Digital Design

Oomph Interview Series Features Asian Students & Alumni

Readers of the Oomph blog — especially those with any interest or knowledge of Chinese — have been treated with the recent ‘Dragon Tales’ blog story series, written by the Digital Design program’s visiting scholar, Maggie Guo.

Maggie kicked things off in October and has lately been posting bilingual interviews with VFS students and alumni like Teresa Chang, Jeff Chen, Lina Zhao, Owen Chen, Yuan You, and Benson Chang.

With nearly half of VFS’s student body coming from outside of Canada, students in any program can expect a wide variety of nations represented — which, in this increasingly globalized entertainment industry, can only serve to expand a creative network of future collaborators.

We’re lucky to have Maggie providing us with a look at Asian students and grads from Digital Design. Visit Oomph to check out her posts, along with a host of other content for design-minded students and pros.

Plaid Men Web Series Unveiled

While VFS is a place focused on helping students spend most of their waking hours on amazing projects, staff and faculty also find unique ways to work together creatively.

Dionne Gordon and Jennifer Siddle, the Program Managers for Writing for Film & Television and Entertainment Business Management, respectively, are amongst the many Mad Men fans who can’t wait for season five to finally arrive. They decided to take the critically-acclaimed series into their own… hands.

With the help of many VFSers, they launched Plaid Men this past weekend – a web series that puts hand puppets inside the feisty Manhattan ad agency and picks up where season four left off. You can catch a new episode every Sunday night at PlaidMenWebSeries.com. In March there will be two episodes per week on Sundays and Thursdays in the lead up to Mad Men‘s season premiere on the 25th.

Plaid Men features the talents of Writing grads Bob Woolsey, Derek Thompson, Steve Toms, and Wade Fennig; Film Production grad Ryan Jackson; Writing/Film instructor Rudy Thauberger; Acting for Film & Television grads Naomi Dayneswood, Shannon Lang, Lauren Martin, and Aaron McCallum; and Head of Acting Bill Marchant.

Oh, and that title sequence? It’s created by Ian Berg, a grad of both Foundation Visual Art & Design and Digital Design.

Check out the first episode and ‘like’ the series on Facebook.

 

2011 Retrospective: Looking Back on an Amazing Year

2011 has been a year of incredible accomplishments by VFS students and alumni.

For the first time, we saw a Writing for Film & Television student screenplay produced on a global stage with grad Seth Lochhead’s Hanna. A team of Entertainment Business Management students took their Compendium short down to Screamfest LA and beat out seasoned pros for the Best Short Film award. And Digital Character Animation grad Rafael Cardenas took home his first Ariel Award – Mexico’s answer to the Oscars.

As any regular reader of this blog knows, that’s just the tip of the iceberg for VFS alumni achievements this year. Students and grads from all programs raised the bar even higher for the next wave of artists to come out of VFS, and we’ve pulled all of their stories together at vfs.com/2011.

Browse through the milestones of 2011, month by month. You’ll see a special video feature, VFS Blog and In Focus magazine stories, YouTube highlights, and what the wider VFS community had to say about it all.

Congratulations to everyone on an amazing year – and thanks for letting us tell your inspiring stories!

Video: Buck Creative Director in Conversation

Digital Design grad — and the Creative Director at Buck — Ryan Honey visited VFS recently to give back some of the experience he’s gained in the industry. (He even wrote a diary of his time here!)

During Ryan’s visit, he sat down for an on-camera conversation with Head of Digital Design, Amber Bezahler, where they talked about Buck’s work, Ryan’s interaction with students, and what it takes to be a successful designer today.

Check out the video here, or watch it on the VFS YouTube channel!

Peter Jin Hong Shares Experience from Google

“What does sex with geese have to do with user experience? As it turns out, everything.” In terms of unique openings to presentations, Peter Jin Hong’s first few minutes at Digital Design‘s Appetizers event will be very hard to top. The user experience expert, now working at Google+ Photos, and Digital Design alumnus spent a riveting fifteen minutes covering the aforementioned geese “stimulating”, done for tagging purposes as they were shipped to Oklahoma, the amount of time people take to decide on actions, inaction, or opinions, and how our frontal lobes have given us the capacity to make illusions into reality.

“Everything is mediated by an illusion, meaning anything we create as an illusion can be considered real.” Peter uses scientific research into perception and brain activity (he was formerly a marine biologist and geneticist) to inform the decisions he makes as a user experience designer. But he says his best advice for new designers is advice he was given when he started his career: “Go out and live”.

After Peter’s opening remarks, each member of Digital Design’s graduating class had three minutes to impress the crowd, made up primarily of industry professionals, with descriptions of their final projects. It was a truly international and cross-disciplinary affair, with students coming from China, Turkey, Hungary, and Indonesia, and from backgrounds as diverse as biology, psychology, and full-ride hockey scholarships. From real-world problems such as brain injuries and child poverty, to social networking sites for sandwich lovers and collectors, the final projects offered a diverse selection of talent and interests.

