Scott Fisher

Time: Wednesday, April 30, 6-9pm
Location: USC's Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts (RZC),
Room 201 Zemeckis Media Lab (ZML)

Featuring Spring Semester Class Projects from :
- CTIN 485L Advanced Game Development - Brinson
- CTIN 544 Experiments in Interactivity (Hoberman)
- CTIN 463 Anatomy of a Game (Hight)
- CTIN 405 Design and Technology for Mobile (Bleecker)
- CTIN 406 Sound Design for Games ­(Diamante)
- CTIN 488 Game Design Workshop (Swain/Arey/Diamante)
- CTIN 484/489 Intermediate Game Design (Brinson & Fullerton)
- CTIN 491 Advanced Game Project ( Swain)
- CTIN 492 Experimental Game Topics (Bleecker)
- CTIN 544 Experiments in Interactivity( Production 1) (Kratky)
- CTIN 542 Interactive Experience Design (Bolas)
- CTIN 590 Directed Research - Fisher

and more....

Food and Drink will be provided starting at 5:45.

***SCHEDULE below*****

Continue reading "IMD Forum for 4/30/08: IMD Project Presentations" »

Posted by Scott Fisher at 8:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Just got word that Tracy is now Associate Professor of Interactive Media with tenure.
Congratulations Tracy!!

Posted by Scott Fisher at 9:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (12)

And speaking of Professor Fullerton...check out:
"School of Thought: USC - At USC interactive media division, students make small games with big ideas." A good article on Winterbottom, the GIL, and our game curriculum on GAMETAP. Some nice words about IMD as well (but not so sure about the "thanks to the efforts of a few old virtual reality tech heads who founded the department...").

Posted by Scott Fisher at 9:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Speakers: Zied Rieke, Infinity Ward
Time: Wednesday, April 16, 6-8pm
Location: USC's Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts (RZC)
Room 201 Zemeckis Media Lab (ZML)

Overview: Infinity Ward design and philosophy.
Question and answer session discussing anything and everything related to designing and developing games and what little Zied knows about that. Confusing and rambling explanations are supplemented by in game and in-tool demonstrations.

Bio: Zied Rieke is a 10 year industry veteran and was Lead Designer on Call of Duty 1, 2 and 4. Before that he worked on Medal of Honor: Allied Assault and some stuff you hopefully have never heard of. Co-author of the Game Developer Call of Duty 4 Post-Mortem, he once visited USC to drop off his sister at a Dave Mathews concert.

Posted by Scott Fisher at 3:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Speakers: Mk Haley, Jill Smolin, and Josh Grow, SIGGRAPH 2008 committee members
Time: Wednesday, April 9, 6-8pm
Location: USC's Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts (RZC)
Room 201 Zemeckis Media Lab (ZML)

This week the CTAN 522 John C Hench Animation & Digital Arts Seminar combines forces with the CTIN 511 Interactive Media Seminar. Our visiting speakers will be three of the committee members for SIGGRAPH 2008 here in LA: Mk Haley, Jill Smolin, and Josh Grow. Jill represents the Animation Festival, Josh represents the Student Volunteer Program, and Mk represents the Interactive Installations. They will talk about the SIGGRAPH conference itself, as well as provide some examples of student submitted work, and a discussion related to how to best submit your work for consideration.

ACM SIGGRAPH's mission is to promote the generation and dissemination of information on computer graphics and interactive techniques and to foster a membership community whose core values help them to catalyze the innovation and application of computer graphics and interactive techniques. Some highlights of the annual conference are its Animation Theater and Electronic Theater presentations, where recently created CG films are played, and an installation of Emerging Technologies that showcases recent work from the crossroads of science, art, and technology and celebrates the best in creativity and innovation from the past year. Dozens of research papers are presented each year, and SIGGRAPH is widely considered the most prestigious forum for the publication of computer graphics research. In addition to the papers, there are numerous panels of industry experts set up to discuss a wide variety of topics, from computer graphics to machine interactivity to education. This year, the conference is also co-located with the 3rd annual Sandbox Videogame Symposium.

Posted by Scott Fisher at 11:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Speakers: Jonathan Strietzel and John Snoddy, Big Stage Entertainment
Time: Wednesday, April 2, 6-8pm
Location: USC's Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts (RZC)
Room 201 Zemeckis Media Lab (ZML)

Big Stage is a media company whose breakthrough technology allows users to easily create and integrate a life-like 3-D avatar of themselves into everything from famous movie scenes, TV shows and video games, to music videos, short video clips, virtual worlds, still images, user-generated content, instant messages, e-mails, social networks and more – instantly. All Big Stage content can then be shared across social networks,mobile phones, and more.

The privately held, Pasadena, Calif.-based company was founded by three tech entrepreneurs who shared a vision for a new media paradigm in which users themselves inhabited the very content which they consumed, and in which the digital fidelity of 3-D animated people -- created and controlled by average consumers -- would soon render virtual performances almost indistinguishable from original performances captured in high-resolution media.

Big Stage’s life-like avatar creation system stems from advanced stereo reconstruction technology funded by multiple government grants, including the CIA, as part of a nineyear cumulative research project at USC. Company Co-Founder Jonathan Strietzel first saw the potential for this technology while meeting with the project’s chief scientist, Doug Fidaleo, Ph.D., at USC. He then assembled Co-Founders Jon Kraft and Jon Snoddy, who each brought unique skills and perspectives to the table, and were able to craft a powerful business vision, secure funding, obtain the core technology license from USC, and hire Fidaleo to officially help bring their vision to life.

