The charming village of Bronxville was established in 1881. Concordia College sits just to the northwest of Bronxsville and is an NCAA division II school.

DMA campers headed to the Concordia campus this summer will get to choose from film camps, robotics camps and video game design camps in New York. DMA offers a world-class day camp experience for ages 8 – 17. All of DMA’s camps are accredited by Stanford Continuing Studies and all the camps are taught by industry professionals and technology educators.

In the day long camps, which run from 9AM – 5PM, kids and teens get a hands-on, interactive learning experience using the latest hardware and software. DMA’s Adventures programs are FUN and exciting, with topics like filmmaking & special effects camps, 2D & 3D game creation, Science & Engineering and Architecture – but kids also get a chance to get outside and play with organized activities and supervised breaks.

Adventures campers enjoy both a high tech learning experience and time outside with short breaks throughout the day.

DMA offers both one-week and two-week academies at Concordia, with camps starting at $825 for a week-long experience. For teens, digital photography, filmmaking and game design camps are just a few of the exciting offerings.

“Concordia College is a distinguished institution and DMA is delighted to be coming to Bronxville,” says DMA founder and president Phil Gibson. “We feel that the school’s close proximity to New York City will make this summer’s programs especially attractive to many area families that have one or more parents who commute daily to and from the city or the Westchester corporate corridor and who are looking for an enriching summer tech camp experience for their children.”

Digital Media Academy was ranked as one of the top ten summer camps in the world by Worth.com in 2011 – and bringing the world-class experience to Westchester, NY.

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Digital Media Academy founder and president, Phil Gibson (R) with comedian and entertainer, Sinbad. Phil is a former Stanford educator and started DMA, at Stanford University.

The location of that first 2002 camp was no accident, since DMA’s founder and president, Phil Gibson, was himself a noted Stanford instructor. It was his dynamic vision of an immersive summer camp experience—taught by professionals with proven records of industry success, and conducted on the nation’s most celebrated college campuses—that has led DMA to its tenth anniversary.

Gibson’s vision was wholeheartedly embraced and due to the success of its Stanford program, DMA was able to branch out, and that expansion continues to this day. Now DMA offers its program on eleven of America’s most beloved campuses, Harvard University tech camp, UCLA tech camp, George Washington University tech camp, Swarthmore College tech camp, Drexel University tech camp, UC San Diego tech camp, and the University of British Columbia tech camp in Vancouver, Canada.

Still, despite all of these great campuses, DMA’s home base is the Stanford University tech camp. Stanford’s setting (between San Francisco and San Jose) showcases the natural desert beauty of this scenic area. Plus, its geographic position within the heart of Silicon Valley more than represents DMA has the pulse on the area’s technological innovation.

Those new technologies were driving Phil Gibson during the 1990s, when he served Stanford’s Academic Computing Department and led efforts to integrate new media technologies. As part of that work, Gibson developed a video-streaming service and a UNIX-based authentication system that he pioneered in Apple-based public computer labs on the Stanford campus. He first experimented with the DMA model of computer camp instruction during 1999, and within three years Gibson left Stanford to devote his energies full-time to promoting the DMA concept.

As DMA pauses to celebrate this milestone, Gibson and the rest of DMA’s staff and educators are busily preparing for the Summer 2012 tech camp season. DMA summer computer camp training makes sense for families that want to help launch creative careers for their children. And DMA now even offers training for adults who are eager to get a technical edge. “What inspires me,” says Gibson, “Is building an organization that makes a difference in people’s lives—young and old.”

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On the set of DMA Studios: Film Production at the Stanford University campus studio.

DMA Studios gave the future Steven Spielberg’s a comprehensive look behind the scenes of moviemaking. Campers worked in dedicated production crew on the production of short film. The film, a 60 Minutes parody, received critical acclaim and thousands of views on Youtube.

New for 2012
For summer 2012, DMA will apply the wildly popular DMA Studios formula to two of today’s hottest technical arenas: app development for the iPhone and iPad and 3D game production. Again the shared goal of campers will be to successfully merge their respective talents and join together as a production team to produce an actual product at the end of the two-week experience.

