Half Presentations were on Friday, March 22nd. There were about 26 guests in the audience. Most of them were EAers, ETC Alums and some bay area industry folks. Each team did a 15 minute presentation about their project and progress to date, followed by a five minute Q&A session.
Videos of the presentations are below:
Chris Klug, a professor at the Entertainment Technology Center in Pittsburgh, visited our Silicon Valley campus on February 25th.
Before joining the ETC faculty, Chris had worked for the game industry for more than twenty years, and worked for a lot of game companies including EA, SegaSoft, THQ, etc. Also, he is a very wonderful teacher and students love him in ETC not only because of his professional and interesting class but also because of his nice and kind personality. In addition to teaching at the ETC, Chris has taught Interactive Storytelling at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh and the Art Institute in Phoenix.
During Chris’s tour of the Silicon Valley campus, he visited every team here, he came to their place, saw their project in detail and sat down with the team to talk about the project. He gave lots of feedback and professional advice about the projects, covering both technology side and game design sides. His deep knowledge of game development makes his advice very valuable to every team.
At last, he had a meeting with the Puppetineering team who is going to develop personal interactions with the robot from the Pittsburgh campus. It will be used during the BVW show this year. Since Chris is teaching BVW this semester and works at the Pittsburgh campus, he knows a lot about the robot itself and the installation about the whole environment. He looked into the team’s design and implementation in detail and provided a lot of useful suggestions and ideas.
It was very nice and inspiring having Chris Klug here with us.
This past Thursday Shirley Saldamarco came all the way from Pittsburgh to visit the SV campus. Shirley is a well established producer who founded her own media production company and is now faculty at the ETC. Unfortunately, she was only able to stay for one day, but she made that day count. She came around to talk to all of the project teams and gave some great feedback.
In class discussion and feedback
While she was here she gave an insightful talk about how to be an effective producer. She drew from all of the experience that she gained from her years of working in industry on many productions including quite a few with WQED.
Shirley really feels that a producer has to be very aware of the entire project and have a clear creative vision to guide the team. She took a lot of inspiration on how to lead a team and be an effective producer from Sun Tzu the Chinese military strategist. He states that the key to success is in understanding your own strengths and weaknesses as well as those of the people that you work with. She took the time to talk about herself and how
She shared with us a few of his quotes on the topic.
If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.
- Sun Tzu
If you know the enemy and know yourself, your victory will not stand in doubt; if you know Heaven and know Earth, you may make your victory complete.
- Sun Tzu
Shirley took the time to talk about herself and how she applied these philosophies to her work and involved us all in discussion. She emphasized the importance of having the big picture in mind, but also checking to make sure that all the details were covered, trusting in the ability of her team, but double checking to make sure that things were getting done.
It was a great to have here to share her experience and philosophies with us.
During his visit to the West Coast, CMU President Jared Cohon dropped by EA and spent some time with our teams.
First stop was Team Hatch, where he protected the north pole from aquian invaders.
Then, on to a tour of the Tea & Sugar Train, where he got an earful about the life of a butcher straight from the source.
More importantly, we all appreciated his interest in the students themselves. He met them all individually and learned about their roles on the projects and their backgrounds before coming to the ETC.
And check out the the T&S Train team – all wearing their CMU colors. Smart in many dimensions.
We all headed back to CMU last week to attend the International Conference on Entertainment Computing (ICEC). The ETC was one of the sponsors, and put on a great event. Some of the highlights included a great talk by the ETC’s own Jesse Schell, the presentation of the Randy Pauche award to Ed Catmull followed by Ed sharing his insights, and an entertaining lunchtime talk from Anthony Daniels (C3PO), and Stan Szymanski of Sony Imageworks sharing some behind-the-scene secrets from the studio. Not to mention an open house at the ETC and the opportunity to see Don’s newest acquisition: a lifesize Princess Leia in the hallway.
After the conference, the Tea & Sugar Train team visited the USS Requin at the Carnegie Science Center to see how the interactive displays done by ETC there work.
