Speaker Series: Henk Dawson

Our last speaker series of the quarter, we wrap it up with Henk Dawson. 

If you have never seen Henk speak for our club before, don't miss this! 

"Over 20 years illustration and animation experience, creating visual asset for large corporations, ad agencies, design firms, and startups. My goal is to continue to stay small and focused on creating quality 3D illustration and animation. I love what I do and want to provide the best work that I am capable of producing." --- Henk Dawson

RSVP with Evite

DMDC Special Movie Screening Event: The Healthcare Movie

“People Are More Important Than Profits”

The Bellevue College Digital Media Design Club would like to invite you to a screening of The Healthcare Movie.  Narrated by Kiefer Sutherland, this film provides the real story of how it came to be that the health care systems in Canada and the United States are so different today. The film was produced by Laurie Simons and her husband, Terry Sterrenberg.  Laurie is a graduate of the Bellevue College Media program and Advanced Track Video program.

The showing will be in N201 on Wednesday, Nov. 16 at 2 pm.  Laurie and her husband will be available after the screening for a discussion.

www.healthcaremovie.net

Please RSVP to the event, on our Evite invitation. 

AniFest 2012

Every once in awhile an opportunity comes along to show off your work. Today we are focusing on the Czech Republic's 11th Annual International AniFest. Brought to our attention by Bellevue College staff member, Stephen Garrow.

AniFest takes a variety of animation types, some of them you may have already seen examples of or created yourself by now. Any animation made within the year 2011 may be submitted, all films are due by December 20th, 2011. Please check the website for further rules and requirements before submitting.

Create your passion, submit it, and see what happens.

www.AniFest.cz

Goldie Jones: Director & Founder of Subverionz Media

 

Goldie Jones will be speaking on November 2nd at 2pm – 4pm in N201, on the Bellevue College campus.

Goldie graduated Summa Cum Laude with a BFA in Visual Arts and New Media with a focus on video and animation and went on to spend several years freelancing in the Seattle area as an editor, After Effects artist, and Director of Photography for dozens of production companies and marketing firms, most of which she continues to collaborate with today.

Goldie founded Subversionz Media in the fall of 2004 and couldn’t be more proud of the Subversionz team, the work that they have created together over the past several years and continue to create, and the relationships between the Subversionz team and our clients that push Subversionz Media on to new growth every year.

We look forward to having Goldie at our Speaker Series, please join us in room N201 at the Bellevue College campus on November 2^nd at 2pm.  You can RSVP at our Evite page.

You can visit Goldie’s company at www.subverionz.com

Jason Fruchter, Flash Animator and Illustrator

Jason will be speaking on October 19th at 2pm-4pm in D126p, the Library Screening Room on the Bellevue College campus.

Jason began using Flash in 1996. He creates Flash animation for games, education and entertainment platforms. Jason has ten years experience as an approved children’s book illustrator for several Nickelodeon and other production studio properties including Dora the Explorer, Go Diego Go, Ni hao, Kai-lan, Dinosaur Train, and Team Umizoomi


The theme of this presentation will be Creating Character Animation in Flash.

Several examples of character animation will be shown. They represent projects geared toward entertainment, education, and gaming.

A variety of Flash related techniques will be demonstrated including: using symbols to create Flash style “puppet” animation, creating keyframes to plan out the action sequence, making the character talk using “lip sync”, and how to create emotions using facial expressions. In addition, traditional “hand drawn” animation techniques will be demonstrated which do not use automatically generated “tweens” in Flash, just the mind of an animator!

Included throughout the presentation will be discussions on the “principals of animation” as used by traditional animators. These principals include: timing, anticipation, recoil, squash and stretch, and overlapping action.

Overall, this presentation will demonstrate how to best animate a character in Flash by combining Flash’s automatically generated “tweening” with traditional animation techniques. The result is an entertaining and compelling character viewers of your animation will be sure to enjoy!

3D Coat: VOX Cube Example by Bay Raitt

vox cube example from Bay Raitt on Vimeo.

Feng Zhu, FZD School of Design: Concept Art Tutorial

What To Do On Your First Day As An Animator

A Helpful Video from Animator Rick O'Connor

Becoming a Student Program

As you all may know, we are VERY close to turning this club into a Student Program. Doing so will help to ensure our vision and mission continues long after we graduate. There are MANY benefits to becoming a program, and we have big goals for a Digital Media Design Student Program. However, before we can start working on and communicating those goals, we have one final hoop to jump through.