In the App Development for the iPhone and iPad DMA Studios program, campers will work in unison to develop a fully functioning iPhone or iPad game using Objective C language and Apple’s SDK. Students will not only develop the graphics for their game, but even write their own 2D game-engine code.

As part of the DMA Studios: 3D Game Production course, DMA campers will utilize industry-standard software such as Autodesk Maya, Unity and the Unreal Development Kit. Teams will concentrate on specific aspects of design, such as level creation, character development and 3D modeling. By the end of the course, these future game developers will have amassed a huge skill set and will also receive a copy of the game they help create.

Getting into the Studio
The DMA Studios program is open to all student campers age 15 and up, but it’s especially recommended for teens that already possess a demonstrated talent and obvious passion for working filmmaking, game design or app development – and want to experience what it’s like to work in a real development studio.

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Learn how to get video on your iDevice with this quick tutorial, courtesy of the good folks at Creative Cow.

Broadcasting Yourself
Video podcasting is a popular way to provide presentations these days, but most people think it’s a complicated process to get video onto a iDevice. But it’s not as hard as you think. Transferring video files into the portable format is relatively easy.

Final Cut is used primarily to edit video, it can also be used to compress video. You can also use Youtube to upload video and broadcast yourself. Youtube’s steps to upload video are easy to follow. Youtube offers great functionality too – you can drag and drop videos onto the page, or click Select files from your computer to begin. once you’ve started an upload there are a variety of options, like sharing and setting a thumbnail are available too. Annotations are also just one click away.

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This blog post is an exercise in how to use a few words to describe videos posted by our film students that have attended film summer camps with Digital Media Academy. Our campers love to post their videos on YouTube, what words do they need to use to be found and viewed? If I were a teen with a dream to make an amazing film and change the world, where would I start? I’d probably search the internet for amazing films that are already changing the world, and work backward from there to learn where to go to learn how to make an amazing video! Digital Media Academy teaches a wide variety of courses, some of which teach kids to make amazing films at film summer camp.

As I was writing a pretty dry document for our instructors to use this year, the nuts and bolts of posting student videos to YouTube, I was trying to think of a great example of a “viral video” – the holy grail of “viral” and how to achieve that goal.  And I remembered that I had used a great video as and example in a “surprise and delight your customer” post…  shown here.  (And you can also check out another amazing viral video:  educate girls)

If I were the original creator of this video, and if I had made it during summer camp, I’d post it with tags like this:  “Digital Media Academy Summer Camp”, “Film Summer Camp”, “Make a Film”, “Teen Summer Camp” and so on.  To view it on the blog here, post it, click on “embed”, select the viewer color box you like, and select size 560 X 340, and paste it in the post in “Html” view.

Enjoy the video!

I’m going to illustrate a few things simultaneously here, so bear with me as it all weaves together with this one incredible viral film!

Things to Keep In Mind When Posting Summer Camp Videos to YouTube

• Categories – YouTube has several categories that are appropriate for summer camp videos – check out the categories by clicking on the “browse” tab next to the search box.
• Think about your video – if your video is the answer, what was the question?  If the question is “I want to watch something funny”, and your video is funny, consider placing it in the “Comedy” category.  If it’s a technical film about how to create something using a certain technology, consider “Education”, “HowTo”, “Science & Technology”, or “Gaming”.
• Post your video and select your tags.  Tags help people find the video.  If the film is made by the Digital Media Academy staff or a student, use “Digital Media Academy” as one of the tags.  If it’s made by kids at summer camps, or if this film would help kids looking for a film summer camp see what happens behind the scenes at film summer camp, use “film summer camp” as a tag.  If the camp is about “skateboard summer camp” or “academy for game design” use those words in the tags.  Whatever the title of the summer camp is, that would make a good tag.  Use all of the available tags.
• Write a brief description of the video, mentioning the name of the summer camp, the location of the summer camp, the age group, and what made it special.  Include a link to the page on the Digital Media Academy website that displays either the course name of the summer camp, or the location of the program.

I’d love to see all the videos made by students and staff this summer at Digital Media Academy!

