Newport Beach Film Festival 2009

In the middle of a dry, desolate landscape stands Tower 37: a shimmering water processing station, siphoning every last drop of water from a once pristine lake. Day in and day out the station's lone steward monitors the tower's activities, never realizing that Tower 37 is slowly destroying an entire ecosystem. But when two unexpected guests arrive, the tower's operator learns the high cost of his ignorance. 'The Incident at Tower 37' leverages the power of allegory and the beauty of computer animation to foster a debate about the ownership, use, and exhaustion of natural resources. What is not obvious from the events of the film, however, is the fact that 'Tower 37' is a result of a significant new direction in undergraduate animation education. Writer/director Chris Perry, an Assistant Professor of Media Arts & Sciences at Hampshire College, has created a sequence of courses at Hampshire that bring interdisciplinary collaboration into the animation classroom. These classes have put students from all corners of campus into the same room and given them the same assignment, namely, to produce a high-end computer animated short film. To meet this goal, working relationships need to be forged between studio artists, animators, filmmakers, composers, and computer scientists. These same relationships form the foundation of any major studio feature animation team, however, they are unfortunately rare in academia.