Prestigious Summer Camps at Swarthmore College

The Digital Media Academy was founded at Stanford University ten years ago and has expanded to many prestigious colleges and universities all over the United States and Canada.  This year the Digital Media Academy will be offering an extensive number of summer camps for kids ranging in ages 6-18 at Swarthmore College!  Each camp features hands on learning experiences with cutting edge media technologies ranging from robotics, 3D modeling, animation, video production, game design, graphics and much more!  Click here for summer camp info:  Swarthmore College Summer Camps.

Take advantage of the residential options available at Swarthmore College summer camps by allowing your kids to truly experience a pre-college atmosphere. Parents can vacation in nearby beautiful Philadelphia and visit the historic Independence Mall, dine in the exquisite “Old City” section and adventure to world famous scenic wonderland of Longwood Gardens.  It is a perfect opportunity for the entire family to visit Philadelphia.  Tailor the kids summer sleepaway camp experiences to fit your schedule – weekend residential sleepaway summer camps will make your summer camp planning easier.

The Digital Media Academy has industry leading experts to instruct your kids in all digital design fields at all age levels.  Give them the opportunity to get a leg up on the competition by completing these top rated courses and exposing them to the most cutting edge computer applications and equipment.  You will have access to top of the line software, computers, and video equipment to be working as a true professional in the field would.  Check out the list of summer camp classes for teens ages 13 to 18:  Teen Summer Camps.  Here’s the link for summer camps for kids ages 11 to 14:  Pre-Teen Summer Camps. Here’s the info for kids ages 6 – 12:  Kids Summer Camps

Younger aged kids have access to all the same equipment and also have the opportunities during the day for recreational games that emphasize team building and creating lasting friendships. 

Come see for yourself why kids come back to the Digital Media Academy year after year.  It is not just the amazing courses we offer, our highly skilled instructors, the fun counselors, or the friends and camaraderie they have.  It is all that combined which we call the Digital Media Academy Experience. 

I invite you to begin your own experience this summer at Swarthmore College!  I look forward to seeing you soon!

Thomas Hensler – Digital Media Academy

Ready to register for Philadelphia Summer Camps?  Click here:

Register for Digital Media Academy Summer Camps

Enjoy your Philadelphia Vacation!

By Ben Caplan – Instructor

Summer is almost here and it is just in time! Last summer at Digital Media Academy we broke out our Adobe Creative suite tool box and dove into the tools of the web trade. We made really cool animations using Flash, edited photos using PhotoShop and we used DreamWeaver to create our very own super cool websites.

This summer we have even more cool stuff in store. The web world is always changing and so you need to keep learning in order to stay up with the current graphic and web trends.  At Digital Media Academy we’ll be introducing you to  the latest tools, just like we do each summer. 

Speaking of the latest tools, here is an interesting article on HTML 5. 

Click here:  HTML 5 Article

Check out  a cool demo of what Adobe has in store for us next Adobe CS5

Click here:  Adobe updates

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Ready for summer camp?  Enroll for Summer Camp Now!  Here are some handy Digital Media Academy links for adult, teen, preteen and kids summer camp scheduling details.

Click here for classes for adults:  Digital Media Academy Course List

Click here summer camps for teens:  Digital Media Academy Summer Camps for Teens

Click here summer camps for kids:  Digital Media Academy Summer Camps for PreTeen Kids

Click here summer camps for young children:  Digital Media Academy Summer Camps for Kids

As I prepare for Summer 2010 Stanford Filmmaking Adventures Camp I am reminded of the successes of 2009. The project that always yielded the most creative and witty videos was the “Commercial.” The students’ task was to select a product and sell it to their audience. (An assignment quite familiar to professionals in the media world). Yet at Digital Media Academy the demand to produce high bucks is replaced with the enjoyable pressure to create high laughs at our End of Camp Film-Festival.

First, we reviewed the 4 stages of film-making: Pre-Production, Production, Post-Production, and Exhibition. This enabled the students to really plan all aspects of the project before they filmed — an essential skill.  Then the brainstorming began. The costume box was transformed from neat & tidy to the delightful whirlwind of a creative mess. Debates over wide-angle shots versus close-ups competed with the sounds of furious typing at the keyboard so the script would be ready in time for the production phase.

“Camera ready?” the assistant director calls out.

“Ready!” the cinematographer answers.

“Actors Ready?”

“Ready!” pipes a lion-dressed “salesman”

A kid from the web design class sneaks in to watch the action.

“Camera Rolling”

“Action!”

