This was an interview that I did with AdCast after being honored as a Tampa Bay Times Rising Star a few years back. It’s odd to hear myself talk about the Game Art program at Ringling before it existed. We graduated our first class in May of this year and have now taught every course in the curriculum at least once (and most more than that). I’m teaching a course right now in which some of my juniors are realizing the type of world -building that I spoke about in this interview.
It’s gratifying to see the work being produced within the program now as well as by our first graduates out in the field. As good as it feels to see good work being produced, of course, we can always do better. We’ll be working for the next few years to push the quality upwards. I said in the interview that one of my goals was to have our program be in the top 3 in the country by 2013. About 500 days to make that happen.
Resumext didn’t survive. It was a great concept but lacked the resources necessary to get off the ground (mainly dedicated staff). After that, I ended up forming a variation of the think tank idea that I talk about in the video. It’s called Big Bang Robot and it’s a creative technology art collective. Our current project is Get Them There, a multi-media documentary project about the first female boxing Olympians.
Part of the core team is my wife and I. My wife is an amateur boxer, software engineer, and culinary creative guru. Imagine a classically trained chef being inspired to create fuel for high performance athletes with fantastic palates who is inspired by PubMed articles and you get the idea of what she does in her spare time.
Our film director role is being filled by Jon Wolding of the Ground Up Films crew. These guys are a boiler room of high standards creative film production for commercial, music video, feature, and just about any other kind of video you can imagine. I worked with those guys on a continuing medical education game for doctors for a very large hospital chain. We had designed real world cross-overs for behavioral training linked to game imagery, but in the end, it was too much for the hospital management. They opted for a scaled-back game only — and even asked for a less fun version. Working with the guys on that helped to launch Big Bang Robot and move toward that other goal that I talk about in the interview.
Maybe I should do these for myself every year or so…
