DMD student work won CT Art Directors Club awards and the international Telly Awards

STAMFORD, Connecticut, October 22 – The UConn Digital Media & Design Department is proud to announce that several of our students and professors were recognized over the summer for their talent in the creative sphere. The 44th annual Connecticut Art Directors Club Awards took place on June 27th. All three DMD teams that submitted work were honored with awards.

DMD Stamford’s student-led design firm, Beachball, won two awards for their client work in the Student Online Interactive Category. The team’s Fresh Nation New Vendor Campaign, aimed at educating potential new vendors about the services the Fresh Nation client provides, received a Gold Award. This campaign combines messaging and motion design.

The Fresh Nation New Vendor Campaign was created exclusively by DMD students. Daria Yaseva was the lead designer and project manager. Other team members include Kaila Baker, Doreen Maclellan, and Bryan Santiago. These students worked together to build a collection of marketing materials for their client. Fresh Nation uses the animated GIFs created for the campaign on social media and in email marketing messages. These clean, colorful, and fun animations will serve as valuable assets the client can utilize to convey their message.

The Beachball firm was also awarded a Silver Award in the Student Online Interactive Category for Kelp the Planet, an integrated campaign created for the client, Sea Greens Farms. This campaign promotes kelp as a viable food product and positions the plant as a “center-plate” item for restaurants.

The multifaceted team that created the Kelp the Planet campaign includes motion designers, Lucas Lazarre and Kristina Frattaroli, and programmers, Nina Drozdenko and Jasneet Chawla. Drozdenko also worked as a video editor alongside Juwan Dumas. Daniella Mossa and Juliana Velez held additional creative roles. Together, this team created a landing page, recipe videos, social media posts, and an explanatory animation.

UConn Digital Media & Design – Stamford’s Beachball agency was also awarded CADC’s Gold Award in the Public Service Video Category. The team’s Connect to What’s Next animation was created for Digital Media CT by student, Daria Yaseva, and DMD Professor Steve Harper. The two worked as designers and animators on the project, and Harper held the additional role of copywriter.

Connect to What’s Next seeks to raise awareness of the myriad educational and career opportunities relating to digital media in the state of Connecticut. The project paired abstract animations with a concise and engaging message. The project was also honored with two international Telly Awards in May, a Silver Award in the Branded Content Category and a Bronze Award in the Non-Broadcast Category, and two Silver W3 Awards in Non-Profit Video and Video Art Direction.

DMD students racked up several impressive awards over in summer 2019, but that wasn’t the first time. The Stamford Beachball team also won two Telly Awards last year. In 2018, the Telly Awards received over 12,000 entries from all 50 states and five continents. DMD’s #myStamford animation won the Gold Award in the Fully Animated Piece for Social Video Category. Out of all 12,000 entries, only two received Gold Awards. The Beachball agency’s Spirit of the Sound video was awarded a Bronze Award in the Non-Broadcast, one of the largest categories of the Telly’s.

The UConn Digital Media & Design Department is thrilled to be able to share this news about its students’ accomplishments. Each team worked tirelessly to create a product that succeeded in impressing their clients, the Department, and most importantly themselves.

If you would like more information about this topic, please call Stacy Webb at 860-486-6765, or email digitalmedia@uconn.edu.

STORRS, Connecticut, October 13 – UConn Digital Media & Design’s 3D Animation and newly renamed Motion Design & Animation concentrations have always been brimming with talented and passionate student artists, but recently students have been making waves with their work all over the northeast. Several of our talented animators recently had their work juried into competitive festivals. Standing alongside filmmakers from across the globe, Katie Sawosik, Lucas Lazarre, Ali Loftus, Cassidy Keller, and Liam McNeece, proudly showcased their work and are helping to build UConn DMD’s national reputation as a top program to study digital animation.

Katherine Sawosik, a May 2019 BFA in 3D Animation graduate, has had incredible success with her BFA Senior Thesis project, Stand. The film has won two awards so far, “Best of Individual Category” at the MetroCAF 2019 Festival in New York, NY, and 2nd Place at the 8th Annual Trinity Film Festival in Hartford, CT. MetroCAF is the annual NYC Metropolitan Area College Computer Animation Festival organized by the New York City chapter of ACM SIGGRAPH (Association of Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques). Started in 2003, MetroCAF has grown into the most important local festival of its kind. Trinity Film Festival also features short films made by college students from around the world. Stand was the first animated film to win an award in the festival’s history.  Joining Katie at MetroCAF were Ali Loftus with her 3D animation, Butterscotch & Beetle, and Lucas Lazarre with his 2D animation, Mayhem, which also was a finalist in NASA’s ProjectMars International Film and Art Competition.  All three animations screened at the New York Institute of Technology’s Auditorium on Broadway on September 27.