To me, the most fulfilling thing about being a film instructor is seeing the kids come out of their shells. When they perform in front of the camera, even the ones who seem “too cool” or “shy” simply can’t hold back and they shine brilliantly.  I can see the surprise on their parents’ faces during the film festival. It is truly exciting.

Since last summer at Digital Media Academy, I’ve been producing video tours and websites for a real estate company. I’ve been itching to return to DMA to see what kind of parodies these kids can make of video tours! It’s going to be a blast!

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Click here for classes for adults:  Digital Media Academy Course List

Click here summer sleepaway and day camps for teens:  Digital Media Academy Summer Camps for Teens

Click here summer sleepaway and summer camps for kids:  Digital Media Academy Summer Camps for PreTeen Kids

Click here summer camps for young children:  Digital Media Academy Summer Camps for Kids

By Michelle OGrady

Summer is fast approaching and in sunny Los Angeles that means more time to do the things your kids love. Digital Media Academy courses at UCLA provide the perfect mixture of fun and education! Families looking for a summer sleepaway residential camp in California love the University of California (UCLA) American summer camp experience!

The addition of some great new teen programs such as our Action Sports & Media Combination courses allows our teen camp participants to enjoy skateboarding while learning practical skills in filmmaking. Digital Media Academy’s Action Sports Filmmaking and Skate Boarding and Filmmaking at UCLA will also give your child the leg up in today’s competitive job market!

With the ever-growing industry in Action Sports in Southern California, Digital Media Academy at UCLA will be able to provide an advantage to anyone who is thinking of pursuing a career in that field. It’s a great way to get started on your new career choice using some of the hottest technologies. Students will be able to learn cutting edge cinematography techniques and editing footage that your teen films while they visit a real life action sports event.

Register for this or explore any of the other great courses here:  UCLA Summer Camps

Seriously though, this is a real situation that many students and professionals face.  In creative professions such as 3D animation, this is the norm.  Work hard, critique, make changes, critique, undo those changes, and repeat.  Now, if you work smart, this cycle of work and constructive feedback can actually help you make the best product possible.  But if you don’t understand this cycle, you are just going to be frustrated in your efforts.

Fortunately, it’s not too difficult to work smart if you can remember one phrase – “one step at a time.”  Whatever you’re tackling, whether it’s a screenplay or a website layout or a music video, it’s important to work in stages.  This is called working “iteratively.”

Since I teach the pro and teen Maya classes at DMA, I’ll take this general idea and apply it to the process of 3D modeling.  3D modeling, like any part of Maya, can be very complex, so it is even more important to work in a systematic way and give yourself room to backtrack if necessary, whether based on client/teacher feedback, or simply your own judgment.  What that translates to in the context of modeling is: work with as little detail as possible, make some adjustments, add more detail, make some adjustments, add some final detail, make final adjustments, and smooth it out.

So, I share with you this cautionary tale from a university class I taught several years back.  The project was to model an environment – architecture, some props, and some effects.  It was the final project, and students had about a month to finish up their fairly complex scene.

One student, who did not understand the process of working iteratively, started working on a banana for a bowl of fruit that existed in the center of his scene. I urged him to do a rough pass on it, like a simple cube stretched out.  Then he could return to it later, add a little bit more detail, fashion that into a closer approximation of the banana, and then move onto something else.  Finally, he could come back, smooth it out, and that would be that.

Well, he didn’t really listen and, like so many novices, started out with an extremely high-resolution cube that he was nearly impossible to change except by moving each row of points, one at a time, to match the profile of the reference imagery he had imported.  And that’s how he spent the rest of that class, face close to the screen, picking and moving, picking and moving, picking and moving.  When I arrived to class the following week, there he was, hunched over, moving those points, and with hundreds to go before he was going to make it look like a real banana.

In the end, he spent hours and hours of his time working on that banana, and never really got to finish the rest of the scene.  By the last week, it was really too late.  The banana didn’t even look that great.  Because all of those points had been moved individually, it ended up looking like a bumpy yellow root.

This poor student made a very common novice error.  In 3D modeling, it’s tempting to try and jump to the end by adding lots of detail (i.e. points and edges) to a model because that’s what they look like when their finished – high-resolution geometry.  But that’s a last step, not a first step.  It’s important to work with as little detail as possible, getting the underlying structure and proportions and the contour of the model right before you start adding a lot of detail.

Changes, adjustments, refinements – these are an inevitable part of the process, even if you are working alone.  So, you need to develop a workflow that accounts for change.  The student in my story slipped on the proverbial (and literal) banana.  You can avoid that fate by taking things one step at a time.

