Bit Films Summer 2013 Internships!

The summer 2013 intern info sheet is up -- we're getting close to finishing TUBE and have our new live-action VFX project (SEED) as well!

Bit Films Summer Internships, 2013

Apply by Friday May 17.

CALDERA is now online!

Our most recent short CALDERA is now available online!

CALDERA on Vimeo

CALDERA premiered at SXSW in 2012, was officially selected for SIGGRAPH Asia, Seattle Int'l, Palm Springs Shorts, Stuttgart Int'l Animation, and over 40 other festivals worldwide. It was awarded the prestigious Prix Ars Electronica Award of Distinction in Linz Austria, and garnered several other awards including Best Animated Film at Rome Independent, Award of Innovation at Seattle Int'l SIFF, and Best Short - View Social Awards.

CALDERA was helmed by Evan Viera (Director/Composer/Co-Writer) and Chris Bishop (Co-writer/Animation Supervisor) and was produced at Hampshire College over two and a half years. I co-produced and edited. CALDERA was the first film to go through our Bit Films Incubator Program, which we created after completing The Incident at Tower 37. In this program we invite orphaned independent films to be made on campus with the College's students and resources. 

You can read more about this amazing project in some of my prior posts, or at the film's main website.

Congrats to the whole team!

A tremendous Prix

Bit Films was born ten years ago this September. Born from a crazy idea that students could and should work together to make films that push the medium of computer animation into meatier and more thoughtful places than Hollywood was willing to attempt. From Displacement (2002) to Catch (2005) to The Incident at Tower 37 (2009) to Caldera (2012) to Tube (upcoming), we've kept on doing it, and today we're especially honored because the venerable Prix Ars Electronica gave one of its two Awards of Distinction to Caldera!

http://www.aec.at/prix/en/gewinner/#computer-animation

This is a terrific acknowledgement of the creative vision and leadership of Evan Viera and Chris Bishop, as well as a wonderful honor to all the crew members who worked to bring this film to life.

But it is also a celebration of the model--radical at times but perhaps not so much any more--that we've been trying to follow for almost a decade: where undergraduate liberal arts students work closely with fellow students and mentors, complementing their individualized, course-based education with hands-on, high-end, collaborative work; where an institution like Hampshire College offers its space and resources to independent artists at no cost because it recognizes the benefits for all involved of having such people around; and where ideas for animated films that certainly don't scream "cartoon!" can take root, mature, and ultimately emerge as fully-formed ideas.

It means all the more to me that Evan and Chris are alums of this program -- they both participated on Bit Films projects when they were students and continued to do so after they graduated. I was pleased to be able to invite them into the Drome when Caldera was still nascent, and now they've come full circle--from students to project supervisors--with distinction, no less!

The Incident at Tower 37: online!

YouTube
Vimeo

Tower 37 is a ten-minute animated short film that was produced collaboratively at Hampshire College and has spent the past two years in film festivals worldwide.

We are releasing it online today, World Water Day, to bring even greater attention to humanity's role in creating and perpetuating this planet's critical water issues. Our film is allegorical, but the challenges we face are real.

Please enjoy, and share! Here are some links to more information and resources related to the film, its making, etc:

ENVIRONMENTAL ACTIVISM

TakePart.com has a recent interview with me and suggests ways you can take action, like donating to Water.org and giving up bottled water (especially those single-use plastic nightmares).

LEARNING ANIMATION

Tower 37 was created within the unique undergraduate animation curriculum at Hampshire, which offers a mix of individualized and collaborative instruction. You can get a taste of animation at Hampshire from a recent demo reel, reading a bit about our program, and/or by following the video journey of a final-year interdisciplinary Hampshire animation student.

Bit Films offers spring, summer, and fall internships for current students and recent grads who want to work on films like Tower 37. Watch the Bit Films website for details. You can also peek at the two amazing projects we're working on at the moment, Caldera and Tube, at their respective sites.

INDEPENDENT ANIMATION PRODUCTION

If you're interested in the ins-and-outs of producing and/or distributing a project like this, There's a long history of Tower 37-related posts on this very blog.

Tower 37 was produced using the open source web-based production management and support system called HELGA. We're looking for developers!

Anima: a festival of contemporary animation by women

Valley animation fans: come see an amazing showcase of recent work by female animators!

7-9pm
Sunday December 12th
Main Lecture Hall, Franklin Patterson Hall
Hampshire College
FREE
parental note: this is not an all ages program

Click here for the facebook event page and tell us you're coming!

The fall 2010 Women in Animation class at Hampshire College has assembled an outstanding program of international and award-winning short films made by women that feature a wide variety of media, techniques, and subject matter. The work is inspiring and fresh, much of it coming from emerging artists who are sure to leave their marks on the animation world.

