Written by Tyler Winick of the John Lennon Bus

The Digital Media Academy (DMA) is a nationally-recognized organization offering hands-on learning experiences in a broad range of digital media technologies. DMA offers summer camps for kids and teens and “Pro-Series” courses for adult-learners. Founded in 2001 by a group from Stanford University, DMA is best known for its premier summer programs hosted at 18 prestigious destination campuses, such as Stanford University, Harvard University and the University of Chicago – just to name a few. In addition to its summer programs, DMA provides on-site training to schools and companies and offers workshops throughout the year at its training facility in Campbell, CA.

I had a great learning experience with DMA!

I had the pleasure of taking some DMA courses last winter and can honestly say that it was an amazing and valuable experience. I learned so much so quickly and was able to immediately apply my knowledge in the classroom and in the field with the John Lennon Bus. For more information you can visit digitalmediaacademy.org

Sony Continues To Provide Professional HD Video Equipment For DMA Film and Video Courses Given At College and University Campuses in U.S. and Canada

Campbell, CA — The Digital Media Academy (DMA), a leading provider of film and video training for educators, adult learners and teens, announced today that Sony Electronics has renewed its official sponsorship and will remain the exclusive supplier of video equipment for DMA’s courses. Sony provides its most current state-of-the-art professional high-definition video cameras and other equipment for use by students in DMA consolidated classes, which take place throughout the summer on college and university campuses including Stanford, Brown, Harvard, U of Chicago, U of British Columbia in Vancouver, U of Texas, Austin and many more.

“DMA is thrilled to continue its successful relationship with Sony as a corporate sponsor,” said Dave Livingston, Director of Instruction for the Academy and its programs. “We’ve made our name providing beginner to advanced training for teens and adults, using the latest and greatest industry standard tools. This relationship puts the cutting-edge, professional Sony video technology, including the HDV™ series of digital video camcorders, directly into the hands of our film and video students.”

Sony’s high-definition camcorders are the choice of professionals working in a range of video applications including electronic field production and newsgathering, and event videography, as well as leading university film and video programs.

“Training programs like the Digital Media Academy are an important part of Sony’s educational focus,” said Shari Sentlowitz, Sony’s Education and Government marketing manager. “We are committed to preparing the next generation of industry professionals and educators, and we’re pleased to continue to be the exclusive video products provider to DMA’s film and video courses.”

About the Digital Media Academy:
The Digital Media Academy (DMA) is a nationally-recognized organization offering hands-on learning in a broad range of digital media technologies. DMA offers a wide range of courses targeted at kids, teens, adults and educators, Founded in 2001 by a group of professionals from Stanford University, DMA is known for its premier summer programs hosted at prestigious destination campuses nationwide. In addition to its summer programs, DMA provides on-site training to schools and companies throughout the year.  For more information, go to  http://www.digitalmediaacademy.org or call 866-656-3342.

Good teachers know that more important than the subject area being taught is teaching students that they can learn. Students who know they can learn develop habits that make learning fun, which can lead to a lifelong passion for learning new things.

Teachers who know how to do this well also model lifelong learning. I was reminded of this recently when I talked to Kris Drake, a teacher in the Palm Springs Unified School District. Kris has taught for over thirty years, including four years of teaching web design using Dreamweaver at Cathedral City High School and twenty five years of using technology tools to support education. This June, Kris will be retiring from teaching, but in her words, “I guarantee I will continue to be a lifelong learner, even after I retire.”

Kris is planning to further her learning in her retirement by pursuing DMA’s Web Design and Production Certification Program. The certification program will require her to take four courses over the next few years. As Kris explains, “being DMA certified will be an asset to my future. It will enable me to advance my training, learn innovative procedures, and become proficient in web design.” When I asked Kris what her future includes, she mentioned the possibility of starting a web design business. Wow!

DMA for the retirement years — that is lifelong learning at its best!

One of the challenges to teaching young students is keeping the curriculum engaging and interactive. With the increased impact of mass media on young minds, teachers are unfortunately often competing with forces beyond their control. Special effects in movies, the immediacy of the internet and the ways video games bring three dimensional worlds to life all combine to shape what “entertainment” means to kids and teens today. And so, of the many hats that teachers wear, the “entertainer” hat is particularly challenging.