You can read more about Maya Animation here:

Continue the lesson here:

Part 1: Learn Maya Animation

Part 2:  Learn Maya Animation

Part 3:  Learn Maya Animation

Click here for classes for adults:  Digital Media Academy Course List

Click here summer camps for teens:  Digital Media Academy Summer Camps for Teens

Click here summer camps for kids:  Digital Media Academy Summer Camps for PreTeen Kids

Click here summer camps for young children:  Digital Media Academy Summer Camps for Kids

My classmates and colleagues and I have a particular way of speaking to each other when we discuss film and filmmaking, and after three years of film school the language we share is fairly rich and fairly idiosyncratic.  One of the expressions we like to use is “from soup to nuts,” which means from beginning to end (back in the early 19 somethin-or-others, a meal at a restaurant started with soup and ended with nuts).

How long is the movie, from soup to nuts?

How much is the camera package going to cost, from soup to nuts?

Wow!  She took first prize at Sundance!?  How much did she win, from soup to nuts?

You get the idea.  You’ll notice that the three examples I gave all have to do with money.  That’s because, to be perfectly honest, film school is an expensive endeavor.  I’m sure I speak for all my classmates when I say that we wouldn’t trade the experience for anything.  We’re doing what we love, we’re getting better at doing it, and we’re surrounded by people who support and believe in our work, and we know that once we enter the professional filmmaking world we probably won’t be in such a comfortable environment.  That’s not to say, though, that everything about filmmaking is prohibitively expensive.  The actual equipment one needs to make a film, from soup to nuts, is very affordable.  Chances are, you already own the major components.  They are:

A video camera:

Most new video cameras shoot onto memory cards.   The new handheld, consumer grade cameras yield a really impressive image, and they shoot in HD, but cameras that shoot on standard definition mini-DV are great, too.  They’re just as easy to use, they have all the ports necessary to edit footage, and the fact that you’re shooting onto tape gives you the added security of having actual masters, meaning a tangible copy of the original footage you can archive.

A computer with at least 100 gigs of hard drive space:

For the Digital Filmmaking for Teens courses we use Apple computers because Final Cut Studio, the editing and finishing software we teach, only runs on Macs.  I personally have a MacBook Pro with 4 gigs of RAM, and it edits High Definition footage like a champ.  Before that, though, I had a PowerBook G4, and if I didn’t start getting professional editing work that requires a more robust processor I’d still be using it.

For now, a computer with a lot of hard drive space, at least 100gigs, will suffice.  But once you start getting serious about your film projects, you’re going to want to invest in an external hard drive.  Something in the 250 gig range is perfectly acceptable.  Just make sure that the drive spins at 7200 rpm and that it has a FireWire port (as opposed to just a USB port).  Glyph hard drives are really reliable and come with a great warranty.  Here’s the drive that just about everyone at NYU used during first year.  You’ll notice that it works out to less than a dollar per gig:

Glyph Hard Drives

Editing Software:

We teach Final Cut Studio at Digital Media Academy, and it is in my opinion the best editing software on the market today.  The interface is very intuitive because most of the editing is done on the timeline; you trim the clips, move them to where they belong in the story, and before you know it you have a movie.  Final Cut Studio comes with the programs Color (a great color correction tool), Compression, Live Type, and DVD Studio, which is such a powerful program that I’d pay up to $500 dollars for it if it were sold separately.

Blank DVD’s:

To screen your movie!  Look for bundles of DVD-r; they also work great as back-up storage media.

And that, from soup to nuts, is what you need to make a movie:  a camera, a computer, editing software, and blank DVD’s, and much of this equipment can be purchased at DMA at a considerable discount.  In my classes, I make it clear that the important part about making a movie—the writing and storytelling—is free.  It’s entirely within you.  Now, with cameras, computers, and editing software at such reasonable prices, the expensive part isn’t all that expensive, either.

I am teaching DMA’s Digital Filmmaking for Teens courses at Harvard and Brown University this summer. 

Learn Maya Animation – Bouncing Ball – Part 3

By Geoff Beatty

The saga continues…

In the first two installments of this tutorial, you learned how to create a pretty good, albeit generic, bouncing ball in Maya.  The first part dealt with setting basic keyframes for position and rotation.  The second part dealt with using the graph editor to shape those keyframes into a serviceable ball.  Now, we turn our attention to making this ball look like something specific, like a baseball or a bowling ball or a beach ball or whatever.

Looking and Interpreting

As I mentioned in the previous installments, it’s always a good idea to find some reference footage (good) or shoot your own (better).  I’ve included a youtube video below that has a lot of different types of balls being dropped or tossed.  This is a really great example:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKJegbjS4N8]

Now, what’s important is that we don’t just try to copy these exactly.  That would be like tracing and tracings don’t really convey the character that we are going for.  Better would be to look at some of the footage, frame by frame if possible, and determine what the overall qualities of the bouncing ball are.  For instance, does its height decrease a little or a lot with each bounce?  Does it squash a little bit when it hits the ground, or is it fairly rigid?  Does it seem to hang in the air a bit, or is it a fairly fast bounce?

