Up and at ‘em! the 8:30Am session was Education: Learning and the Studio.  Pamela Turner, a faculty member at Virginia Commonwealth University talked about going beyond software for a studio approach to animation. She asks her students to solve problems with paint, glue, and sometimes telephone books:Phonebook Flicker by Roxanne Splitt

Shiloh T. McClean talked about ways that she has been able to give young creatives access to Australia’s digital effects and film industry. Via a call for competition, she selects 5 people each year for a six-month training program where they are placed alongside a senior person in the industry and are prepared for work in their field, like the coal miner from New South Wales who is now working in the affects industry.  All residents of New South Wales are eligible to apply to this program.

Rhythm & Hues which has over 700 employees is now partnering with colleges and universities to educate faculty about their specific pipeline. The Fac Ed program which started in 2007 is a 4-day seminar in LA where faculty get to see what R&H likes to see in a reel, and learn how to transition young people from student to professional. You can bet I’ll be signing up.

Dreamworks and Texas A&M University’s Department of Visualization partnered to create a summer industry class for students who are serious about the business of animation. For 10 weeks, 5 days a week, the students worked with Dreamworks as their “client”. Students woring in teams would be given a deadline, a storyboard, animatic and key character to start with. They had to produce a 30 second piece which had to be shown to the client for approval at the end of every step in the production pipeline.  Needless to say, the students were blown away by the tight deadline, but still managed to create very professional shorts. This is something I’d love to implement at Ramapo. Possibly with volunteers from Perception, Charlex, or Blue Sky.

I met with a networking group, Birds of a Feather, that focused on Motion Graphics where I saw a great commercial produced for Weeds created using Cinema 4D. and saw some great Aftereffects plugins demonstrated by Gil at Conoa.com

Some great Art Papers were presented; Experimental Interaction Unit was presented by by Anuradha Vikram, an art historian investigating surveillance. She covered the work of EIU artist Eric Pallos who worked with Mark Puline’s SRL group and who also was in contact with the Yes Men and E-Toy. She focused on the ideas behind bartering of personal informaiton for goods and services in this and other interactive work. Very engaging!  http://www.eiu.org/

Jurgen Scheible deomnstrated his new piece, Mobi-Spray where with an inexpensive media projector, moble phone with an accelerometer, and a laptop can be combined to create large-scale projected non-destructive graffitti. Now you KNOW I like that. Very similar to GRL’s Laser Tag, but this one has color, though a much more blunt “brush” which makes it hard for the user to create anything but fat stripes or dots.

Camille Scherrer presented her recent work, Souvenirs du Monde des Montagnes which she built with  Julien Pilet, Vincent Lepetit and Pascal Fua. It is a storybook-driven interactive installation which consists of an illustrated book, a lamp, desk and monitor. The lamp “Reads” the images on the book and then adds to them , showing on the monitor the book page in real time, with its illustration (and possibly the viewer’s hand, if it is resting on the page), and  an animation overlayed onto the illustration which further brings it to life, enacting the story.  This was  a beautiful and succesful melding of digital and analog because it happened so seamlessly. Imagine reading a novel on the couch and looking up at the television screen to see just that scene from your current page being displayed, as if your imagination were now broadcast directly to the monitor.

Tsutomu Miyashita described a touch screen built recently for the Louvre to demonstrate links in symbolism and imagery to museumgoers. The aesthetic of the interface was rich and beautifully presented, but museumgoers did not tend to engage in it long enough to understand the links between multiple paintings as semantic elements.