Appetizers is just one of the ways Digital Design students integrate with the industry. To find out more, head over to the Digital Design program page.

Danish Motion Studio Visits Digital Design

Thank You, a motion graphics studio based in Copenhagen, were so taken by the VFS grads who have worked there, that they took time out from a business trip to the Pacific Northwest to visit VFS Digital Design students and share their work for MTV and Swatch.

The talk was delivered by partner Örn Ólason, who described the creation of the company as a meeting of “men of few words, who love visuals and love animation”. The work he showed certainly supported this: a series of campaigns for Swatch that started with 3D renderings of the products and extended those images into motion graphics, videos, and even store design.

The company works from the perspective of seeing just how simply they can approach a problem. “We love it when it starts to hurt,” Örn said. “Can we do it that simply? But we come from Scandanavia; we’re allowed.”

Thanks, Örn and everyone from Thank You!

Supporting Young Readers with Interactive Stories

As you might’ve noticed this morning on Digital Design‘s Oomph blog, there’s a great story of alumni innovation and success.

Inspired by the work of Vancouver writer Niina Chebry, two Digital Design grads – Drea Morin and Kelsey Armour – collaborated with former Entertainment Business Management instructor Christine Baudry to create Auguste RoDent: The Artist of Abundant Talent, an interactive storybook for children.

Spearheaded by Sharing-Books.com, a social enterprise focused on supporting young readers, the project is now available in the Android Marketplace. You can learn more about it here. The Sharing-Books.com team already have another storybook in the works – which you can support through their IndieGoGo campaign.

Check out the full story on Oomph to learn more about Drea and Kelsey’s great work!

Grad Named the 2011 Young Blood Interactive Winner

On-the-rise design superstar Antonio Alarcon Roman continues to garner attention for his impressive skills. A grad of Digital Design and Foundation Visual Art & Design, he made Design Edge Canada’s list of notable designers under the age of 35 in 2010 and one of his student team projects was also recognized by Applied Arts magazine.

Now — even while Antonio’s been busily creating award-winning work at Tribal DDB here in Vancouver — he’s managed to be named the 2011 Young Blood Interactive winner and is once again gracing the pages of Applied Arts magazine in the current issue.

Check out Oomph for the full scoop and an exclusive Q&A with Antonio!

VFS Welcomes Google’s Peter Jin Hong

We’re pleased to welcome Peter Jin Hong, a Digital Design program Advisory Board Member (and alumnus) currently working as the UX Lead for Google+ Photos.

Peter will be spending a few days with students in Digital Design, reviewing their work and sharing his high-profile experience. (Check out his schedule at VFS, as well as a full background on his career, on Oomph.) His much-anticipated visit begins with an upcoming talk on design, where he’ll focus on the role of mentorship and human-powered solutions. If you’ll be in Vancouver and you’re passionate about design, we encourage you to come!

“Remembering That We’re Human – Elusive Perspectives On a Career in UX”
A special talk from Google’s Peter Jin Hong
VFS Main Theatre, 420 Homer Street
Tuesday, December 13, 2011
4:30pm-6:00pm

RSVP with your name (and those of any guests) to leslie@vfs.com.

OVERVIEW
Peter will discuss his career in user experience, focusing on his time with Google and also his volunteer work as Creative Director for WellDone.org. Peter has helped the non-profit develop empowering and positive strategies to get people involved with social good (WellDone.org helps developing communities source clean drinking water.) The team recently won the top award at AIGA’s and CauseEffect.org’s 2011 Do-Gooder Awards for transformative design for social change.

ABOUT PETER JIN HONG
Peter Jin Hong has been a professional innovation catalyst and story collector for over 10 years. Most of his career has been as an award-winning Creative Director and pioneer of User Experience innovation/strategy business units at Blast Radius, Tribal DDB, and for clients such as KAYAK, CarMax, AOL, Nike, EA, Sony, Honda, and BMW. Valuing mentorship, Peter has guided many promising individuals, who themselves have become successful creative directors for other renowned agencies.

Space is limited! RSVP soon to get a seat. Email neesha@vfs.com.

(Please note that current VFS students will be given preference.)

Digital Design Work Featured at TEDx Vancouver

The TED talks have set the standard for captivating speakers, bringing together the best minds in technology, entertainment, and design for thought-provoking presentations. So when TEDx Vancouver needed motion graphic speaker bumpers and interactive nametags, two Digital Design students, Amie Bennett and Juan Martinezguerra, rose to the challenge.

Amie crafted bumpers by animating the grid-pattern logo of the event; the kinetic letters of the speakers’ names move like geometric marionettes. Juan’s nametags are based on origami, and provided a tactile activity for an otherwise static object. Unfortunately, his design for infrared scanners to be used to connect the tags to social media kiosks proved too ambitious for the project, but certainly demonstrated his desire to push the design envelope.

All in all their work was a huge success, and helped unify the look and feel of the conference. Congratulations, Amie and Juan!

For more on this story, and to hear from the designers themselves, head over to Digital Design’s OOMPH blog. You can see Amie’s work in the video below.