Point Park University's Student-Run Newspaper

Point Park Globe

Point Park University's Student-Run Newspaper

Point Park Globe

Point Park University's Student-Run Newspaper

Point Park Globe

Conservatory welcomes new professor

Pahl Hluchan works on animation, puppetry and painting. Now, he is also one of Point Park University’s newest professors.Hluchan teaches in the visual and digital arts department of the Conservatory of Performing Arts and is using his varied background to teach his students.”My goal is to make Point Park the best animation school—if not in the country, then at least in the doorway to the Midwest,” Hluchan said in an interview in his University Center office on Wednesday.As Hluchan sat behind his desk and spoke of his career, the eclectic clutter of DVDs, original artwork, plastic skeletons and a skull, and movie posters spread throughout his office reflected the variety of experiences and interests that led him to Point Park.Despite being originally from Riverside, Calif., Hluchan spent most of his life on the East Coast. His love of animation led him to study it at Rhode Island School of Design. While in school, Hluchan attended workshops led by The Jim Henson Company—the creators of “The Muppets” and the creators of the characters of “Sesame Street.” This experience sparked his interest in puppetry in addition to animation.Hluchan earned his bachelor’s degree in 1987. The late 1980s, however, were not the best time for an animator to find a job.”It was before Disney really had come back; “The Little Mermaid” hadn’t come out yet, so it was very hard for anyone who studied animation to get any work,” Hluchan said.Hluchan managed to get a job with a small production company in New Haven, Conn., called Geomatrix Productions, where he started working on motion graphics and video editing projects. Also, his work with puppetry led him to the position of artistic director for a Geomatrix children’s television show called “Puppet Parables.””No matter how creative that job became, it was still working on other people’s ideas. I wanted to be an artist and work on my own ideas,” Hluchan said.Because computer animation equipment was so expensive at the time, Hluchan started painting. He was accepted into Yale University’s esteemed Master of Fine Arts program for painting and printmaking.Hluchan taught drawing and painting classes after earning his master’s degree at Yale in 1994; however, he began to miss animation, Hluchan said.With the 1990s came improved technology at lower prices, so Hluchan was able to start combining his passions for animation and painting.”My paintings became more and more narrative; I started using characters that repeated themselves,” he said.One of these characters, the red rabbit, is found throughout Hluchan’s personal paintings and animated movies, including in the framed artwork hanging in his Point Park office.”I drew this character and I immediately had a lot of connection to him because it was based on a teddy bear that I had as a kid,” Hluchan explained.The color red represents passion and emotion, and the form of a stuffed animal gives people an “instant emotional connection to the character,” Hluchan said.According to Hluchan, people feel sympathy toward this childlike character and are willing to forgive its mistakes and bad behavior, allowing for the psychological examination of the reasons why people do what they do.Painting the red rabbit character was what got Hluchan back into animation.”The paintings started as individual, stand-alone paintings, and then they started becoming sequences, and then they became the conceptual work for my animations,” Hluchan said.In addition to working on personal paintings and animated films, Hluchan taught part-time at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and Delaware College of Art and Design. Eventually, Hluchan started Delaware College of Art and Design’s animation program, which grew to be the largest program in the college in the 14 years that he taught there.A visit to Pittsburgh with his wife from their home in Wilmington, Del., led Hluchan to his current teaching job at Point Park.”The cinema department [at Point Park] seemed really vibrant, and it sounded like really interesting people were teaching here, so on a whim I applied for a job,” he said. “I had a great time on the interview and really liked everybody, and I guess they liked me too.”

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