Robots!

Elicia Brandon has made a series of videos about David Hanson's latest robot. Hanson is a UT Dallas Ph.D candidate and entrepreneur. Great stuff!

Elicia is graduating this semester and this is en excellent example of what EMAC is all about: integrating new media publishing into your creative, work, and play activities.

Release Form

Here's a release for you can use for video. as discussed in class use it for everyone you interview / talk to.

UTD Metaverse Art Gallery Opening

The opening is this Saturday @ 9PM CST. You can join us in world or come to the mac lab. We'll help you set up a Second Life account if need be.

Be there or be analog. More info here.

Vloggies

Here are a whole set of contenders for the Vlog Awards - spend some time watching and use it for reference in your own work.

2 min idea pitch to class next tues! Have a rough prototype if possibe - but bring some material to class to work with. Feel free to us one of these shows as a model.

The Dark Side of Social Networks

So you are in college and looking for a good gig. What do you do in the age of GooTube? You make a video of course. And you claim you can serve a tennis ball 140 mph and bench press 495 pounds. Wait, no, maybe you shouldn't do that.

Actually I don't think Yale student Aleksey Vayner knew he was living in the age of web 2.0 and GooTube - his video was part of a supposedly confidential application to UBS for an investment banking job. If your video is digital, you should assume everyone will see it, at least until we have better permission layers on Internet media.

Social networks can connect you and make you popular, but they can also bring you 15 minutes of shame.

ATEC Showcase This Saturday!

Don't Miss the ATEC Showcase Saturday night @ 7. We'll have a sneak preview of our island in Second Life. Thanks to Russ, Christi, Steve, and Jeff for their tireless work! We'll have a full opening next month.

details here

homework

for this week is to (1) fine tune your videos per the comments made in class. (2) start thinking very hard about a final project idea - I want to hear it!

New EMAC Site & YouTube Group

Here's the new EMAC site - ugly right now but there will be lots of posts, updates, news, student content, etc.

And here's a YouTube Group - so be sure to join and add your videos here when you are ready to show off!

Rev3 is up and running

if you are into geek video - this is the new network from the Digg guys:
http://revision3.com/

Game Dev Weekend

from Tony Tyler, ATEC Visiting Assistant Professor and faculty sponsor for the Arts and Technology Student Association (ATSA):

Hi everyone.

As the faculty sponsor for the Arts and Technology Student Association (ATSA), I cordially invite you and your students to join our members to the first, ever, ATSA Game Development Weekend.

1. Labs will be open from 10/13/06 at 12:00 p.m. until 10/15/06 at 12:00 a.m. That's 60+ hours of open lab. So even if students don't want to participate, they have a lot of lab time open.

2. No experience is required. No set length of time is required. Everyone is welcome. Everyone is needed. Thursday night, 10/12/06, at 10:00 p.m., we will have a ramp-up session for everyone who is interested.

3. Every discipline is needed, IE., Sound, 3D, Design, Programming, Film, etc.

4. The weekend will end with the ATSA meeting on Sunday night with free BBQ, and a showing off of the level.

The Onyx Project

...a small independent film made for computer viewing aspires to blend serious cinematic storytelling with the popular shuffle feature in iPods and other music players. The film, “The Onyx Project,” is meant to be an experiment in nonlinear storytelling for the digital age.

More from the NYT

Revision3

Will it work? Saw a lot of these come and go in 1998-2000. Maybe the time, content, approach is right?

More on the new video network from the Digg guys.

Help with 3d, photoshop, etc

From fellow student Doug Hines:

If you need help helping your students, I can try to be of assistance.
I have a site : http://3d-artists.net that I would like to use for UTD student help. It could be place for students to recieve help on projects from other students. I as well as other senior/more experienced students are more than willing to offer help to beginner maya, zbrush, photoshop, and game development students (or anyone that asks for help).

Open it Up and Let Go

From an article in Business Week - some self reflection at the end of the piece:

What would this article look like if it were a real blog, and not just this glossy simulacrum?

Think of the way we produce stories here. It's a closed process. We come up with an idea. We read, we discuss in-house, and then we interview all sorts of experts and take their pictures. We urge them not to spill the beans about what we're working on. It's a secret. Finally, we write. Then the story goes through lots and lots of editing. And when the proofreaders have had their last look, someone presses the button and we launch a finished product on the world.

If this were a real blog, we probably would have posted our story pitch on Day One, before we did any reporting. In the blog world, a host of experts (including many of the same ones we called for this story) would weigh in, telling us what's wrong, what we're overlooking. In many ways, it's a similar editorial process. But it takes place in the open. It's a discussion.

Why draw this comparison? In a world chock-full of citizen publishers, we mainstream types control an ever-smaller chunk of human knowledge. Some of us will work to draw in more of what the bloggers know, vetting it, editing it, and packaging it into our closed productions. But here's betting that we also forge ahead in the open world. The measure of success in that world is not a finished product. The winners will be those who host the very best conversations.

Letting go of control is proving to be very difficult for mainstream media organizations...