Institute of Art Design + Technology Dún Laoghaire
Ireland’s campus for the Creative Industries

Chris McConnon Espinola 

BA [Hons] Animation

Chris enjoys designing environments and seeing how the characters interact with or exist in the world around them. Developing an environment or a world through researching real-life landscapes is what lead to most of the imagery in his film, as it was based on the symbiotic relationship between termites and their mound. With this project He tried to steer more toward a visual collective of images and create some kind of narrative with those, rather than make up a story for the images to exist with, which was a bit of a challenge, but kept the film flexible and developing all the time.

Final Year Film

My final year film was inspired by termites and the symbiotic relationship they have with their environment, specifically the mounds they build. The mounds function almost like organs themselves, acting as a pair of lungs powered by temperature changes that move air in and out of its chambers to provide the termites with air. The way termites interact with each other and work together to support the colony and build their environment implies that the mound relies on them, just as they rely on the mound. These thoughts developed into my film, exploring what a living environment dependant on its inhabitants.


An Analysis of the use of Lighting as an Emotional and Narrative Tool in 2D Animated Film

My thesis is about the use of lighting in 2D animated films, and the development of digital technology that allowed lighting to be used in different ways. Lighting in animation has many fundamental uses and enhances emotive as well as narrative qualities because of its flexibility to be crafted and designed for any scene. The thesis explores scenes of emotional and narrative importance in films and analysis how the lighting heightened the emotion and narrative storytelling in its delivery to the audience through the use of design principals such as colour, framing, shape, contrast and exaggeration. Lighting in 2D animation is specifically interesting because it’s not bound to physics as it only exists in a 2D space, and can be manipulated by the animator in any way. As well, the leap from pre-digital to digital technology allowed for lighting to be taken to new extremes for storytelling within animation.