Cassidy Keller and Liam McNeece, juniors in DMD’s Motion Design & Animation concentration, created a short film titled A Life of Dreaming that was featured in Art All Night: the 7th Annual Trenton Film Festival. This festival took place the weekend of June 15, 2019 and featured more than 200 short films from over 40 countries.

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If you would like more information about this topic, please call Stacy Webb at 860-486-6765, or email digitalmedia@uconn.edu.

Wondering what those ants on Bishop are all about? In DMD, we’ve been busy over the past three years making ant-inspired art! We’re now excited to invite you to the world premiere of the ant-inspired, art-science performance The Colony the weekend of September 6-8 at the Studio Theatre at UConn Storrs. The performance was conceived by DMD Professor Anna Lindemann and includes animations and video developed by DMD students and alums Sarah Shattuck, Allie Marsh, Jasmine Rajavadee, Ryan Glista, and Alex Rouleau.

The Colony is about sisterhood and the evolution of communication in two of the most social creatures on earth: humans and ants. Produced as part of AntU, The Colony ventures into speculative fiction and includes projected animations and imagery alongside live spoken and musical performance, all informed by scientific research on ant colonies.

For more about the performance, visit www.thecolony.show.

Seating is limited and reservations are encouraged.

Watch the  Performance Preview:

2019 marked the inaugural gallery exhibition for the 2019 senior class of Bachelor of Fine Arts Digital Media & Design students! This year we had a cohort of 21 talented students, 17 who have created a diverse body of senior projects – ranging from 2D and 3D animations, live-action films, interactive sites, and physical works. Also featured were our four DMD interns who, in lieu of a senior project, shared their incredible experiences working as professional interns at a variety of corporations.

More on the exhibiting artists here

April 8 to April 29, 2019

Jorgensen Center for the Performing Arts
2132 Hillside Road
Storrs, CT  06269

Mon – Fri   10am to 4pm

Prior to performances and during intermissions

Friday, April 12, 5-8pm

Light refreshments provided!

On March 26th, UConn honored its Babbidge and New England Scholars at the annual award ceremony. A Babbidge Scholar must keep a 4.0 GPA for the year, and a New England Scholar must keep a 3.7 GPA. We are incredibly proud that we DMD had 13 of the 15 (87%) School of Fine Arts Babbidge Scholars, and an additional 43 New England Scholars. We are so incredibly proud of our DMD scholars.

Babbidge Scholars: 
Nicholas Bartos, Madison Busick, Nina Drozdenko, Corlis Fraga, Anna Jannott, Ronald Jones, Allison Marsh, Nicole Mason, Devin Quinn, Rebecca Rosen, Sharah Shattuck, Sheryl Wang, and Daria Yeseva

New England Scholars:
Simone Alston, Isaac Bilmes, Sean Bollman, Owen Boyle, James Brockett, Aidan Brueckner, Harrison Burr, Tianxian (Dave) Cai, Abiegael Canova, Thomas Carter, Kailee Collins, Alexander Crosset, Shane Deptula, Mackenzie Fox, Brett Glynn, Jeremy Gonzalez, Alisia Gruendel, Malik Harris, Cassidy Keller, Julian Kinney, Chelsea Kuarasz, Eve Lenson, Allison Loftus, Mia Marasco, Christina McDonnell, Timothy Morris, Victoria Nazworth, Max Nonken, Julia Padget, Gillian Partyka, Lily Pashapour, Cynthia Reinert, Michael Russel, Alvaro Sanz-Perez, Katherine Sawosik, Erik Schweitzer, Courtney (Bean) Senior, Bridget Smith, Shanna Surena-Mattson, Hillary Therriault, Dana Wachsmuth, Rachel Wolther, and Rachel Wright

Original Article: Here

UConn Pre-College Summer Courses – Storrs, Connecticut

While not technically a summer camp, the University of Connecticut holds a unique opportunity for high school students, offering Pre-College Summer courses. Strictly for rising juniors and seniors, the programs all consist of four week-long sessions for each class. In addition to the courses you select, there are exploratory workshops throughout each session on resume building, writing college essays, selecting a major and developing professional communication skills.

The diversity of class options through this program are remarkable for any student pursuing a major in a STEM field. For the technology-minded considering developing their own app to impress a future college, there are courses in Game Design, Programming, and Web Design. The Engineering courses include Global Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, and a unique Makerspace design class among others. Pre-med majors will appreciate a wide variety of medical classes, from Pharmacy, Neuroscience, Medical Anthropology, and Sports Medicine. For all majors, the course in Creative Writing allows students to hone their writing skills before tackling college applications.

