Your senior project is your demonstration of mastery of the topics taught in class. It is an opportunity for you to develop a project that

• Appeals to your personal interests
• Applies what you’ve learned on a much larger scale
• Is a compelling piece for your portfolio or demo reel

Scope

The project may involve any topic and media you choose, provided that it relates to the major; the general rule of thumb is that you should be able to make a sensible argument that you couldn’t have done the project before you took the Animate Arts classes. Alternatively, your project could be a tool or technology demonstration (e.g. a CS research project) rather than an artwork itself. In that case, you should be able to discuss how it would be used in making cultural artifacts and what about it is better than existing tools or technologies.

Both individual and group projects are permitted. You may also involve people from outside the major in your project. However, since you are spending two quarters on it, you should put in the equivalent work into your project of two normal 300-level courses. (Students graduating in 2006 may petition to substitute another course for their second quarter of senior project work).

Project proposal

Your project must be approved by the Animate Arts faculty before you begin. As part of this process, you will give a 10 minute in-class presentation that clearly describes:

• Your basic concept for the piece
• Why you personally find it compelling
• What kind of experience you intend for the audience/listener/player/user to have
• How it relates to the tradition: how it quotes or otherwise borrows from previous work, and how it departs from it and innovates

In addition, you should talk about how you are going to go about executing the piece:

• What are the main subtasks that will be involved?
• How long do you think it will take you to do them?
• What will be the hardest things to do?
• What are the risks involved in the project? (e.g. tasks you don’t have any experience with, software or hardware you don’t have experience with, assumptions you’re making about your ability to realistically model something, or about how the audience will react to something)

Finally, while many of you will be able to do your projects using only the studio and/or your own computers, some of you will need additional resources, such as specialized hardware or software, books or other media, performance or exhibition spaces, art materials, or the assistance of specialists outside your range of expertise. If so, you will probably be on your own for finding those resources, so your proposal presentation should address

• What additional resources you would require
• Ideas about where to find those resources, and
• An approximate budget for any resources you’d have to pay for

Your goal in this presentation is to convince the faculty and your fellow students that this is an interesting project worthy of a senior thesis, but one that is tractable given the time and resources available. You should use some kind of electronic presentation tool like PowerPoint or a web page when presenting information such as budgets or lists of tasks, or when presenting media, such as story boards.

Project planning

If you have made it this far, you have probably noticed that projects tend to take a lot longer than you anticipate. A common rule of thumb in programming is to estimate how long it “ought to take” then double it, then add some more time on top of that, and then some people double it again. Since many of you will be doing your senior projects in your senior years, you won’t have the option of running overtime and taking an incomplete. If you don’t finish the project on time, you won’t complete the adjunct major. Consequently, project planning and time management will be crucial.

Immediately after project approval, you should develop an implementation plan. We will provide you with a project planning tool for tracking tasks, subtasks, and dependencies between tasks. We want you so much as possible to break the project down into subtasks that each require less than a day to perform. Then you will use the tool to work out a schedule for the tasks to make sure that it’s tractable to do the project in the time available.

We will also ask you to work out a set of contingency plans for each of the risky aspects of the project you identified in your proposal, identifying how you will alter or scale back the project should parts of it fail. Again, this is for your protection: we want to make sure that you won’t have any unpleasant surprises going into finals week.

Check-in and status reports

Once your implementation and contingency plans are approved, the rest of the quarter will consist of working on your project and checking in with us and with your fellow students about how your work is progressing and what challenges you’re facing. We’ll compare your progress on the project to your anticipated progress and discuss what changes to the project and implementation plan need to made, when necessary. Depending on your project and implementation plan, you may also be demos or critiques of intermediate results.

Deliverables

When you complete your project, you’ll turn it in along with a short write-up. The length and content of the write-up will depend on the type of project. An art project might have a very short artist’s statement, whereas a software tool might require a user’s manual.

Final critique

At the end of the year, we will hold a senior project critique that will be attended by the Animate Arts faculty and students. As always, pizza will be provided.