We need to go before the ASG board of directors to get their approval.   

We just found out yesterday the next board of directors meeting is Tomorrow!

Wed 06.08.2011

BC C103

12:30pm  

We've been told to bring as many supporters as possible to this meeting. If they see that our Club is backed by our community, then the decision is an easy one for them to make. 

This is the final step in the process and we could really use your support. If you like what we are doing and you are available, we would love to see you there tomorrow. 

We Need You | 05.25.2011

We just found out Stephen Garrow, Rob Backstrand & Mary Slowinsky will also be attending our Spring Speaker Series this Wed. They will take some time (either before or after our guest speakers) to talk about the Digital Media Arts program changes & answer any questions you might have. 

We started this club as a way to make a positive change in our education and involvement with our industry. Let's show the Department how serious the Digital Media Design Club & its supporters are about these goals. IT WOULD BE GREAT TO SHOW THEM WITH A PACKED ROOM. :)

AfterEffects With the Experts - Grett Marshall and Todd Kopriva (Adobe)

Jarrett attended this talk hosted by Aquent. Thanks for sharing your notes Jarrett.
.....
Wednesday, May 18th | 7-8:30 PM.  
Just got back from the meeting here is the rundown of info I got.... you can forward the center body on info and if you want to get in touch with Todd Kopriva about them coming to BC to give speaches for the Animation club you can contact him at korpriva@adobe.com (oh and I will be talking to Eric Jensen from Adobe about interning options, there are none as yet, but they are looking into the option...I was ask for more along the lines of an unpaid learning experience)

1.To turn off annoying auto "Easy Ease"
Goto Preferences and select "General"
On thid down select "Default Spacial Interpolation to Linear"

2. To export AE project for Flash
Goto "File"
Export->"Adome Flash Professional XFL"

3. 3D Dome or warp effect on a flat plane layer
Goto "Effects"
Select "Freeform Digi effects"
This tool is supposed to be a bit difficult and it was reccomnded to download a demo and look at the settings on that demo to understand it more, also to search "freeform"

4. Puppet tools "Skeleton Effect"
Download the "Duik" script for AE, it is said to be quite nice (and I hope it is free...sorry forgot to ask because I was loading on more questions that the entire group combined and didn't want to get beat down)

5.Audio playback option while working on large project to avoid need for prerendering
Press the "." on the number pad to mark a sart and stop point

6. Alts for moving the motion path of an item
A. Highlite all the keyframes then select a point of the motion path and move it
B. "Click" on "position" and the keys will all select the select a point on the motion path and move

7. Adobe AE blog with useful info:
http://blogs.adobe.com/toddkopriva/

8. Open "Adobe Help" in web browser of your choice
Select Help
Click "After Effects Help" or just click "F1"
Once open slect "Edit"
Select "Preferences"
Click the Sixth option down "Open Help in Browser"

9. To make a single object a layered animation
"Right-click" item to replace and select "Replace footage"
Select "File"
Once in the file select window highlite range of pngs
Once range is selected the lower left-hand corner an option will un-grey for "PNG Sequence"
Once that is clicked you can also click the next option of forcing "aphabetical order"
 
10. Meetings in Seattle
There is a User group for Premeir on this approaching Moday at 7 PM in downtown seattle. I do not know the location yet, but I hope to get it. This group will focus on AE as well

There is an Adobe User Group at the Adobe Offices in Fremont by the bridge at this approaching Tuesday at 7 PM

Final Cut Users Group [Seattle]

Jarrett attended the Final Cut user's group meeting last night. Below are his notes from that event. Thanks Jarrett for sharing!

The meeting last night went from 7 to 9 PM. The meetings occur every month on the last Monday in Guitar center building (the next one they are going over the new Final Cut that is being released next month), there is a door at the base of the stairs from the parking lot on the roof.

     The first section was a speaker talking about "seed" files and meta data. He was pretty much saying to number the original videos in a way that made sense to you...i.e If you import clips from video files name mv_1201 you can alter them to firstdayshoot_001 and such so at later times you will know what they are. Then to place them in a folder so that folder's info (meta data) had some use to you, like "firstdayshoot". Then when you are working, use a copy to work from so that your original data is not lost. Once you name the new files they should have something in the name to point back tot he seed files, like "intro_firstdayshoot_001". He does editing for a living and seemed very staunch on this.

