Creating an Ecosystem for Production Development and Student Growth

I approach curriculum development as an opportunity to connect courses, creative practice, and collaborative production into a larger learning experience. My special-topics courses are designed to build upon one another while remaining flexible enough for projects to move between story development, visual development, asset creation, performance, and production as their needs evolve. This approach allows students to encounter increasingly complex creative and technical challenges while developing the independence, adaptability, and collaborative skills necessary for professional practice.

From Pipeline to Ecosystem

When I began developing this sequence of special-topics courses, I imagined them as a production pipeline: projects would move from concept development through storyboarding, visual development, asset creation, performance, and eventually production. Over time, I discovered that the most valuable learning rarely followed such a predictable path. Projects moved between courses, returned for revision, revealed technical limitations, generated new ideas, and sometimes evolved into entirely different productions. What began as a pipeline became an ecosystem—one designed not simply to move projects toward completion, but to give ideas and students the time, tools, and opportunities they need to grow.

Advanced Storyboarding is structured to move students from guided practice toward independent creative decision-making. During the first half of the semester, students work from an established screenplay and character designs, allowing them to concentrate on staging, composition, acting, pacing, continuity, and cinematic storytelling. During the second half, they apply those skills to the development and boarding of an original story of their own.

Projects Across the Curriculum

Jurassic Joyride: From Concept to Production

Developed initially in Concept Development, Jurassic Joyride was selected for continued production because its scope and visual direction made it achievable within the resources available to the student team. As the project progressed through asset development and into Production Studio, earlier work was reevaluated, including rebuilding Caveboy’s 2D rig when the original version proved inadequate for the demands of production.

Uncle Bigfoot: Creative Practice as Curriculum

I developed the characters and screenplay for Uncle Bigfoot alongside students during the original-project portion of Advanced Storyboarding, sharing my work during critique and modeling the same process of revision I asked of them. The character turnarounds later became source material for 2D Rigging, where the complexity of the designs created new technical challenges and opportunities for collaborative problem solving. The project then returned to a later Advanced Storyboarding cohort, who worked from the established screenplay and characters to explore staging, performance, camera placement, and cinematic interpretation.

Kate Shelley and the Bridge of Darkness: Sustained Development Across Courses

Kate Shelley demonstrates how a project can generate increasingly sophisticated learning opportunities as it develops. Beginning with storyboards in Advanced Storyboarding, the project moved into 2D/3D Hybrid Animation for story refinement, visual development, and asset creation before becoming the foundation for character acting exercises in Character Blocking & Performance and, ultimately, Facial Performance.

Finding the Production Inside the Project

Development is not always about preserving the original idea. Sometimes the most important creative decision is recognizing which character, sequence, or concept has the greatest potential and allowing it to become something new.

Swampspiracy to The Bigfoot Getaway

Developed alongside Jurassic Joyride in Concept Development, Swampspiracy remained an active idea even after the more production-feasible Jurassic Joyride moved forward. Revisiting and revising the boards in Advanced Storyboarding as demonstrations of Storyboard Pro workflows, camera movement, and shot revision revealed that the car chase was the project’s strongest element. That discovery became the foundation for The Bigfoot Getaway, planned for visual development in 2D/3D Hybrid Animation in Spring 2027 with the goal of preparing it for future production.

Bub and Creaks Guide to Making Friends to I Scream Dodgeball!

A similar process of reassessment transformed Bub and Creak’s Guide to Making Friends, originally developed as The Monsters in My Head. Continued development revealed that the dodgeball sequence—and the characters emerging around it—offered the strongest foundation for a focused production. Those ideas were reworked into I Scream Dodgeball!, which is moving into Production Studio in Fall 2026.

Closing

The goal of this curriculum is not simply to produce finished films. It is to create sustained opportunities for students to solve increasingly complex creative problems, learn from revision, and develop the confidence to carry ambitious ideas from conception toward production.