
The Bachelor of Fine Arts in Digital Animation from Kennesaw State University prepares students for careers in animation and animation-related industries, or graduate school with a rigorous program in digital animation. Learn more.
Full Sail University’s degree programs give students hands-on experience that prepares them for the working world. As part of that real-world approach, students learn from course directors with industry experience. Instructors like Plinio Pinto and Kelly Wergin bring their professional perspectives to Full Sail’s game art and computer animation curriculum options.
Plinio Pinto
In Fundamentals of Art I and Fundamentals of Art II, course director Plinio Pinto teaches art fundamentals like composition, value, and core drawing skills to students studying computer animation and game art.
Plinio’s had plenty of experience using those skills in his own work: He’s a professional illustrator who has created sketch cards for the trading card company Upper Deck, he’s won awards for his portraits, and he’s completed several public art projects in Orlando.
For his work with Upper Deck, Plinio created trading card-sized illustrations of characters from TV shows, movies, and comics. He worked on cards for properties like The Walking Dead, the Hobbit movies, and Marvel and DC Comics.
“I used to do an order of 30 to 50 [sketch cards], and they are shipped out inside little packets to the entire world. So it's a really cool way of sending out your work and producing something that has market value as well as personal value,” he says.
Recently, Plinio has created public art for Orlando’s Thornton Park Main Street District. He completed a large mural for the area; he also painted murals for storm drains as part of the city’s Only Rain Down the Drain program.
“It's always nice creating things in public where people stop and take pictures and ask about it, so there's an interaction that does not happen when you're just creating work in your studio,” he says.
Plinio finds a lot of joy in the artistic process, and he encourages his students to marry their own artistic style with the skills in the curriculum.
“I usually ask my students to carry a little sketchbook with them every day and just draw anything that’s around them… especially for students going into computer animation and game art, they need to have a better understanding of the space around them. With that continuous drawing, they’ll gain that ability of seeing things in space, but they will also start developing a way of drawing that’s personal to them,” Plinio explains. “With that practice, they will start falling in love with drawing. And to me, that will then kind of ripple throughout their entire [career] in the future.”
Kelly Wergin
Kelly Wergin is the Game Art Department Chair and teaches Game Production to Full Sail students. She has multiple degrees from Full Sail, including a bachelor’s in Computer Animation and a master’s in Game Design, as well as years of experience in the video game industry. She’s passionate about fixing game assets, which comes in handy when she’s teaching.
“I just love troubleshooting, which is what I do in my current Game Production course. It's troubleshooting design, troubleshooting implementation, critiquing, and troubleshooting the art in a technical way,” Kelly shares.
Kelly got her first taste of complex troubleshooting when she worked on the game The Loneliest Artist, where she stepped in after the bulk of the game was already designed.
“My job was to pretty much clean up the artwork. Visually it was beautiful, but on the technical side of it, it was a disaster,” she laughs. “I absolutely loved cleaning all of that up and making things more efficient.”
Kelly not only teaches her students about troubleshooting, but, in the process, continues to improve her own skills.
“Troubleshooting my students' artwork is a huge learning experience,” she says. “I have to figure out how they got there, what’s gone wrong, and then how I can fix it. And that has helped me learn more about the tools and the programs [used to create video games].”
Besides her professional experience, Kelly has another secret weapon that she uses to keep her students engaged: her infectious positivity.
“If I'm excited, they're excited,” she says.