The courses are all taught by the universities’ top professors, allowing for early connections to be formed in the field.  The program requires an online application, which includes the submission of short-answer questions, transcripts, attendance records, and a reference. The cost of one session is listed as $2050. There is an Early Bird discount of $150 off for students applying before April 1, 2019, with a hard deadline of June 23, 2019.

(Original Article can be found on the Christie Digital Systems USA website)

PHOENIX, Ariz.​ – (February 20, 2019)

Students at the University of Connecticut’s (UConn’s) Digital Media & Design program had a big canvas to fill for their final projection mapping project. ATD Audio Visual, a full-service event production and rental company in the Bronx, New York, served as technical partner, selected the Christie Spyder X80 multi-window processor to facilitate mapping the students’ digital content onto the façade of The Bushnell Performing Arts Center in Hartford.

The beautiful neoclassical walls, columns and pediment in the courtyard at The Bushnell lent themselves to the dynamic and colorful graphics and animations created by the UConn students. The Bushnell has been a gathering place for arts, education and community activities in Greater Hartford for almost 90 years.

“The Bushnell’s façade was ideal for projection mapping,” says Or Israel, president, ATD. “It has many 3D elements – columns, brick walls, and lions’ heads supporting the portico – which made an interesting surface to display the 1920 x 1920-resolution content. The façade had been scanned and content specs supplied to the students who built their projects on templates of the projection surface.” Favorite Color, a New York City-based design studio and production company, also created content for the show.

“It was exciting to work with ATD on this pilot for a program we hope to continue,” says Ryan Glista, Project Manager at The Bushnell’s Digital Institute and a recent UConn graduate. “This was the first partnership between The Bushnell and UConn. Seven students were completing an introduction to projection mapping course; they are all juniors and seniors with a strong background in animation. They had done projection mapping on small objects in class, but their final project was on a much bigger scale.”

ATD provided two 20,000 lumen projectors with short-throw lenses, mounted under the glass portico of the courtyard façade; a media server; and a Christie Spyder X80 multi-screen windowing processor. The project was the first projection mapping assignment for the new Spyder X80, which ATD acquired last November. In addition, Israel shared his expertise with students by teaching a two-hour class on basic projection mapping and 3D mapping at UConn.

“Or told me about the Spyder X80, and I was as excited as he was to see it in action at The Bushnell,” says Glista.

“We knew if we used the X80 it would be a stress-free show,” says Israel, who acted as project manager. “With the Spyder X80 we connect the system and everything works. I feel free to mingle with the client; without it I have to be behind the technicians making sure nothing goes wrong. Even though the X80’s success rate is extremely high, we also had the security of Spyder’s built-in redundancy; we knew the still store would step in if there were any failures.”

Glista notes that, “the show was initially supposed to be a two-day test, but when the CEO of The Bushnell saw it he was so impressed by it and what it could mean for the theater that we installed it for the three-week, sold-out run of ‘Hamilton.’ That meant thousands of people saw the projection mapping every night – how amazing for the students!”

Israel notes that ATD used the X80 on five shows in just two months. “Since we took delivery of the Spyder it’s done a number of live shows for high-end clients, including a corporate event in Manhattan with six 4K outputs and a total of 60 million pixels.”

At ATD, Riley Irving was the Spyder X80 operator for The Bushnell project and Kevin Gomez the AV Technician. At UConn, the department head was Heather Elliott-Famularo and the professor was Kevin Richetelli. The students whose work was shown were Ian D’Arcangelo, Nick Donati, Eric Fritz, Orly Mobilio, Jasmine Rajavadee, Morgan Rossi and Renoj Varghese.

About ATD Audio Visual
ATD provides AV Services for a variety of events, including presentations, conferences, meetings and trade shows. With decades of technology and programming experience, ATD offers a variety of services backed by industry-leading expertise. By guiding clients through the entire process, ATD acts as a full-service consultant providing insights, advice and unique solutions to meet specific requirements.

About Christie®
Christie Digital Systems USA, Inc. is a global visual and audio technologies company and a wholly-owned subsidiary of Ushio Inc., Japan (JP:6925). Consistently setting the standards by being the first to market some of the world’s most advanced projectors, complete system displays, and cinema audio solutions; Christie is recognized as one of the most innovative visual technology companies in the world. From retail displays to Hollywood, mission critical command centers to classrooms and training simulators, Christie display solutions and projectors capture the attention of audiences around the world with dynamic and stunning images, accompanied by awe-inspiring sound. Visit www.christiedigital.com.

