Motion Capture and Interactivity
course: Advanced Multimedia, level 300-400
For this project, students use a Kinect motion sensor and software to create a video that responds to interaction with the audience. As an introduction to motion capture and responsive technology, students create two videos, one that will be projected and one that will appear in the silhouette of the person moving in front of the motion sensor. The two videos must have a relationship.
Pattern and Play: Animated Wallpaper
course: Advanced Multimedia, level 300-400
For this project, student are challenged to create a video loop that incorporates pattern and animation to create a digitally animated wallpaper. We projected the animations to fit a wall from floor to ceiling so it appears as wallpaper. Students were asked to think about how elements of surprise and play can be engaged in a work of art, as well as how we interact with images in our daily lives and how we can infiltrate those spaces to send a new message. What does it mean when something we thought was a still images becomes moving? What types of imagery are typical of wallpaper and what do they represent in our culture?
Short Film
course: Video Art, level: 200
For this project, students create a short film, 3-5 minutes long, in the genre of either narrative or documentary cinema but through an experimental cinematic lens.
Digital Negative / Historical Print
For this assignment, student create a digital image using DSLR’s, appropriated imagery, or digitally created graphics, transfer their image into the negative, and print it on transparency film. Students use the digitally created negative to create a cyanotype print. The content of the students’ works must address the historical cyanotype process in some way. Students are encouraged to think about Anne Atkins, architectural blueprints, what the world looked like in the mid 1800’s compared to what it is like today, etc, and are asked to how using a historical printing process could be pertinent today. This project was a collaboration between the advanced Printmaking class and the advanced Digital and Interactive Media class, and was team taught with Printmaking Professor Susanna Crum.
The Medium is the Message Project
course: Video Art, level: 200
Storytelling Project: creative podcast
course: Advanced Multimedia, level: 300 and 400
Storytelling podcasts like “This American Life,” “Serial” or “Radiolab” are powerful avenues for people to listen and learn about other humans’ experiences. Audio storytelling allows the listen- er to imagine their own visuals for people, places and events that unfold. For this project, students were asked to tell a true story with only audio.
Site Specificity and the Projected Image
course: Video Art, level: 200
Public Service Announcement
course: Advanced Multimedia, level 300-400
For this project, students create a video with animated text and imagery that will act
as a “public service announcement.” The video is then projected in public space at an organized event.
Short Film Project
For this project, students worked in groups to create videos that were be projected onto surfaces in surprising spaces around campus. Student’s video needed to create a relationship with the site on which it is projected, physically and conceptually. We did do this visually by mapping each groups video to fit on a certain element of architecture. Think about what is happening in your video and how those elements relate to the shape of the architecture. Does your video need to be very large and overwhelming or does it need to be small and intimate? What is your video saying about the site, how people interact with the site, what the social purpose of the site is? This is considered a public artwork so it important to think about “public,” as opposed to “private,” as a site as well. What is important to convey to the public? How do people interact with the piece?
The Happening: Performance Project
course: Four-Dimensional Studies, level: 100
For this project, students investigate the idea of the “Happening” in performance art. In groups of three, they create an event or a series of events, or performances, that disrupt or alter “normal” everyday life.
Abstract Video Portrait Project
course: Digital Foundations, level: 100
This project is a lesson in abstraction and is meant to help students move away from the traditional cinema format they are accustomed. For this project, students create a portrait (the story of someone or something) without ever showing the audience who or what your portrait is about.
Super 8mm film Project
course: Advanced Multimedia, level: 300-400
For this assignment, students shot their own color or Black and white films on Super 8mm cameras. The content was guided by each student’s conceptual focus.
Stop Motion Animation
course: Digital Foundations, level: 100