CTIN 499 is a course about moviemaking and media production; about gestural interface and new technologies that immerse practitioners more completely in the work of creation; about making production profoundly nonlinear, so that its elements are brought into re-entrant contact with each other. And so it’s about process: the organizational structures and the flows of effort — human and technological — that together shape media production. Film, whose own methodologies are sliding and being pushed sideways from analog to digital, will serve as an anchor for our inquiry, but the workflows that attend animation, interactive media creation, experience design, and game production are the topic no less.
Just abutting film’s imminent transformation, human-machine interface is about to slip the bonds of the mouse-based GUI’s twenty-five year monopoly. What’s next is the spatial operating environment. The SOE’s acknowledgment of the embodied, real-world nature of humans and pixels alike enables a new style of interaction: gestural, direct, as expressive as hands must be allowed to be.
In this project-centered course, then, we’ll survey present-day workflows (with frequent guest-addresses from industry domain experts) and so form an understanding of where and how and by what forces true nonlinear production is currently impeded. In parallel, student teams will undertake three comprehensive tool-building projects. Each team will focus on one particular production domain in order to (1) conceptualize and storyboard a new tool or toolset; (2) author a proof-of-concept video ‘simulation’ of the tool; and finally (3) construct a working, interactive prototype of the tool atop the g-speak SOE.
By year end, the three-project packages from the class’s teams should provide a compelling glimpse of future production workflow.
[ instructors: alex mcdowell & john underkoffler; syllabus; flower street annex location; schedule: tuesdays 6-8.45p ]