So far, being a second semester senior has been crazy, and I’m loving every moment of it. A lot of good things have come my way recently, and I’d really like to share them with my readers.
First and most notably, my website is finally looking the way I want it to! I’m really excited, and I’ve put up a whole bunch of new work. DigitalGreg has been extremely helpful in photographing my work, as well as taking the lovely new photograph of me on my “about” page. I’m still working on some gallery fixes and video encoding issues with vimeo, but once those are resolved, I will be posting a section containing my body of work that I’ve been developing in the Art & Technology program here at UF. In addition, I’m also working on re-theming my resume and business cards to match the look of this site.
I am currently working on a few freelance design projects that I’m very excited to share (once they’ve come to completion, of course). I am also very excited to announce that I have been selected to participate in Ad Society’s very first Ad Dash. Ad Dash is a philanthropic event that connects UF students with a secret client that is in need of marketing assistance. Teams of up to 5 people, all with different specialties, have 12 hours to develop a campaign for the client. The winning team will have their work used by that client and will also score an interview with a major ad agency in New York. I’ve never done anything like this before, but I’m beyond excited to be chosen to be a part of this!
On the subject of exciting news, DAMN (Digital Arts Media Network), UF’s Art & Technology club, participated in its very first studio visiting trip yesterday. Eight of us carpooled down to Orlando to visit EA Tiburon and FIEA. First of all, EA’s facility was AWESOME. This particular studio was responsible for the EA Sports productions, including Madden, NCAA Football, and Tiger Woods PGA Tour, so the place was covered from head to toe in sports memorabilia (including a lot of Gator swag!). There was also a ball pit in their conference room, not to mention a free coffee and cereal bar on every floor. We had a brief tour of the building from a former Gator and got a general feel for the production pipeline. Although I don’t plan on going into the gaming industry, I have to admit that I was extremely impressed by what I saw.
Our next stop was FIEA, UCF’s graduate program for video game production. Their facility was also extremely beautiful and they had a lot of cutting-edge technology. FIEA has a partnership with the House of Moves in California responsible for motion capture technology used in movies and video games. As a result, FIEA has the largest motion capture studio on the east coast that is accessible to FIEA students and brings in a lot of outside business.
The day that we were there just happened to be the day that the students were giving their ‘Vertical Slice’ presentations. Students are formed into teams consisting of programmers, artists, animators, etc. and they spend their last two semesters or so developing a video game from ideation to completion. The presentations they gave were basically a check-in point after two months of work on them. We stayed for three of the presentations, but from what we saw, we were really impressed. They each demoed a portion of their game that was full developed. Of course a lot of tweaking was still needed, but the graphics and the feel of each game were really well fleshed out.
Much, much more exciting news to come 🙂
-N.