Tag Archives: World-building

Speakers: Prof. Alex McDowell & WbML team
Time:          Wednesday, January 23, 6-8pm
Location:   USC’s Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts (RZC), Room 122
Title:            “Leviathan – Worldbuilding in Digital Narrative Media”   (Research in the SCA Interactive Media Division PART 2)

The program for this 511 session will present recent research by SCA’s new Worldbuilding Media Lab headed by Prof. Alex McDowell.  The project team will describe their worldbuilding approach to develop a proof of concept for a story space based on author Scott Westerfeld’s Leviathan.

Speaker: DANNY YOUNT & AHMET AHMET,  Prologue Films
Time:          Wednesday, November 7, 6-8pm
Location:   USC’s Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts (RZC), Room 122 (ZML)

Danny Yount is a main title designer / director for film and television. He has earned many notable industry awards, as well as 2 Emmy wins and one nomination. At Prologue Films he has designed and directed many recognizable feature film main titles like Kiss Kiss Bang Bang – which IFC has rated as one of the 50 best title sequences of all time, Iron Man, which was featured in Creativity magazine’s Top 5, Tron Legacy, Sherlock Holmes and graphic visual effects sequences for Ironman 2.

Ahmet Ahmet, a Director at Prologue and Prologue Pictures, earned his Bachelor of Arts Degree in Art from Staffordshire Univerisyt, England. After graduation, he worked as a Designer and Art Director for BBC Television London and worked as a Creative Director at Framestore London. He joined Prologue last year, coming over from Imaginary Forces, and immediatley jumped into desinging and directing the main titles and many film segments for the critically acclaimed “M:14″ starring Tom Cruise.  Most recently he has worked on VFX for Prometheus.

Speaker:    Yasser Malaika, Valve
Time:          Wednesday, September 26, 6-8pm
Location:   USC’s Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts (RZC), Room 122 (ZML)

Interaction Designer/Developer/Artist.   Yasser enjoys working at the intersection of architecture and digital technology.  At Valve, he has created environments, effects, and production tools for games in the Half Life, Left 4 Dead, and Portal series. He has also developed powerful creativity software that is easy to learn and fun to use, such as the Portal 2 Puzzle Maker.  Before joining Valve, Yasser helped to design SketchUp, a widely used 3D modeling tool, and developed a low-cost, multi-material digital fabrication system. He has also had a career in architecture, where he used games such as Unreal Tournament to visualize designs of stadiums, office buildings, and classrooms. While studying architecture, he used games such as Quake to experience long-lost ancient buildings, floating sea colonies, and to recreate never-built designs of the architects he admired.

Speakers:       Kim Moses and Ian Sander
Time:              Wednesday, January 11 , 6-8pm
Location:       USC’s Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts (RZC), Room 122

Kim Moses is a principal in Sander/Moses Productions where she has both developed and served as an executive producer on over 300 hours of prime-time television programming.  Moses was Executive Producer and Director of the hit CBS drama “Ghost Whisperer,” and she has co-authored the show’s companion book, “Ghost Whisperer: Spirit Guide.” She has also co-created and written the award winning “Ghost Whisperer: The Other Side” webseries. Kim’s other television executive producer credits include “Profiler,” for which she co-wrote and directed episodes, as well as “The Beast,” “New York News,” “Brimstone” and “For The People.” Among her television movie executive producer credits are “Ali, An American Hero,” the Emmy Award-winning “Stolen Babies,” “Chasing the Dragon” and “How to Marry a Billionaire.” Additional feature film script writing credits include “The Surgeon” and “Home of Champions.”

Ian Sander is a principal in Sander/Moses Productions where he has both developed and served as an executive producer on over 300 hours of dramatic prime-time television programming. Sander was Executive Producer and Director of the hit CBS drama “Ghost Whisperer,” and he has co-authored the show’s companion book, “Ghost Whisperer Spirit Guide.” He has also co-created the award winning Ghost Whisperer: The Other Side webseries.Ian’s other television executive producer credits include “Profiler,” “The Beast”, “New York News”, and “For the People” all of which he also directed, and “Brimstone.” Sander was the executive producer of the Emmy Award-winning series “Equal Justice” and the Emmy Award-winning two-hour series “I’ll Fly Away.” Sander’s earliest producing credits include the theatrical film noir thriller “D.O.A.” and the feature “Everybody’s All American.”

Kim and Ian have co-created the Total Engagement Experience, a new business and creative model for television, which uses the television show as a component of a broader multi-platform entertainment experience that includes the internet, publishing, music, mobile, DVD’s, video games and more, establishing an infinity loop driving ratings and increasing revenue streams.

Speakers:      IMD Project Presentations
Time:              Wednesday, November 30, 6-8pm
Location:       USC’s Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts (RZC), Room 122

Featuring Class Projects from :

• CTIN 400: Fundamentals of Procedural Media ( Brinson)
• CTIN 401L: Interface Design for Games (Hicks)
• CTIN 404L: Usability Testing for Games (Desuvire)
• CTIN 483: Introduction to Game Development (Gibson)
• CTIN 484L: Intermediate Game Development (Brinson)
• CTIN 488: Game Design Workshop (Gibson/Diamante)
• CTIN 489: Intermediate Game Design Workshop (Kuzma)
• CTIN 491aL: Advanced Game Project (Malamed)
• CTIN 502a: Experiments in Stereoscopic Imaging (Hoberman)
• CTIN 532: Interactive Experience and World Design (Weil)
• CTIN 534L: Experiments in Interactivity I (Kratky)
• CTIN 541: Design for Interactive Media (Fullerton)
• Student research Projects (Gotsis)

and more….

Food and Drink will be provided!

The Slipstream Archipelago Atlas

Here is the link to my Atlas for World Building: ScryptyriaAtlas

This shows an early version of my Wu Xing-inspired cellular automata, taking the form of a Reaction-Diffusion model.  This isn’t as commented and a little more obscure than the DLA code, but you should be able to copy/paste the code into processing and get a simple reaction/diffusion cellular automata in Processing:

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Here is the Diffusion Limited Aggregation code, to make the lighting-bolt, ice-crystal patterns – I’ve had trouble posting the working Processing sketch here before but here’s the code.  Copying and pasting into a new sketch should do the trick:

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Todd Furmanski showed several examples, here are a few more:

Rebecca Allen’s BUSH SOUL and EMERGENCE system, designed in 1998:  ”…three interactive art installations that explore the role of human presence in a world of artificial life. A person’s “soul”, represented as a sphere of energy, enters a virtual “bush” that is alive and responsive. The world’s inhabitants are brought to life through programs that define their behaviors and desires. A force-feedback joystick provides both navigation and tactile sensations, connecting one’s physical body and virtual soul. Through the joystick one can feel the “energy” of the environment as vibrations emanating from certain creatures and significant places in the virtual world.”

More about CODEX SERAPHINIANUS here.

Mitchell Joaquim‘s generative architecture projects include an “In Vitro Meat Habitat” and Peristaltic City