“It's giving students opportunities where production companies and studios will see them online and then contact them and say, ‘We'd love to adapt this to TV or we would love to option this property and try to develop it as a film or as a studio short.’ It's happened multiple times in the past few years.”Īnd students pick up other honors too. Nationwide, the average first year to second year retention rate is 69.0.
With 81.0 of students making it past their freshman year, Ringling College of Art and Design has freshman retention rates above the national average. In the past eight years, I'd say we have over 20, maybe 30 films that have over 30 million views on YouTube. Ringling College of Art and Design Has a Better Than Average Freshman Retention Rate. “They create shorts that go onto the " target="_blank">internet and they get millions of views. “And it's at that point that students find a lot of success because they understand the whole pipeline,” said Downs, whose animation credits include the Ice Age franchise and the Oscar-nominated 2017 film, Ferdinand. Ringling students like sophomore Olivia Coucci log many hours at Ringling's Computer Animation lab. It is an art college that serves the purpose of teaching students about art and animation. As sophomores and juniors, they work more in the computer labs and then, in senior year, the entire class is devoted to making their own film. Ringling College of Art and Design is a setting in Rebeccas videos and animations.
They are learning not only how to draw the figure and how to capture movement, but also that it’s always about how to best serve the story and how to observe what's around them.”įreshman in the program start with a foundation and spend a lot of their time drawing. "What sets it apart from a lot of other places is that it’s focused on story so heavily,” he said. in Computer Animation from the college, says students are taught that computer animation is equal parts science and art. “That's what they're putting into every one of those characters so that when a shot plays, it's a hundred percent believable that that thing exists.”ĭowns, who earned a B.F.A. "To perform at that level, they have to have a deep understanding of character, body mechanics, facial expressions, just every aspect of the human being,” he said. Paul Downs, a Ringling alum and instructor at the college, says the reason why hundreds of students find success after graduating has everything to do with their rigorous education.
His graphic novel series Urban Legendz was released in 2019 and is currently being developed for TV/film. Paul Downs is a former student and instructor at Ringling.