Christie® is a trademark of Christie Digital Systems USA registered in the United States of America and certain other countries
DLP® is a registered trademark of Texas Instruments.

Franklin Street Works, a non-profit contemporary art space in Stamford, Conn., presents “Collective Action Archive: Redux,” an exhibition exploring the intersections between art and activism, featuring materials from dozens of U.S. artist/activist collectives.

The exhibition expands on the 2013 show, “Collective Action Archive,” which was curated collaboratively by Franklin Street Works with Purchase College, SUNY and then was accessioned into the college’s library archive. The updated group exhibition features materials from the Library’s archive along with new items from collectives who were not included in or had not yet formed at the time of the 2013 show. In the spirit of a living archive, new contributions will be added throughout the exhibition’s run. It is on view at Franklin Street Works February 9 through September 8, 2019 and launches with with a free, public reception on Saturday, February 9, 5-8pm.

Curated by Franklin Street Works creative director Terri C Smith, “Collective Action Archive: Redux” is rooted in  two past exhibitions curated by the Stamford art space. The first, “Working Alternatives: Breaking Bread, Art Broadcasting and Collective Action,” included a 2012 call to more than 90 artist/activist collectives. For the show, the materials were presented in archive boxes with only a portion on display. The second, the 2013 “Collective Action Archive,” at Purchase College Passage Gallery, opened the archive boxes to create a vibrant exhibition. Co-curated by Smith and her FSW colleague Sandrine Milet in collaboration with students and faculty from the Media Studies Department at Purchase College, it featured materials gathered from artist/activist collectives. When the exhibition closed, its contents were accessioned into the Purchase College Library archive, becoming a resource for students and scholars. That archive along with new, borrowed materials will form the 2019 exhibition “Collective Action Archive: Redux.”Photos, videos, artworks, pamphlets and texts by more than 3-dozen artist/activist collectives from across the United States will be on view, including contributions from longtime collectives such as ABC No Rio, the Guerrilla Girls, Paper Tiger TV, subRosa, and Temporary Services.

Programming for “Collective Action Archive: Redux” will include: talks by exhibiting collectives, informal presentations by regional activist organizations, and discussion groups about the often contradictory relationship between social activism and the arts.

Exhibiting artist/activist collectives include: ABC No Rio, Artists Against Apartheid, Big Tent, Codify Art, Conflict Kitchen, Critical Making, fierce pussy, Floating Lab Collective, Futurefarmers, Ghana ThinkTank, Guerrilla Girls, Guffey Hollow, Howling Mob Society, Illegal Art, Just Seeds, Kitchen Sink, Knifeandfork, Lucky Pierre, M12 Collective, Meme Rider Media Team, National Bitter Melon Council, Okay Mountain Collective, Paper Tiger TV, Philly Stake, Preemptive Media, Publication Studio, RAGGA, Regional Relationships, Second Front, Students of the African Diaspora, subRosa, Temporary Services, The Pinky Show, W.A.G.E., and Work Progress Collective.

Saturday, March 9, 4:00 – 6:00 pm
Knifeandfork: Brian House and Sue Huang in Conversation

Brian House and Sue Huang of the internationally exhibiting media arts collaborative Knifeandfork will discuss their practice. Sponsored by Stamford Community Arts Partnership Program (CAPP) grant.

Event Details: http://www.franklinstreetworks.org/event/media-arts-collaborative-knifeandfork-in-conversation/

Franklin Street Works is a not-for- profit contemporary art space whose mission is to manifest contemporary art in a professional and welcoming setting. Franklin Street Works aims to broaden community participation in the arts, contribute to a larger arts dialogue, and cultivate emerging artists. To date, the organization has exhibited the work of more than 350 artists, curated 30 original exhibitions, and organized approximately 150 programs, including talks, tours, and performances. Their work has received national and regional support, including two multi-year grants from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts as well as regional grants from Fairfield County’s Community Foundation, Connecticut Office of the Arts, New Canaan Community Foundation, among others. Exhibitions have been recognized with positive reviews in major publications such as Artforum online, Art in America online, Art Papers, The Brooklyn Rail, Huffington Post, Hyperallergic, Art New England, Modern Painters and Two Coats of Paint.

Franklin Street Works is located at 41 Franklin Street in downtown Stamford, Connecticut. Click here for more on directions and parking: http://www.franklinstreetworks.org/visit/

Franklin Street Works has an ADA compliant ramp to our back door on the first floor and is accessible from Franklin St. Once inside there is an elevator and bathrooms are spacious but do not have grab bars.