Unfortunately, traditional means of teaching often leads to boredom and disengagement. While it is important for kids to learn how to learn regardless of teacher style, it helps when teachers can go an extra step in making their lessons engaging. As many teachers are finding out, technology integration adds a whole new dimension to learning — and you don’t need to be a entertainer to make it happen.

Integrating technology into the commonly taught subject areas (like math, science, social studies, language arts or literature) provides project oriented, hands-on learning opportunities. For example, I recently met middle school studies who combined social studies with technology — and now know more about the Civil War than they would otherwise. Traditional learning would have had them researching the topic and and then writing a five paragraph essay. These students took their research and writing to another level. They added music, photos and narration to create a ten minute documentary on the Civil War using iMovie. For more on this story, go to this past blog entry.

Linda Benefal, the current Coordinator of Instructional Technology for Alhambra Unified School District (outside of Los Angeles), has similarly made learning come to life for students by integrating technology. She is currently planning to return to teaching high school English in the fall, where she plans to re-invigorate her curriculum with technology based projects. She hopes to have her students create digital stories, literary newspapers and multimedia presentations. They will also create their own website as an electronic portfolio of their work. As she explains, “I see no reason for students to be disengaged and bored in the classroom. I passionately believe that creating an educational environment that provides many methods of learning and many ways to demonstrate mastery of the content will harness the imagination of my students. In the past, when my students did projects utilizing technology, they often surprised me with the scope of their projects. They went far beyond the project requirements and provided a fresh point-of-view that demonstrated both critical thinking and creativity. ”

Stay tuned for more examples like these.

By James Alguire, Lead Final Cut Pro Instructor, DMA @ UC San Diego

I’ve been teaching Final Cut Pro courses at DMA for about 4 years now.
Each time I teach a class, I am challenged and grow as a teacher and also as a Final Cut Pro user and editor.

Final Cut is such a robust program and since I’ve been editing on it since version ONE (we are now up to SIX),
I have watched it grow and offer even more tools for my work.

What’s great about teaching new and existing FCP users is that there is always a question of ‘How do I do this?’, and sometimes, I’ve never had to execute said question, so as a group we figure it out together!  I love collaborating with my students in that regard.  And sometimes I watch their projects and get inspired in my own work. (Another great benefit to teaching!)

I also love working with ‘mature’ students who are adapting to a new platform: Sometimes an Operating System – Sometimes a new program.
I love the moment when they are able to execute an edit and they get very excited and want to show me their work!
This always reminds me of my first films, when I found the ‘right’ cut, I always wanted to share it with as many people as possible.

At the end of the day, editing for me is about telling a story.  Choosing the right ‘frame’ to cut upon is sometimes essential to telling that story.
FCP is a tool that we learn  and I embrace the challenges of helping new and current editors learn their tool to better tell their stories.

By Chris Platz, Lead 3d Game Art and Design Instructor, DMA @ Stanford University

After last week’s Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco, I realized that we are indeed in a new Renaissance, and most of us don’t even know it. The current convergence of social networks, virtual worlds, and games is connecting people world wide faster, and in new ways that are mind boggling.

The research going on in the two departments I work in at Stanford has opened my eyes to many of these new paradigm shifts on the Web. The current group I am spending the most time with is the Stanford Humanities Lab shl.stanford.edu

This is where society meets art, meets technology. Our new open source 3D virtual world platform Sirikata is being developed so that anyone can build a networked virtual environment, and use it for what ever they like.

http://www.sirikata.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page

The other research going on the the Computer Science Department, Graphics group, is also truly amazing. Tools that allow for anyone to build a great avatar will soon be available. A few Ph.D. students have a rendering system that rendered over 12 BILLION polygons realtime, and with 6 simultaneous users in that networked environment! Incredible advances.

What does all of this mean for me as an instructor? By next year we’ll have a virtual classroom environment in 3D, with people logged in from all over the world. Inside people will be able to upload their 3D models and textures directly from their favorite 3D package, and we’ll build worlds, games, whatever, together and be able to talk with Voip. All of this will happen with dynamic lighting.

This should all trickle down to K-12 education, and allow children to start building virtual environments to express themselves, learn, and communicate in such a manner that they will far surpass us old folks by the time I see them in my DMA students in college classrooms. They already know more than I do in many ways, and I love the collaborative learning that goes on when generations come together around new technologies.