Building on the USC research, Chief Technology Officer Snoddy, Chief Scientist Fidaleo and their team were able to take the quality and accuracy of complex, expensive 3-D scanning technology previously only available to production houses and animation companies and offer it to any consumer with a digital camera through a free, fun and easy to use Internet-based platform, for wide-spread entertainment immersion.

BACKCHANNEL LOG from PRESENTATION: Download file

Posted by Scott Fisher at 4:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Speaker: Anne Bray, LA Freewaves
Time: Wednesday, March 26, 6-8pm
Location: USC's Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts (RZC)
Room 201 Zemeckis Media Lab (ZML)

HollyWould?
LA Freewaves Executive Director Anne Bray will present a preview of this year's festival and several related projects and opportunities for media art, activism and public media culture. This year's Freewaves festival is titled HollyWould and will be distributed across every screen on Hollywood Boulevard. Since 1989, LA Freewaves has been presenting biennial festivals of film, video and new media art, under the direction of Anne Bray, who founded the concept of LA Freewaves and has administered the festival for two decades. http://www.freewaves.org/

Anne has been working in the field of media arts since the mid 1970s as an administrator, artist and art teacher. As the Freewaves Executive Director, she has continued to see the organization through the technological, social and aesthetic changes of the 1990s to the present, exploring innovative venues, curatorial models and distribution strategies ranging from traditional screenings to online distribution to public art venues. In addition to presenting on LA Freewaves, Anne teaches in the IML's Honors in Multimedia Scholarship program and the public art program at Claremont Graduate University.

***Special Bonus Presentation: Proceeding Ann's talk, first year IMD MFA student, Taiyoung RYU will give an encore presentation of his GDC '08 talk on "Game Design based on Micro-transactions in Online Games". ***

Posted by Scott Fisher at 4:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Presenters: 2nd Year MFA students in CTIN 542, 544, 548
Time: Wednesday, March 12, 6pm-8pm
Location: USC's Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts (RZC),
Room 201 Zemeckis Media Lab (ZML)

Title: "Flying Off The Handle - CTIN 542, 544, 548 Second Year MFA Combined One-Week Interactive Design Project, Spring 2008"

Instructors/Jurors: Mark Bolas, Perry Hoberman, Michael Naimark, Peggy Weil

Project Description:
"In the center of the table in front of you is a pile of handles, knobs and pulls. These objects, specifically shaped for the human hand, can be attached to other objects or surfaces, allowing them to be pushed, pulled, grabbed, closed, opened, turned, twisted, switched, lifted, shifted, operated, poured, tossed, etc. Handles can be attached to either movable and immobile objects. Handles can have both symbolic and/or practical functions - a handle is a kind of affordance. Affordances provide clues to how an object can or should be used (clues that can be useful, but also misleading). Your assignment is to conceive of, design, and produce an interactive experience in which the operation of one or more of these handles by a human user is a central component. This experience should be one or more of the following: surprising, shocking, bewildering, addictive, amazing, exquisite, subtle, provocative."

Posted by Scott Fisher at 11:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Speaker: Richard Lemarchand, Game Designer, Naughty Dog
Time: Wednesday, March 5, 6-8pm
Location: USC's Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts (RZC)
Room 201 Zemeckis Media Lab (ZML)

Title: "Audacious Feats of Daring: An Expanded Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune Post-Mortem"

Brace yourself for a rollicking ride as Naughty Dog game designer Richard Lemarchand leads a collaborative presentation deconstructing the successes and pitfalls of his studio’s first PlayStation 3 release, Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune. A contemporary reinvention of classic pulp adventure, the game was released at the end of 2007 to wide critical acclaim, public w00ts and the massive salez0rs.

In an Easter egg and bonus content-laden reprise of his GDC 2008 talk, Lemarchand covers the open, meritocratic, intensively collaborative way that Naughty Dog works, the iterative, play-test oriented development methodology that the studio subscribes to, and the technological, design and production challenges that the project faced.

Subjects ripe for discussion in this uniquely interjectional seminar format include interactivity design as exploration, managing large, talented teams through creative chaos, player attention as it relates to immersion, flow and variably scheduled activities, interactive storytelling techniques and emotion in games, wide-linear versus open-world gameplay, and gaming as mass entertainment, literature and fine art. The takeaway promises to be both practically applicable for game developers and stimulating for thinkers about interactive media.

Bio: Richard Lemarchand has made story-based character-action games the main focus of his design career, and has worked with some of the industry’s best and brightest in the field along the way. He spends his days building games with his metaphorical sleeves rolled up, advocating for the player and helping keep the development team on track. His credits include the Gex and Soul Reaver series of games, Jak 3 and Jak X: Combat Racing, and he was most recently the Lead Game Designer for Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune. He’s a contributor to Game Developer Magazine, and a frequent visitor to USC.

Posted by Scott Fisher at 9:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Great interview at GDC with IMD faculty member (and Sony Exec), John Hight. Talking about thatgamecompany, flOw, and his IMD class, "Anatomy of a Game".

Posted by Scott Fisher at 11:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)