It’s important to figure this out, or at least decide what you’re going for before you start messing with your bounce.  It would be very helpful in fact to sketch out your idea of what the bounce is going to look like.  Don’t overplan it though.  Have an attitude of experimentation and don’t be afraid to exaggerate.

Timing, Interpolation, and Squash and Stretch

There are two basic things that we will be adjusting.  The first is the timing of the bounces.  That involves moving keyframes around in the timeline or graph editor.  The second thing is the interpolation between the keyframes.  This is a graph editor only operation.  We’re going to work with the in and out tangents of the keyframe to change the way the ball moves from one point to the next.  Finally, depending on the example, we’re going to be adding some squash and stretch to the ball.

An Example

Just for the sake of this example, let’s pretend this ball is a beach ball.  A beach ball moves fairly slowly, retains a high level of bounce, and is slightly squishy.  Now how does that translate into Maya?

Our first step is to look at the placement of the keyframes.  My generic ball is a little fast, so I’m going to go into the timeline and adjust the keyframes.  I’m going to do that by SHIFT-LMB dragging in the timeline to select all the frames.  You’ll notice that when I do that, it creates a red selection of the keyframes and also places some arrows at the middle and both ends.  I’m going to pull on the right-most arrow, the circled one in the screenshot, to basically scale those keys out on the timeline so that they will be slower.  For my taste, dragging it to 60 seems about right to me (before I go on, I’m going to right-click in the red area of the selected keyframes and choose “snap” – that will make sure all the keyframes are on whole numbers rather than half-frames).

That slows things down, but now I need to get the height decreasing believably from one bounce to the next.  It’s not like a flat basketball, so it won’t be completely dead when it hits the ground, but it does decrease slightly.  In the graph editor, I’m going to take the second and third “up” keyframes on the Translate Y attribute and move them down (remember to have the move tool selected).  You may have to adjust the tangents on the “bounce” keyframes to maintain a nice curve (screenshot).

The last thing I’m going to add is some squash and stretch to the ball as it bounces.  I’m going to add only a little bit, because too much will look strange.  However, I urge you to experiment with it once you get started.  You can get some pretty startling and funny results.

I’m going to advance the playhead to the frame just before the first bounce (in my case frame 12).  I’m going to set a keyframe on the scale attributes by hitting SHIFT+R.  Then I’m going to go to the next frame and using my scale tool, I’m going to scale it down in the Y-axis.  You might have to compensate for it pulling off the floor by moving it down a bit.  Then, I’m going to scale out in the X and Z axes because when you push down on any sort of ball, the sides push out.  Next, I’m going to advance one more keyframe and scale the ball back to its normal state.

Although this one frame squash doesn’t seem like much, it adds a little spice of believability to something that would otherwise look remarkably generic.  You can add it to the next two bounce frames, of course decreasing the amount of squash each time as the ball loses energy.

Going Further

Well, you’ve reached the end of this tutorial, but you’ve got a lot of room to experiment now.  Try different timings, interpolations, whatever.  Don’t be afraid to exaggerate or make it look like it’s got a mind of its own.  If you can make a plain old sphere look like something that it’s not, then you’re already on your way to becoming a great animator.

You can read more about Maya Animation here:

Have you read these additional posts about Maya Animation?

Part 1: Learn Maya Animation

Part 2:  Learn Maya Animation

Learning Maya Animation One Step at a Time

Classes for adult learners:  Digital Media Academy Course List

Overnight and day summer camps for teens:  Digital Media Academy Summer Camps for Teens

Day and sleepaway summer camps for kids:  Digital Media Academy Summer Camps for PreTeen Kids

Click here summer camps for young children:  Digital Media Academy Summer Camps for Kids

By Seamus Harte

The 10 Best Academic Programs for Documentary Filmmakers. That is the title of the article I stumbled upon surfing the web for a graduate program that provided a Master’s Degree in Documentary Filmmaking. That is also where I found Digital Media Academy’s Documentary Filmmaking Camp. It was sitting in between Stanford University’s Documentary Film Department and UC  Berkeley’s School of Journalism (two schools you may have heard of). Of course Duke, University of Florida, NYU, and George Washington were some other schools tossed in the mix.

Now, we aren’t offering a Master’s Degree to attend our filmmaking camps, but we are offering top notch instruction. The article highlighted Digital Media Academy’s ability to provide a “quick but comprehensive taste of the craft.”