Official Selection (alphabetical order)
Astronomer's Sun, The (Cope, 2010, UK)
Benigni (Vuorinen, Partanen, Ottelin, 2009, Finland)
Chrigi (Kofmel, 2009, Switzerland)
El Doctor (Pitt, 2006, USA)
Forest (Schulnik, 2009, USA)
Lebensader (Steffen, 2009, Germany)
Miramare (Müller, 2009, Switzerland)
Notebook (Lohbeck, 2008, Netherlands)
Soft Plants (de Swaef, 2009, Belgium)
Tongueling, The (Vuorinen, 2010, Finland)
Triumph of the Wild 2 (Colburn, 2009, Netherlands/USA)
Windows, Masks & Doors (Orenstein, 2007, USA)

festival program

Bit Films Fall 2010 Internships

I'm pleased to report that internship information is now posted for the Fall 2010 session!

Fall 2010 internship details here

This is our fifth consecutive internship session, running from September 20 to December 17, 2010. Applications are due (via email) no later than Monday September 13, 2010 at 5pm (EDT). We understand that this is short lead time for those in need of making visa and travel arrangements. Because the projects are ongoing, the internship period is flexible; if in doubt, apply!

Everything you'd want to know about the two films being produced in-house (Caldera and Tube) is available via the link above. Today I want to mention the amazing work environment that surrounds the productions and is home to the work we do.

First of all, the studio is on the Hampshire College campus. During the fall, classes are in session so the place is buzzing with activity -- there are lectures, shows, presentations, screenings, sporting events, and more happening all the time and right next to the studio space. Interns have audited Hampshire courses in the past and we certainly expect this to continue.

Nearby Amherst and Northampton are politically liberal college towns with lots of food and entertainment. The PVTA bus system connects them, Hampshire, and the other four colleges in the Five College Consortium so transportation is straightforward. There is also a bike path connecting Northampton and Amherst (which summer 2010 intern Josh ran daily as an impressive commute/exercise regimen).

In addition to lots of US participants over the past four sessions, we've had interns from China, Argentina, South Africa, France, and England be a part of the program in the past. We are eager to fold different voices and histories into the studio so we do our best to support international applicants through the Visa process, finding a place to live, and getting oriented.

So check out the call for interns, look into the films, and see about joining our crew. We look forward to hearing from you.

One Frame at a Time wrapup

The One Frame at a Time animation event at Hampshire went great last weekend. I thank our filmmakers for exposing us all to some outstanding work (including older films by Raoul Servais and Georges Schwizgebel -- both embedded below), and for sharing their production methods with those who attended the master class.

The nice thing about a flexible, participant-curated show is that we could squeeze in some other treats, like Bill Plympton's new short "The Cow Who Wanted to be a Hamburger" (clip below) and a 16mm print of a Mr. Magoo "Fuddy Duddy Buddy" hand-delivered to the screening by Emily Hubley.

I hadn't yet seen Bill Plympton's new short even though it has been collecting awards at many festivals lately. It was a lot of fun, and there was a great resonance with my interests of late since I've been researching food and agriculture for another project. I also smiled at the parallels between the young cow and the young protagonist of my short Catch from 2005 - both have at least some portion of their lives shaped by billboards!

Thanks to all who attended and participated. With luck we'll be able to repeat this process next year and bring a new slate of animation work to viewers in the Valley.

an aside about Hampshire

I was recently asked why I teach at Hampshire College and what, in my opinion, makes it unique. This question comes my way so frequently from so many different sources that I thought it was worthy of a public response.

The answer to these questions is the same for me. I teach at Hampshire because of its unique qualities. In fact, I teach at all because of Hampshire's unique qualities. Let me elaborate on a few of these.

At Hampshire I can teach what I want, when I want.

The autonomy I have in devising my own curriculum is incredible. This flexibility at once acknowledges the dynamic nature of academic fields, entrusts me with the responsibility of running my own program, and gives students the opportunity to take fresh, timely courses in contrast with the typically rigid offerings at other institutions. Since I've been at Hampshire I've created twelve different courses and co-created two. For a decade of teaching, that's a lot of experimentation.

Narrative evaluations are immeasurably better academic tools than grades.

Yes they require a fair amount of work, however, reading even a single narrative evaluation of a student's progress in a course will teach you more about a student's individual strengths and weaknesses than an entire transcript from a grade-based institution. A grade is like a black hole, smashing things like effort, creativity, attendance, thoroughness, class participation and other factors of performance into a singularity that's impossible to disentangle. As a student, if you receive a low grade, the lesson is, "do better." Boy that's really giving students their money's worth! A well-written narrative evaluation will actually break down areas for improvement and offer suggestions for future learning opportunities that might offer those opportunities.

