I’ve been fortunate to work with so many awesome people on a variety of collaborative projects. As a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center, I contributed to two semester-long projects, as well as a number of novel interactive experiences. These efforts primed me for working in the technology sector at companies that prize collaboration and meaningful innovation. I’ve also initiated several creative collaborations with friends on my own time.
Depero Futuristi
CPeLevated
Grumpy Gus
Robot Love
Presidential Campaign
3 Panel Comics
Depero Futuristi
CLIENT: Museum of Arts and Design, Performa 09
My team was tasked with re-imagining Balli Plastici – the “plastic dance” created by Italian Futurist Fortunato Depero in 1918 – for this student project at Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center. I contributed my 3D modeling and animation skills, and helped out with project management and scoping. We digitized Depero’s puppets – which, for me, meant creating an animation rig and library of actions for each character – and developed an animation toolkit for people to create their own Futurist-inspired ballets.
We presented our work in New York City at the Performa 09 festival at the Museum of Arts and Design, which included a live demonstration of the animation software. Our version of Balli Plastici was featured as one of the best performances of the festival by Vulture.
A retrospective of our project was published in the GSTF International Journal on Computing (JoC) (ISSN: 2010-2283), Vol. 1, No.1, 2010.
Balli Plastici was featured in the February 10, 2010 edition of Art in America.
I animated this entire scene in 3D Studio Max, with stage direction by Francisco Souki:
I used 3D Studio Max’s particle generator to animate a “rain of cigarettes.”
CPeLevated
CLIENT: Chicago Public Library, YouMedia
PARTNERS: Chicago Scenic Studios, MacArthur Foundation, Pearson
CPeLevated was an Entertainment Technology Center student project that renovated space in Chicago’s Harold Washington Library for teenagers. The new space opened in July 2009 and is the home of the nationally-recognized YouMedia program. In addition to project management, I collaborated with my teammates on design and purchasing decisions, and developed a unique installation – a whiteboard in the form of a tree, with attached LCD picture frames.
Grumpy Gus
In this virtual world project, the audience cheers up Gus, a depressed cloud, by singing to him. We combined live performance and virtual puppetry to create this experience. My roles on the project included Modeler and Animator, and everyone on the team collaborated on the script. I was also the voice actor for Gus.
Robot Love
In ‘Robot Love’, two robots find a way to survive in the face of obsolescence. This was a live performance by an actor wearing a virtual reality headset and hand trackers. I was a modeler and animator on the project.
Presidential Campaign
I was a project manager and contributed some art assets to this collaborative crowd game. It uses directional input from Beyond Question remote controls to control the on-screen avatars. We split the audience into two teams and it was awesome watching them really get into it.
This was a collaboration between friends. One person would draw the comic, the next person would write the script based on what had been drawn. I then scanned and uploaded the finished comic.