Recently I became aware of the Mary Pickford Institute for Film Education, a non-profit organization based in the Los Angeles area. The organization furthers the legacy and creativity of Mary Pickford, co-founder of the film studio United Artists and one of the original founders of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The Institute has a public research library, in addition to offering educational initiatives using film, video and digital media. Their hope, according to their website, is “to empower students by helping them realize they have a voice that is worthy of being heard.”

At the CUE Conference in Palm Springs, we met Andi Hicks, director for the Mary Pickford Institute. In what follows, she tells about the Institute’s two Mobile Classrooms and reflects on her experience in meeting DMA instructors at CUE:

The Mary Pickford Institute for Film Education’s educational outreach program is designed to “Ignite an Excitement for Learning” by introducing the world of digital media to students through our two Mobile Film Classrooms.  Each of our production studios on wheels is fully equipped to teach 21st Century learning skills to students in Grades 3 – 12.  (although we have had great success with kindergarteners and special needs children and adults, as well.) Our buses provide total environments where students can focus on learning both technical skills and the art of creative storytelling. Technically, students learn basic camera operation, graphic composition and placement, computer competency, how to digitize and manage data, video and audio editing, information gathering through the internet, and how to output and upload.  Most importantly, students learn that they have a voice and one that is worthy of being heard. Scholastically, students are encouraged to use and expand their knowledge of math, language, geography, science and history to augment their storytelling skills.  We feel we have created an educational interface to carry students from the classroom to their unique place global community. 

I was personally thrilled to discover DMA. And I became even more enthusiastic after attending two 20-min. “pop-out” sessions (Adding music in FCP and Basic Camera Techniques).  The instructors were succinct experts who took a personal interest in each attendee. What I learned in those 40 minutes is invaluable, and I will make use of every tip and instruction in not only in my own work, but also while working with others.

I know that concentrated professional training through DMA can only result in the ability for the teachers and staff at the Mary Pickford Institute to become even more proficient and enable us to provide a higher quality of instruction and inspiration to our students.  I look forward to a long and exciting future between the Digital Media Academy and The Mary Pickford Institute for Film Education.

Andi Hicks
Director, Mary Pickford Institute

Images Copyright Heather Reid Kwok Photography

In July of 2006 I spent two weeks at the Digital Media Academy immersing myself in the world of digital photography and Photoshop. Since Photoshop was not the most intuitive software to me, I was glad for the hands on training to get a handle on the basic and more advanced editing tools that it provides.  The instructor knew his stuff!  He was able to show us how to achieve the same result using at least three different methods and explain which method he thought was best which helped me grasp just how much Photoshop had to offer.  It felt like drinking from a fire hose at times!  However by the end of the week, everything would start to come together and it was amazing to see how much I had learned in such a short time.

The courses were a great combination of out in the field shooting and in the classroom learning Photoshop.  I learned some valuable photography skills that helped me take better photos from the start and in the end saves me tons of time since getting the shot right the first time takes less time then trying to correct problems in Photoshop.  The small class size made it easy to get personal time with the instructor to ask my questions and learn what I was specifically looking to learn in these courses.

After two weeks I had gone from never using Photoshop to using Photoshop to edit all of my photos.  DMA’s courses allowed me to gain the skills and confidence to launch my photography business shortly thereafter.  Without the DMA course I never would have gotten my business off the ground and running so quickly.  Since the summer of 2006 my photography business has taken off thanks to DMA!    It’s the best investment of time and money that I’ve put into my business and I recommend these courses for any aspiring photography who is looking to lauch or take their photography business to the next level.

Hi, I’m Ben Jaffe, one of DMA’s instructors. In our Music & Video Production course, we’ll be composing and recording an original song, mixing and mastering it, and creating a music video and dvd to accompany the music. We’ll be using the best software tools for the job. I’d like to talk a bit about mixing music in “Logic Studio,” the audio software we’ll be using.

Logic Studio is one of the industry standard audio software packages used in recording studios. I believe Logic is easier to learn than many of the others, but it is just as versatile and powerful.

There are several steps to recording a song. First, you write the song, and decide what instruments play which parts. Then, you record the parts, and input the parts for the software instruments. After that, you mix and master the song. I’ll be talking about those last steps in this blog entry.