Hampshire's academic program, from a lack of departments to student-proposed concentrations and senior thesis projects, is interdisciplinary at its core.

There's a story I've told many times about my own senior thesis woes in college that perhaps explains why this point is so important to me. I wanted to study the computer graphic synthesis of fire, but when I went in search of a faculty adviser, I was rejected by everyone. The physics faculty who I had studied with for years said the project wasn't rooted enough in physics. The computer scientists said it wasn't enough computer science. I think I also spoke with a chemistry professor who had the same response.

Dividing the academic world into independent chunks and requiring students and faculty to work within those chunks unnecessarily marginalizes areas of intellectual inquiry that may span the chunks. It wasn't until I went to the MIT Media Lab that I found an intellectual home that understood this. I still remember my first day, when Stephen Benton told all of us new arrivals that, if they continued running the lab well, we wouldn't find jobs after graduating. Translation: their success hinged on remaining ahead of the curve, working with ideas in ways others had never considered. Thus their graduates wouldn't fit easily into the world's existing categories.

After my extremely positive experience at MIT, I promised myself I would never again be a part of an organization that didn't value cross-discipline studies the way that I did. I cannot stress this enough: until I was 21, I felt like I didn't fit anywhere. I was into movies and computers and comics and sports and physics and a few other things too, but not any one enough to make a profession out of it and push the others out of my life. So far I've been lucky enough to have been able to keep that promise: MIT was followed by Rhythm & Hues Studios, then Pixar, and now Hampshire and Bit Films (yes, at Bit Films we wholly embrace the discipline-crosser).

This history returns to my consciousness term after term at Hampshire. Students come to my office looking for support in their cross-disciplinary academic pursuits. I am so pleased that I can say yes to them and have the structures of the institution backing me up. It goes beyond the students, too, of course: I feel supported in my own scholarly pursuits, which have taken many forms since I arrived at Hampshire.


Although there are more, I will stop with just these three reasons for now. I would like to return to my screenwriting, or programming, or perhaps researching my new spring course on interaction design. Then I'll be heading to campus to watch and celebrate the wildly diverse work completed by the students in my Animation Workshop class this term. As you can see, it is an easy day for me to recognize and reflect upon the value of Hampshire.

catch me if you can

Okay, so it was just over two weeks ago that I blogged about my new Pixelbending class. You'll have to forgive me, that was something of a FlashForward. So it's not that the post is wrong, per se, it's just that it was a few months too early.

My real spring 2010 class just went online today. It will be a departure for me in many ways, but a return to my roots in others. Here are the details:

Improving TheHub (CS 214)

TheHub is a critical online tool supporting the academic program at Hampshire. Not only is it the primary mechanism by which our Divisional contracts and narrative evaluations are created, edited, and shared, but it is also where important aspects of registration and advising take place. Despite its ubiquity and importance, however, TheHub can be frustrating for many to use.

This course seeks to improve TheHub through a unique collaboration between students, faculty, and staff. In addition to learning how TheHub is currently implemented, students will be tasked to identify areas of TheHub most in need of improvement and to propose, design, implement, and test new interfaces for these areas.

Ideal candidates for this one-of-a-kind course will have a background in design (color theory, graphic design, HTML, studio arts, etc.) or programming (PHP, Perl, AJAX, Javascript, etc.) or both. For programmers, concurrent enrollment in CS 272 (Advanced Web Design) will satisfy the programming pre-requisites for this course. Prospective students should bring a current resume and a portfolio of their relevant work to Professor Perry no later than the first class meeting.

Those following my teaching history should recognize that this is another collaborative class, akin to the animation courses that produced Displacement and Tower 37 in the past. Fairly new to me is the domain: although I've worked on large-scale software projects in the past, and of course have a hand in the ongoing development of Helga, interface design for a heavily-trafficked and mission-critical web tool like TheHub is going to demand some stretching. And some smart partnering: I will be co-teaching the class with the original engineer of TheHub, and I'm hoping to fold experienced guests in as we work to meet the challenge of the class.

This class offers a rare opportunity for students to be a part of a team whose work can actually change how Hampshire functions day-to-day. We are not going to be changing policies, of course, but we are going to investigate how our current tool does--and does not--support students and faculty working together.

How you can help now, dear reader, is to tell the most talented designers and programmers you know about this course and encourage them to discuss their participation with me.

And please start thinking about how you would like to see TheHub change, particularly in the areas directly related to the academic program (advising, evaluations, course registration, course listings, etc). Feel free to start sharing them here as comments, or wait for the site we'll be launching in the spring to collect these ideas.

Pixelbenders: apologies for now. I am working to fold that course in to next year's curriculum.