The Scripter Awards

This video about the Cinematic Arts Library was shown during the silent auction of the 2015 Scripter Awards.

"I know in Interactive Media and Games people think we are always looking to the future.  But you can't move forward until you have looked back first."

Interactive Animation for "What Makes a Monster?" Exhibit

What Makes a Monster of You?
by Kurosh ValaNejad

Morphing illustrations from Ulisse Aldrovandi's 1642 Compendium Monstarorum Historia, Kurosh's installation suggest that we ourselves create monsters, and by doing so, are the real monster.

What Makes a Monster of You?  (2015)

Interactive Exhibition Banner

Treasure Room, USC Doheny Memorial Library

7' tall x 5' wide x 1" thick glass

Rear Projection Screen

An existing glass panel was converted into a rear projection screen.

Dean Quinlan,  USC Libraries, thanking sponsors and staff while welcoming speakers and attendees of the 'Monsters' panel discussion.

After my "Making Of" presentation at the Cinema School, we walked over to the library for a demonstration.

USC News: SCA Students Interpret "What Makes a Monster?"

8-bit Monster
James Cox

8-bit Monster by James Cox (2015)

Interactive Exhibition Banner

Treasure Room, USC Doheny Memorial Library

7' tall x 5' wide x 1" thick glass

Rear Projection Screen

Tweet by James 

“The exhibit hits on many aspects of monsters, ranging from diseases to film to conspiracy sightings, yet one untapped medium was videogames." James Cox

Internet Monster
Brady Thomas

Internet Monster by Brady Thomas (2015)

Interactive Exhibition Banner
Treasure Room, USC Doheny Memorial Library

7' tall x 5' wide x 1" thick glass

Rear Projection Screen

“ I was reading an article about these horrible tweets directed towards game developer Brianna Wu, and I became inspired to do a piece about the ugliness and bile that gets spewed on the internet, and how anonymity can turn us into monsters.” Bardy Thomas

Thinkers Need Doers Need Thinkers Need Doers Need Thinkers Need Doers

Grant's femininity compliments Hepburn’s androgyny.

Screwball comedies Bringing Up Baby (1938), The Lady Eve (1941), and Balls of Fire (1941) invert gender roles. The fictional female characters are independent and intelligent, and as influential as the ‘real’ movie stars who portray them. These unruly women didn’t need domesticity to fulfill their Utopian desires, as seen in earlier films of the genre. In fact, they possess powers to tame men with laughter and their brazen gazin’. And in the broader narrative regarding the evolution of Women’s Rights in America, they primed a generation of American girls and young women to ‘wear the pants’ and jump the gender divide.

With legs crossed, Carey Grant is the feminine thinker.

The genre parodies Romantic Comedies to reveal their dwindling relevance to social norms. These films, in particular, do it at the expense of the leading men. In her 2011 essay, Professor Heroes and Brides on Top Kathleen Rowe details how the ‘shadow figures’ of the less-than-ideal leading men are liberated through humiliation triggered by misunderstanding, wordplay, and lies of the predatory parallel figures who love them. For Freud, women ambivalent to being home-makers or -wreckers exemplify the uncanny. For me, this period in Hollywood filmmaking became more interesting when Rowe presents this trio of films as an investigation of the masculinity of an intellectual man. Which leads to my question – Did lexicographer Bertram Potts, befuddled paleontologist David, and Charles the amateur herpetologist serve as role model for gay men of the time who felt pressured to couple? Was Science seen as a haven for gay students?

Hudson River School at LACMA

January 30, 2015 

LOS ANGELES, California – My colleagues from the USC Game Innovation Lab and I spent the morning at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) conducting the rarest of research activities by looking closely at the actual source material. We were there to see, then deconstruct*, the seminal works of the Hudson River School – as represented by the exhibit Nature and the American Vision – whose aesthetics of beauty and politics are a primary reference for Walden, a game.

I was reminded Immersive Environments and Virtual Reality are rooted in Painting.

Walden project director Tracy Fullerton, transported to Hudson River, New York, 1830

We scattered and swarmed, scattered and swarmed; as we fell into the world of the paintings. Our virtual ferry ride up the Hudson River was guided by the School’s founder, British-born Thomas Cole,   He influenced a generation of patriotic American painters, who used oil paint as a weapon of propaganda and pride. Cole would be proud to know his influence reaches past his passing, as the 4th tallest mountain in the Catskill is named after him, and he would have never guessed a few patriotic video-game-makers would cite, in hindsight, Cole's School as their primary visual influence.  
(In all our excitement, we forgot to figure out who influenced Cole. **)

Lead Artist Lucas Peterson goes for a hike at sunset.

* Deconstructing Hudson River School Paintings

P. O. V. & Composition:
….slightly above eye-level, as if standing on a boulder.
__The horizon line is drawn below the center of the composition.

Light & Color:
….creates a sense of depth.
….holds detail even in the brightest and darkest areas, like HDR (High Dynamic Range)

Photography.
__The foreground uses deep, rather than dark colors.
__The middle-ground uses a vivid color palate, and pools of light.
__Distant terrain and the sky use a pastel color palate with luminous, slightly over-exposed lighting.
__Atmospheric haze softens the image, pushing focus to areas without the haze.
__The sun is rarely rendered.

Man & Nature:
__Including man and man-made objects provide a sense of scale.
__Man is not glorified and is in harmony with nature.
__Nature has a glorified grandeur and hyper-realistic quality

“The love of the natural world shines through in these works. Because when I get up close to them, I’m admiring the effort to move between the big and the small, and the reality and the grandeur. It almost feels like moving between what you see and what you feel.” - Lucas Peterson

Luke and Research Assistant Alex Mathew discussing the use of light.

**
3 years later Verso, the Huntington's blog, provides the answer in the post titled The Most Influential Artist You’ve Never Met

"John Martin was absolutely crucial to the progression of Western painting tradition, influencing later generations, most directly Thomas Cole and other Hudson River School painters across the pond.”

"His luminous, epic style was so impressive that storytellers of all stripes—from novelists Jules Verne and the Brontë sisters to filmmakers D.W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille—betrayed his influence."