This film was made by Keith English, acclaimed artist, animator and instructor for the Digital Media Academy. He created the animations for this promo for the Sonoma International Film Festival.

Kids, post your videos, and leave a comment on this post.  Wouldn’t it be fun to have a contest for the funniest video?  Please let me know (especially!) if you post a video to the comedy category!

Check out Digital Media Academy’s videos on YouTube!     Have a blast at summer camp!

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Or if you’re an experienced boarder and have made videos in the past, you’ll be able to kickflip your vids to an entirely new level. This year’s class at Stanford is taught by taught by SoCal’s visual fx and skateboarding master Nick Guth with UCSC grad and extreme sport junkie Travis Schalfman.

As with all our camps, you have the choice to get a taste of the college life by sleeping at Stanford’s campus each night or come for five action-filled days. Regardless, you’ll wrap the week with a dynamic vid … and there’s even a rumor the Skateworks Team will showcase their gravity-defying talents in an exclusive session for the class.

But if you’re not in the Bay Area this summer, there’s no need to despair. Digital Media Academy also offers the Skateboarding and Filmmaking Camp at UCLA, UCSD, George Washington University and Harvard, while SkateWorks’ brand-name boards, decks, trucks, wheels, and apparel are available for shipment across the country from their website.

Classes are filling up, be sure to register for our raffle before June 18 !

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Today I’m going to talk about a technique known as sampling. Sampling is taking bits and pieces of music or sounds from other songs and manipulating them to use in your own artistic endeavors. This is a popular technique used in Hip-Hop songs, but can also be used in any genre or audio situation. The tecnique I’m going to teach allows you to take an audio sample, cut it up, and assign it to different keys so you can play the slices on your MIDI keyboard. Something to be aware of; If you are using noticeable pieces of music you will have to obtain the rights to use that music from whomever owns the rights. This is referred to as “clearing” a sample. You might have to share a portion of your earnings or “royalties” from the song, pay for the rights to use it, or get written consent.

So lets begin.

I’m going to be showing you this technique in Logic Pro 9, an awesome DAW or Digital Audio Workstation from Apple. This is the primary software I’ll be teaching this summer in the “Come Together Music and Video Course” as well as the “Digital Audio and Music Production Course.”

To start you’ll have to launch Logic by clicking the icon in the Dock, the Application in finder, or a Logic Project file.

Then once the software is open you should create a new empty project and save it. For this exercise I’m going to call my project 4_DMP_Sampling.

Make sure all the boxes except include movie are checked when you save it. This way you’ll always have copies of all audio files associated with this project in your project folder.

Next you’ll have to get a piece of audio you want to sample from. For this exercise I’m going to use an apple loop. This is very cool because the Apple loops included in Logic can be cut up and sampled just like anything else, giving you thousands of options! You can also use songs from old vinyl records, CD’s, tapes, or anywhere really.

The loop I’m using is called “Sweet Strummer 02″ It is an Acoustic Guitar lick that I like and want to cut it up and play the different slices on my MIDI keyboard.

Locate the sample by going to your “Media Tab” then  click the “Loops Tab” Type in Sweet Strummer 02 in the search field and hit return. It will pop up below.

Then click the sample to preview it in the loop browser. Nice Huh!

After that click and drag it to an audio track in the arrange area.

Now double click the middle of the audio region to load it into the sample editor in the editing area.

This window allows you to do a multitude of thigs to audio files, but for now I want you to do the following:

Go to the audio file menu there and choose “Detect Transients” what this is going to do is create markers based on “peaks” or dynamically louder sounds in the file.

Now you’ll see little white lines or “markers” in the file. Logic computed where transients were and put markers there. What these represent are the durations of the sample to be mapped to each key. To understand more, double click on the audio file in between two markers and push play or the spacebar on your keyboard. You’ll notice that it only plays from one marker to the next. This is what will be heard when you press a key on your keyboard.

You can move those markers around to change what will be mapped to each key by simply mousing over them and dragging from left to right. You can also remove the makers by double clicking them. So go ahead an move the markers around and delete if you need to.