The second speaker talked about Photoshop.

He showed the advantages of using the Shadow/Highlights adjustment allowing for the dark areas in images to come out. He pretty much warned of going above 30% on them.  This one is in the image-adjustments drop-down.

Next he covered image merging where he explained to get the best results a user needs to pivot from one point to take the images and not to move left or right. The newest algorithm that is in CS5 has been greatly improved.

Once the layers were flattened to make one large image he cropped the image a bit to get rid of the larger areas of negative space, then he used the magic wand to select the blank areas. Once he had a black area he used the expand border tool in the select drop-down, increased the selected area by 4 pixels, then selected the fill tool in edit (shift F5) and selected the content aware feature which allows Photoshop to run a few algorithms that will calculate what should be in the blank area. It works quite well in areas with more randomness, but in areas with defined linear patterns or such you can notice issues. The examples he gave was for removing a cow from a field works great, while removing one form a brick wall or beam background would not work as well.

Finally he went into the use of Smart Sharpen (filter-sharpen-smartsharpen), that it is best not to go above 60-75%. He opened the advanced tab to show all of its features. Next using the LAB color scheme (instead of RGB) he places Gaussian blurs on the A and B levels to get rid of the image dirt or noise. (according to him the blue channel has the largest amount of noise

  if you were looking to see any)

Finally he showed histogram usage for colors by going to levels-adjustments-levels (he was in RGB at this time), just saying the proper way to color correct was to switch between the colors in the histograms and to make sure the far left and right triangles at the base of the histogram graph are at the edges of the rise and fall of the displayed graph or mountain that it shows.

That is all that happened. If you are looking for speakers David may be game for it, he runs the group, he works with several companies, and I think he teaches. He is going to look into inter options for me as well and hit me up with which places may be looking, and what they are looking for. If you want to talk to him about the animation club you can email him at david@dicoverytools.com

Digital Media Design Speakers BEAU OBREMSKI & ROB MULLIN

05.18.2011, 2:00-4:00, Bellevue College N201
http://www.scottishninjas.com/
Beau and Rob are the creators of animated series Scottish Ninjas. Come hear their journey and experiences as animators for this adult cartoon.

Digital Media Design Speakers Molly Bennett & Anne Garber

05.11.2011
BC C130 
Two Interactive Design Recruiters from Aquent will share with club members. Find out how to prepare your portfolio, what the industry is looking for and where the industry is growing.
http://aquent.us/our-specialties/interactive-design/

Here's some of the links mentioned in their presentation:

Icon tutorials:

http://slodive.com/photoshop/photoshop-icon-design-tutorials/

 

Free Microsoft tools (including Expression Blend):

DreamSpark: https://www.dreamspark.com/ - there are MANY Microsoft tools available for students to download for free on this site including Expression Blend

Learn Blend in 5 days: http://www.microsoft.com/expression/resources/BlendTraining/Default.aspx

 

Free portfolio hosting/template sites:

http://cargocollective.com/

http://www.krop.com/

http://www.indexhibit.org/ (decent, but not as good as the other two)

(we don’t tend to like Coroflot, Behance, or Carbonmade for sites – not as flexible and presentation not as nice)

 

Students are welcome to connect to us on LinkedIn! Here are our profiles:Anne Garber: http://www.linkedin.com/in/annegarber

Abby McLoughlin: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/abby-mcloughlin/13/140/934

Join us for a DMD Club Tour of FuturePoly!

Saturday, April 23rd @ 4pm
http://futurepoly.com/about.aspx

The Digital Media Design Club has been invited to tour FuturePoly! You won't want to miss this opportunity.

Also check out their Student Gallery

Voxel Sculpting

Product: 3D Coat

http://www.3d-coat.com/what-is-3dcoat/

Official Description 

"3D-Coat is the one application that has all the tools you need to take your 3D idea from a block of digital clay all the way to a production ready, fully textured organic or hard surface model."

How did we hear about it?

We saw it used by Bay Raitt during a talk he gave at the Redmond Digital Arts Festival.

This is quite possibly the coolest tool for 3D modeling!

