Hello

​

My name is Katie Lathrop, and I'm a Stop Motion Animator from Dublin, Ohio.

 

I'll be graduating with a BFA in Animation from the Savannah College of Art and Design in August of 2020.

​

Throughout my college career, Animation has been my passion. Animating and bringing life to characters in any medium is like composing music: the rhythm of your character combined with the energy of their actions can create a beautiful harmony of motion. During my initial years at school, I was pushed to either pursue 3D or 2D animation. This became very disheartening, as 3D animation felt so impersonal, and while I loved the hands on nature of 2D, I didn't feel I was being pushed enough to achieve professionalism. It was at this point that I wandered into the stop motion workshop. It was like I had been transported to another world. You could feel the passion in the air and the love in everything these students touched. I was enrolled for the introductory Stop Motion course the next quarter.

​

With the guidance of some of the kindest people you'll meet, and an inspirational professor, over the past two years I've been able to hone in on my skills of sculpting, seamstress work, mold making and silicone casting, and most of all: animating. Stop Motion lets me combine my love of animation and working directly with my hands into one medium, and I'm am so excited to pursue this career

​

​

Covid-19 and New Opportunities

​

Due to the on-spread of Covid-19 in the Winter of 2020, nearly every school across the country closed their campuses and went to an online only experience. While this is a great model for many forms of education and opens up so many possibilities for learning that were previously being overlooked, for a medium that requires a work shop to create in and equipment to shoot with, it proved a great challenge, and unfortunately fell in the middle of our senior films.

 

But stop motion people are resourceful, creative people, and as soon as we were told the semester would be online and we wouldn't have access to machinery, we bought wood. We built tables. We packed up our things from the building that had become our home and began to prepare to shoot in my very own apartment. Of course, this was devastating for us, and the lack of help from our school is unprofessional and honestly a robbery considering the amount we pay to attend, but we have poured our hearts into a film that we've been working on for half of a year, and we're going to finish. I'm excited to share the progress we make as we learn to deal with the obstacles of finishing our film at my home!

​

​