onedotzero_cascade
While the professionals screened and performed their masterpieces during the festival, the next up-and-coming creative talents where participating in onedotzero_cascade, our educational programme aimed at devising a different model for creative learning plugging students from all backgrounds and disciplines into the heart of the creative industries. With students from new media theory, animation and typography classes at Rensselaer, EMPAC organised a series of educational artist exchanges to help develop projects as part of their coursework. Participating artists included, Benton-C Bainbridge, Jeff Crouse and Reid Farrington who helped inform and inspire their work. This resulted in a cascade educational presentation as part of the festival which was watched and critiqued by the specially selected panel including Joanie Lermercier-AntiVJ, Kathleen Forde-curator, Time-Based Media EMPAC, Blair Neal-RPI graduate student and onedotzero’s creative Director, Shane Walter.

The result? A very professional and confident group of students who each presented their ideas, concepts and work, talking through their processes, problems and successes before screening or performing their final work/work in progress. With a large audience to be entertained and a panel of guest critics to impress, the RPI students had their work cut out! Luckily they were not phased and each group embraced the opportunity onedotzero_cascade had presented to them. Kicking off with a performance exploring live audio-visual mixing using analogue techniques, the audience watched on as the group dealt with a few technical problems and mishaps which I guess all comes with the territory of performing ‘live’. Of course this was not the way they had planned the performance, however the fact that things went wrong livened up the presentations, challenged the group to think fast, and reminded some of the guest critics of the times in their past when performances took on a life of their own!

onedotzero_cascade presentation, live performance

With students studying different courses, the realisations of the brief came in different shapes and forms. Alongside the grand live performance we saw short animation ‘and your spirit of kindness’ which was created by Sarah Stump. Primarily created with pencil, paper, watercolor, adobe after fffects, and some photoshop, this 2D animation was created for Sarah’s senior thesis.

Check out ‘and your spirit of kindness’ here:

if you can’t see the film, follow this link: www.vimeo.com/11025755

With an afternoon of entertaining student presentations and energetic audience participation over, we went on to close the festival with a food + drinks reception at EMPACs cafe. With the feedback from the professionals, and insight into the ideas of the next creative talents it was a very appropriate ending with a positive outlook for the future! Who knows where the students/graduates work will end up… perhaps within onedotzero_adventures in motion festival next year?!