Oh, and did I mention Mr. Raitt usually puts in about 3 hours a day playing with 3D Coat (after work). How much time (outside of class) are you spending each day to improve?

See it in action!

http://www.3d-coat.com/tutorial/free-tutorial/

Want to work on Video Games?

This FB video is a good example of what you might encounter while trying to find your dream job.

MEDIA250: Internship In Media

Are you getting close to graduation? Then you'll need to take MEDIA250 Internship in Media. The course description states you need permission from the course admin to register. What you might not know is that there is another prerequisite; your internship needs to be setup BEFORE getting permission.

Below are a few tips for finding that media internship.

• Visit the Career Center to get help with your resume. They also offer assistance in finding internships.
• Talk to your teachers and Digital Media Arts Administration, they may have connections or know of an internship that will match your passions.
• Attend the Digital Media Design Club Speaker Series and Mixers. This is a great way to meet industry professionals and talk to fellow classmates. Often, internships opportunities have more than one opening. Your fellow classmates who have secured one of those openings may be your ticket in.
• Check out local community meet-ups, festivals and career talks:
• AIGA Seattle's Jump Start. If you can't make this one, check back often, they may offer it again!
• Redmond Digital Arts Festival This is a free event!
• User Groups like:  
• After Effects Meetup
• Photoshop
• Flash
• InDesgin
• Contact the Media250 course admin Mary Solisnky if you've tried the above and are still having trouble finding an internship.

What it all comes down to is Networking! The more people you meet and talk to the more opportunities you create for yourself.  If you want to find that dream job, you can't afford to be shy. Joining groups and talking to other people with the similar passions is a great way to start!

Save the Bellevue College Art Store

As you may have heard, plans are being made to consolidate the satellite Art Store in Building C with the general bookstore. The satellite store location would then be replaced with a bank and Colin would be relegated to book-related tasks in the back room.
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/save-bellevue-college-art-store/

Vision Goals Mission Benefits

Our Vision

The Digital Media Design Club’s vision is to inspire, educate and inform student designers, helping them to realize their talents and to advocate the value of design among the media, the local business community, public agencies and the general public. We believe our contribution to the success of the Digital Media Arts program at Bellevue College will make it one of the most desired Digital Media Arts programs in the Pacific Northwest to both prospective students and industry professionals seeking to recruit creative talent.

Our Mission

We are committed to improving the learning experience for all Digital Media Arts students (including, but not limited to: animators, cartoonists, designers, game designers, illustrators, and digital artists) by being a place students turn to first to exchange ideas and information, participate in critical analysis, and research and advance education and ethical practices. Our mission is to increase our interaction with industry professionals by regular speaker sessions, networking and professional workshops. The DMD Club is committed to stimulating thinking about media design through conferences, competitions, exhibitions, publications and websites. We desire to promote and protect the social, economic, educational and professional interests of its members while abiding by Bellevue College student policies. We seek to improve and promote the design and media programs at Bellevue College. The DMD Club is open to students at all skill levels regardless of race, color, creed, religion, national origin, sex, sexual orientation including gender identity or expression, age, marital or family status, disability or status as a disabled veteran or Vietnam era veteran.

Our Goals

Our Club Charter was submitted on February 4, 2011. Our first of weekly speaker events was held on February 16th with two established designers presenting to 20 students in attendance. We currently have speakers scheduled every week until the end of the Winter Quarter. We have an active Facebook fan page featuring event updates. We have a Twitter account for feeding industry news and infromation. The DMD club also has a website in development for showcasing and promoting student digital media content. Our goals include creating a Linkedin Group for networking. Begin and support a Bellevue College Animated Film Festival. Organize and conduct design competitions and contests. Collaborate with other BC clubs (ie: the Film Club) that regularly meet to discuss student needs and objectives. Continue to invite guest speakers and plan industry tours. We’d also like to start a creative industry job fair on campus. Organize a Bellevue College Digital Media Alumni association as part of the club.

Our Benefit to Bellevue College
We believe we can enhance social and educational experiences to the benefit of Bellevue College and the Digital Media Arts program by operating within our stated vision, mission and goals. By bringing industry leaders on campus to share working experiences with students, we expect to contribute to the success of the BC DMA program by encouraging our members to successfully complete their training and become working design professionals within our local and global communities.