Mixing is mainly just setting the volume levels of different instruments so they sound good together. When you go to a concert, the engineer standing in front of that huge board somewhere in the back-center of the audience is the sound mixer. In that case, the mixer only gets one shot at mixing it right, since they are mixing a live show. Recording studios are great because we have plenty of time to get the song to sound exactly the way we want it to sound. And if something sounds entirely wrong, we can just re-record it!

We can also use automation to simulate live mixing. If we have a guitar solo, we can push the guitar’s volume slider up to make it louder, and pull it back down after the solo is over. Automation lets us do this automatically exactly the same every time we play our song.

There are other tricks we can use. When we record an artist playing or singing a part, we call that a take. We usually record several takes so we can get the best one. If none of them are perfect, we can actually stitch multiple takes together and use the best parts from each take. For example, if the guitarist botched one chord, but the rest of the take was perfect, we can substitute in a chord from another take to fix it. Logic makes splicing clips together very easy. In the project pictured below, I had two substandard takes, so I used different parts of each take to create a better one. (You can hear the song at the bottom of this post).

We can also add “Equalization” to a track. “EQ” lets us change the volume of specific ranges of frequencies. In other words, if the vocalist’s track sounds muddy, we can boost the higher frequencies and take down the lower ones to increase the clarity of their voice. If we have a high-pitched whine in the background, we can take out just the offending frequency.

Here are some examples of the kinds of problems we can fix by mixing the song. I recorded this song with my friend Misha Byrne a few months ago. For all three examples, I’ll play the unmixed version before the mixed version, so you can compare them.

In the first clip, listen to the volume levels. The vocals get a bit quiet on “Maybe I’ll never see…”
In the second clip, you may notice the high pitched noise in the background. Also, the ‘t’ in “heart” gets lost in the unmixed clip.
In the third clip, notice the error in the guitar on the last chord. In the mixed version, I spliced in another recording of Misha playing that chord correctly to make it sound better.

I’ve only mentioned a few of the tools recording engineers and mixers use to arrange and mix songs. We cover them all in our Music and Video Production Class, plus we cover the video side of things as well. We’re all very excited for this class. There is so much to learn, and this class will give every student the knowledge they need to get started in both audio and video.

Here’s the full song. Misha Byrne is a singer, guitarist, and songwriter in Queensland, Australia.

I hope to see you all this summer. This course will be a blast!

-Ben

By Geoff Beatty, Lead Maya Instructror

There are many things to consider when you create an animated character.  3D modeling and animation are processes which require constant evaluation and decision-making.  That is why it’s sometimes helpful to group the thousands of visual choices available into basic, fundamental principles.  For me, one of the most important of these is the idea of asymmetry.

The dictionary would define asymmetry as an inequality between two parts, and in the world of mathematics, this is usually undesirable.  In the context of design (and in 3D modeling and animation in particular) asymmetry is vitally important in establishing both believability and interest.

Asymmetry helps to establish believability because our world is naturally assymetrical.  The most basic example is the human face.  Which face below is correct?

Asymmetry helps to establishes interest because variability from one thing to another, in this case left to right, automatically generates more interest.  Which of the two boxes below is more “interesting?”

Now, how does this translate into the context of 3D modeling and animation?  How do we achieve asymmetry in Maya?  There are some simple ways to do this.

First, a common approach to modeling characters is to work on one half and then mirror the geometry to the other side.  This is a smart way to work, as it resembles the rough symmetry of most characters and simultaneously cuts the work in half.  However, this leaves us with a completely symmetrical model when we want something more believable.  It looks, for lack of a better word, “computer-ish.”  We can avoid this by simply altering certain elements of one side of the model through scaling or sculpting or using lattice deformers, as in the image below.

This is fine for modeling, but how do we incorporate asymmetry into animation?  There are essentially two ways of doing this.  One is while posing the model.  Consider which of these two poses is more dynamic, more readable, more believable:

Finally, the during animation, motion curves representing opposite sides of the body can be offset to provide a sort of temporal asymmetry.  This creates a pleasant overlap and flexibility to a characters action, an important step in creating a believable sense of weight.

Asymmetry, in short, is a vital step in creating a believable character.  Its presence is a clear indicator of a thoughtful designer, modeler and animator.