Maybe you graduated high school and you’re thinking about attending a 4 year college to pursue a career of movie making, perhaps you should check out this camp and get a head start on making your passion your career.

Perhaps you are looking to change careers but nervous about diving right into a school.

Or maybe you are a filmmaker and you are just looking to sharpen your tools.

Why spend your time and money with big schools and uncertainty when you can attend a Digital Media Academy camp and discover what new path you want to head down.

Check out the rest of the article here:

Check out the Digital Media Academy Documentary Filmmaking Camp here:

By Phil Gibson, Founder Digital Media Academy

At least a few days each week, I spend time answering the phone, chatting with parents who are trying to figure out what summer camp to send their child to. One thing is clear, summer camp remains a top priority for families. I get that. We have 3 children ages 4 to 10 and sending them to a summer camp experience is a given. What is also clear in this tough economy is that many parents are waiting a bit longer and choosing more carefully. Let’s face it. Some families are worried about job security or have already felt the impact of a layoff – or worse. Other families are wondering when their luck will run out. Even for the majority who are registering as usual, there is a higher sense of purpose – parents feel better about spending on quality this year.

I see opportunity in this economy. Perhaps this won’t be a stellar year for the summer camp industry, though our industry will do better than some. I see this an an opportunity to demonstrate our values. We have seen a record number of scholarship applications, and we will offer the most financial aid in our history.  In the end, parents want the best for their children and it is our #1 mission to deliver the best.

Learn more about our scholarship opportunities: 

Financial Assistance for Summer Camp

Learn about Grants for Teachers: 

Grants for Teacher Education

What do teachers say about Grants for Teachers?

Teachers at Summer Camp!

Let’s look at the role and responsibilities of the Music Producer within the music industry. A music producer can wear many hats. I will try to cover them all here, but do know that depending on the project a producer may wear all of the hats or perhaps just one.

Let’s check out some of the hats the music producer wears:

1) The Idea Hat

It can be the music producer’s job to gather ideas for the project. This may seem vague, and it is, that is why artist hire a music producer. When all is said and done with the production of an album you essentially have a CD that has on record 12 – 15 “ideas”. It is the music producer’s job to steer this idea harvesting.

Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is an example of a “concept” album. On this album the Beatles worked with their producer George Martin to collect and shape their ideas of an album recorded by “Sgt. Pepper” and his band.

2) The Golden Ear Hat

Once the idea of the album is agreed upon the music producer can put on his Golden Ear Hat. While wearing this hat the producer will be responsible for making the decisions of song selection and musician selection. Lot’s of times a band will go into the studio with the general idea of an album and perhaps more songs than can fit on one album.

The producer will help select which songs should be put on the album by determining which songs best support the overall concept and idea of the album.

Often to bring the songs to their full potential additional musicians need to be brought in. Perhaps, the chorus of a song would benefit from a horn section, but none of the band members play any horn instruments. Or sometimes, the band members themselves need to be replaced for the best sound on record. The producer is responsible for making these tough decisions that can ultimately make or break the album.

3) The Coaching Hat
Once the musicians and songs are selected the producer then becomes the coach in the studio. The producer is now responsible to coach the artist and the studio musicians to come together and create the most accurate record of their ideas at hand. Perhaps this is helping the drummer find the groove or discuss different approaches with the guitarist for the solo. Sometimes it can also be much more psychological than musical. Maybe it’s making the vocalist feel confident so they give the best vocal performance.

4) The Schedule Hat
It is very important to not only have a schedule but have one that allows for your artist to provide their best performances. It is the producers responsibility to keep the production on schedule in terms of finances and release date, but also in terms of morale and fatigue. What is the point of having the record released on time if you exerted your vocalist too much during the production and his vocals are the best? This balance of schedule is very important and requires the producer to juggle the demands of many different people in the process.

5) The Follow Through Hat
Once the production involving the artist is done they are able to go back on tour or go home and relax, but the record itself is still far from being done. The producer is responsible to oversee the Mixing and Mastering process. The mixing process is where a mixing engineer mixes together all of the audio files gathered in the recording process into one sonically beautiful stereo track. The mastering process involves a mastering engineer that ensures that each individual track on the album matches the sonic qualities of the other tracks on the album. Again it is the music producer’s responsibility to oversee these processes and ensure quality control.

These are examples of the hats that a music producer would wear in the record making process. The term “Producer” in some genres such as hip-hop, pop, dance, and electronica, is the actual producer of the music. These producers are the ones responsible for the production of the music track, or the “beat”.

Hopefully this shows you a little into the many hats of the music producer.