If you want to create new markers highlight the audio file where you want to create them and hit the plus sign at the top of the Sample Editor:

So once you’ve moved your markers, added and deleted them, now its time to map them to the keyboard.

Now close the sample editor by clicking its name in the edit area and highlight the audio region in the arrange. Then go up to the local “audio” menu and choose “convert regions to new sampler track”

You will then see this menu:

Make sure the Transient Markers bubble is selected. This means that its going to map the sample to the keys based on the markers we created. If you leave regions selected you’ll have the sample only on one key, and it will play the whole thing, not the slices.

Also the trigger note range is the keys you are going to map these to. So if C1 is selected on the left, this is where the first slice will be mapped and the rest will continue up to G8. Then hit ok.

You’ll now notice that a software instrument track was created and a region is created also. This region represents the sample as it is now. Delete that region.

If you record enable the software instrument track with the EXS24 sampler on it that was just created, you’ll be able to play the slices mapped out on your keyboard. So go ahead and play around until you find a pattern you like and record it.

So that’s it. Now you know how to slice, map, and play samples in Logic. Super fun and easy to do. It just might change your life.

To learn more techniques like the one I’ve described here sign up for one of the courses I’ll be teaching this summer listed below:

Come Together – Music and Video Production: http://bit.ly/9zHpIT

Digital Audio and Music Production: http://bit.ly/9kbqHD

Logic Pro 101 Course: http://bit.ly/cuvgmr

Hope to see you there!

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  What are the summer camps like?

By Ben Jaffe, Instructor

As a regular instructor for several companies around the San Francisco Bay Area, I believe it is important to ensure that every class I teach is different from the last. Even if I teach 5 consecutive classes on CSS, each class has a completely different set of students, each with different skill levels and interests. In many training centers, often classes really do end up exactly the same. Many instructors I have worked with simply plod along, following the curriculum word by word, line by line. No deviations, and no excitement. Of course, as a student you can ask questions and take advantage of their expertise in the field. But that experience doesn’t make for an interesting class. You may learn the topic, but it’s not fun.

It is certainly important to have guidelines and curriculum for a class so every class matches or exceeds a certain quality baseline. But what really brings a class to life is enthusiasm and flexibility. The instructor and the students both need to have fun, or it will be monotonous.

Digital Media Academy hires passionate and enthusiastic instructors for their classes. Just as importantly, DMA also allows their instructors quite a bit of flexibility with the course curriculum. Some of the best classes I have ever taught were classes where we went off the beaten path, attacking a project that nobody in the room had ever tried before. Last year, I taught Flash Actionscript Class for Teens at Stanford. After a few days, we voted on a game to work on together. We ended up making a playable version of Connect Four in Flash. Not only was it the first time any of my students had programmed Connect Four, it was the first time I had too!

Because Digital Media Academy hires only the best and most competent staff and instructors, we can go places with our classes that other companies cannot. Having taught with many computer training companies over many years, I truly do feel Digital Media Academy has something very unique. When you take a class with DMA, you don’t leave with a curriculum mindlessly stuffed into your brain. You leave with knowledge, confidence and a fulfilling experience.

I hope to see you this summer at Digital Media Academy!

If you’ve had a fulfilling experience at DMA in previous summers, feel free to join the conversation and leave a comment below!  Read one of our summer camp success stories!

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That’s why it’d be a shame if you missed your chance to win FREE tuition for a Digital Media Summer Camp Course of your selection.

There is only 1 week left in the iLike. iWin. iLearn. iPad. Sweepstakes presented by Digital Media Academy. We have already given away 4 FREE iPads! But what is even better is what is still to come. Next Tuesday, June 1st, we will be announcing the winner of a prize worth more than all 4 of those iPads combined!

Do you want to learn how to become an animator with Maya? Maybe you want to produce music using Logic Pro or make your own videos with Final Cut Pro. Maybe you want to direct music videos using both?

Whatever your dreams and aspirations are in digital media, Digital Media Academy has a summer camp that can help you get on your way. All you have to do is head on over to our Facebook page and sign up for the sweepstakes and you could win your FREE ride!

Hurry the sweepstakes ends in a week!

SIGN UP HERE!!!!!!!!

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