Finding Nemo and Shrek hit the top of the movie charts and have since made their way into Penn's Digital Media Design curriculum.
Considered a selective and prestigious program, DMD was first created in 1998 and is still the only program of its kind in the Ivy League.
Other programs do exist, such as the animation school at the University of Central Florida, explained Amy Calhoun, the associate director of DMD. However, Penn's program is unique in combining computer science, fine arts and communications, Calhoun said.
The application process is very selective, only accepting at most 20 students per year for a total of 80 students in the program.
Those students who apply are "really passionate about things like Web design and 3D animation and are usually the only kids who like this stuff in their high school, so in a way, they select themselves," Calhoun said.
What makes DMD students so unique is their ability to excel not only at the technical aspects of computer science, but more creative activities such as figure drawing.
Consequently, students in the DMD program "enter lots of contests and win things," Calhoun said.
College junior Joshua Gorin and DMD alumnus Neil Chatterjee took a risk when they entered a national film contest in 2001 sponsored by the video game maker Activision.
"The company was coming out with a new ninja-themed game, and as part of the promotion, they were sponsoring a film-making contest among college students," Gorin said. "The only stipulations were that entries be under three minutes long and be about ninjas."
Gorin and Chatterjee found out about the contest only 16 days before the entry due date, and so they worked quickly to put together their own ninja masterpiece. The final product awed the judges, including director John Woo -- of Face/Off, Mission Impossible 2 and Paycheck -- and producer Terence Chang.
Chatterjee, Gorin and other movie production assistants won the grand prize of $15,000.
"We split up the money democratically based on how much time and money each individual invested in the project," Gorin said. "I used my share to buy professional digital film-making equipment so I could work on more productions of my own."
Other DMD students are creating innovative projects of their own. Animations in 3D, such as Dink, feature a "group of cockroaches whose lives strangely parallel that of Penn students," according to the DMD Web site.
Dink won this year's Association of Higher Education Cable Television Administrators Award and was created with the help of a software donation from Pixar. DMD alumni Ray Forziati and Paul Kanyuk, senior Omer Baristiran and juniors Ju Hee Kwon and Jean Tsong all contributed to Dink's creation.
Catering to the needs of the students in the program, DMD has a staff of approximately 12 computer science professors, 12 fine arts professors and five professors from the Annenberg School for Communication. Each of these professors provides students with courses ranging from traditional sciences such as physics and chemistry, to more liberal arts-oriented classes such as "Film, Form and Context."
Overall, DMD students must fulfill 40 credits to graduate. The courses can be "tailored to individual interests," Calhoun said, adding while laughing that this "doesn't mean that students can get out of calculus."
With such successful endeavors at the undergraduate level, DMD students have many opportunities to continue in the field once they graduate.
For those looking to continue their studies in Philadelphia, this upcoming fall, the DMD program will be starting its own graduate school. Calhoun, however, is afraid that the program is late in its entrance into the graduate field, and so "it may not get off the ground this year, but we still have hope," she said.
Yet the graduates won't have to stop there. Calhoun praised the success of DMD students, noting that graduates have gone on to work for companies including The Cartoon Network, MTV, CBS News, HBO, the Franklin Institute and Seventeen magazine.
