[Gfx-cafe] Digital Filmmaking course at UNM

Dear ABQ digital-media community,

I would like to tell you about a course in Digital Filmmaking which I will
be teaching in the Spring of 2009. In this course, students from
Engineering and the Arts will work together to make a short CG movie.
The idea is that we will break up the students into teams like they do in
a real production studio, from folks on the engineering side working on
the renderer and the physical simulation to folks on the art side working
on modeling or animation.

To participate in the class you don't necessarily have to be a enrolled in
IF&DM (or even be a student at UNM), but there are some requirements. On
the engineering side, students should have taken at least the ECE/CS 412
Introduction to Computer Graphics course I will be teaching this fall (or
have comparable experience). If you have not taken it and cannot take it
in Fall 2008 then speak to me to see if you can participate in the class.

On the art side, you should have experience in whatever sub-team you want
to be part of. You will need to submit your portfolio that demonstrates
this experience, since we will use them to decide who will get into the
class. In particular, we need folks that can do modeling, animation, and
shader/texture design.

I am attaching a draft of the syllabus to this email. I'm sending out
this email almost a year in advance to give people time to prepare for
the class. For example, I encourage the folks in the arts that want to
take the class to sign up for modeling and animation classes offered at
CNM if they have not taken them already. I will look at portfolios as
soon as I receive them, and I will start discussions immediately with
the more talented students in both art and engineering so that I can
find leaders to guide the various teams. This way, we can have everything
in place by this Fall and perhaps even start on pre-pre-production.

This class is going a lot of work but also a pretty amazing experience. I
have already lined up folks from industry (Sony Imageworks, Pixar, etc)
to serve as mentors and team leaders for the class, and so you will get
the kind of experience film production companies are looking for. After
all, this class is designed to help get you get a foot in the door! At
the end of the two-semester sequence, we will have a high-quality short
film that can be part of your portfolio.

Faculty, please distribute this to students you think might be interested
in participating in such a class.

Please let me know if you have any questions.

Thanks!

-Pradeep Sen

--
Pradeep Sen
Assistant Professor
Advanced Graphics Lab
Dept. of Electrical & Computer Engineering
University of New Mexico