speed.

Member participation has gone up and down already this semester, according to Anest. Welcome Day attracted many new members, but snowfall the next week lowered attendance significantly. On Feb. 2, six people stayed consistently throughout the meeting, with a few others popping in and out.

Hopefully starting this month, Anest and the club’s officers will “try and push more advertising, like making posters, doing fundraisers, and just being out on campus. Word of mouth last semester was super effective, especially in the animation classes.”

WAI spent much of the pandemic having movie nights on the ANIFams Discord server, which is an online group for all animation majors at WCC. Even after switching meetings to in-person this school year, the club uses the Discord to communicate and post announcements, such as explaining meeting plans like the show-and-tell.

“Trying to get speakers to talk to us is a bit of an uphill battle,” Anest said. “I want to try and do some college visits, but I want people in the club to be the ones telling us where we go. It’s a bit hard for me to say, ‘We’re gonna do XYZ thing,’ because to me the most important thing is, what do the members want?”

Their overall goal is to recruit more creatives, whether they’re animators like Portis or non-animators like Stubbs.

“The club has a bend toward creative students, just because animation as a field is such a creative thing,” Anest said. “People don’t think of it as creative, but coding is art in a lot of ways because you’re building something new.”

Students can attend WAI meetings every Thursday from 3:30-6 p.m. in room GM107.

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