With the help of a $25,000 Digital Projects for the Public award from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), researchers from UConn’s Digital Media and Design Department in the School of Fine Arts, UConn Library’s Archives & Special Collections (ASC), and Neag School of Education are working with colleagues across the globe to make this project a reality.

The team hopes that their Courtroom 600 project – named for the courtroom in the Justizpalast in Nuremberg, Germany, where the trials took place – will draw learners into ongoing thought and empathetic discussion about human rights both past and present.

“The Courtroom 600 project team is grateful for the opportunity NEH funding will provide to advance this work,” says principal investigator Ken Thompson, assistant professor-in-residence of game design. “Evidence shows there is a significant decline in Holocaust awareness, with one study citing that 1 out of 5 millennials haven’t heard of or are not sure if they have heard of the Holocaust. As publically engaged scholars, we believe it is critical to create engaging and well-informed educational experiences to begin to address this disconnect, and the Courtroom 600 project aims to do just that.”

The goal of Courtroom 600 is to engage learners in historical thinking processes as they explore international justice and Holocaust histories through the lens of the major war criminals trials that took place in Nuremberg, before the International Military Tribunal (IMT) in 1945-1946.

Although the trials were held more than 70 years ago, their impact is still evident in modern international law. Legacies of the IMT include the development of international criminal courts, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, and the “Nuremberg Code” of medical and scientific ethics.

The research and advisory team, which includes experts in educational psychology, digital public humanities, human rights, international law, and Holocaust history, considers teaching learners how to evaluate the nature of evidence as a critical first step in understanding the histories and legacies of the Holocaust and the IMT. Among other aims, the Courtroom 600 VR experience will also write women’s roles and Jewish resistance back into Holocaust history.

While the project seeks to help users have a personal encounter with an important event from Holocaust history, the technology behind the project couldn’t be more futuristic. The team has completed a technological proof-of-concept, with software code that connects the UConn Library’s digital repository to various systems used for educational VR experiences.

Embodying a fictitious member of the U.S. prosecutorial team, learners must investigate digitized copies of documents, photographs, and other primary source materials. Then, aided by materials that provide historical context, they piece together an understanding of past events and accumulate evidence against selected defendants.

When finished with the discovery phase of the investigation, the Courtroom 600 experience places learners in a three-dimensional, human-scale reproduction of Courtroom 600. Here they listen to testimony, interrogate witnesses and defendants, and consult with the prosecuting attorneys on their team about strategy – in other words, learners actively experience the trials instead of passively hearing about them.

The archival materials used for the virtual experience are pulled in real time from executive trial counsel Thomas J. Dodd’s papers housed at UConn Library’s Archives and Special Collections in Storrs. Through one of the first collaborative projects of its kind in the nation, UConn and partner organizations digitized 50,000 depositions, photographs, pieces of evidence, correspondence, drafts of legal briefs, and other documents from the Nuremberg Trials for use by scholars and now the public.

“The potential impacts of Courtroom 600 extend beyond its subject matter and beyond its proposed approaches to engaging self-directed learners in Holocaust history,” says Greg Colati, co-investigator on the project and assistant university librarian for University Archives, Special Collections, and Digital Curation. “It also demonstrates the value of interoperable data standards so we can increase the versatility and discoverability of digital collections and allow people to personally interact with media and history.”

Thanks to the recently awarded NEH funding, members of the Courtroom 600 project and a panel of national and international experts will meet in Storrs for a two-day charrette in June 2019. Project collaborators include specialists from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, and the Memorium Nürnberger Prozesse(Nuremberg Trials Memorial) in Germany. They will have the opportunity to don VR headsets, take up the controls, and spend time experiencing the prototype for themselves. In addition to gathering information on possible approaches to the narrative, learning objectives, and visual treatments in focus groups, the software will capture data about user interactions to refine the prototype.

The June meeting will also involve discussions of what it means to present Holocaust history through this new medium.

“The use of immersive, interactive VR technologies to educate learners about difficult histories by ‘placing’ them in convincing simulations of the past is still a relatively new area of work,” says co-PI Clarissa Ceglio, assistant professor of digital humanities. “And it comes with a number of important ethical questions that need to be addressed. Sharing how we work through these issues will be one of the key contributions that Courtroom 600 makes to the field.”

The NEH funding will bring the project closer to completing a prototype of the first educational module of the Courtroom 600 experience. The team will test the module at UConn and with collaborating museums dedicated to Holocaust and human rights histories.