Posts Tagged summer computer camp
Make Your Brain Grow at Digital Media Academy!
Digital Media Academy News + Events | May 18th, 2009 by Philip Harding
Written by Seamus Harte from the John Lennon Bus
Visit http://www.digitalmediaacademy.org to find out how to grow your digital brain.
Visit http://www.digitalmediaacademy.org/give to sign up for your chance to win a trip to one of the many digital media camps happening this summer.
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Camp Fairs Raffle (Drawing #2) Winner Announced!
Digital Media Academy News + Events | May 12th, 2009 by Lara
Announcing the Second DMA Camp Fair Free Tuition winner!
Congratulations to Darryl Sanjeant (Dominic) for winning the raffle for free tuition to the Digital Media Academy from our second round of camp fairs! Dominic can choose from our many great courses.
DMA attends many camp fairs across the country. Attendees are able to enter their name for a chance to win a free summer camp course by Digital Media Academy.
Digital Photography Lesson : Tips from DMA Pros with Aperture
Digital Media Academy News + Events | March 26th, 2009 by Philip Harding
Written by Jeff Sobel of the John Lennon Bus
In my last post I talked about the saturation and vibrancy adjustments in Aperture 2. I mentioned that these powerful tools are great when you want to adjust the color in the entire image but not a good solution for selectively adjusting color in only parts of the image. Aperture provides an often overlooked tool which is fantastic for making these types of selective adjustments. It’s the Dodge and Burn plugin and it can be found in the Images>Edit With> menu as seen in the screen grab below:
Though Dodge and Burn is included with Aperture 2 it is actually a plugin so when you select it in the menu your image opens up in a new window. It’s much like sending the image to an external editor except that it’s more tightly integrated with Aperture. The name Dodge and Burn comes from the darkroom technique of using a card to dodge (lighten) or burn (darken) select areas of a photo print while it is in the chemical bath to manipulate the exposure of the photograph. The Dodge and Burn plugin in Aperture 2 allows you to do the same thing with your mouse, no noxious chemicals required. The great thing about the D&B plugin is that it not only allows you to adjust light/dark but a half-dozen other effects as well, including saturation (see screen grab below).
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By playing with this tool you’ll quickly learn how to manipulate the color saturation in certain areas of your image while leaving other areas in their natural state (or manipulating those areas in a different way). Here are some examples (all images can be clicked to embiggen).
I took some photos at a friend’s wedding last year. They were married in Golden Gate Park and the grass and trees were a vibrant green. I found that even though I had a fairly shallow depth of field that threw the background out of focus the vibrant color of the plants was distracting the eye from the important parts of the image (the bride and groom!). Â
I wanted to reduce the saturation of the plants and people behind my subjects to separate the bride and groom from the background. However, I couldn’t simply reduce the saturation in the whole image because I certainly didn’t want to take away from the bride’s amazing gown. So I turned to the Dodge and Burn plugin. Using the Desaturate setting I ‘painted’ desaturation onto the background. It took a little time but I loved the results:
By applying the same effect to all the photos a consistent look can be achieved which can really tie an album together (much like a good rug ties the room together). Here are a few more examples of using the Dodge and Burn plugin to desaturate the background while leaving the subjects vibrant:
Before:Â
After:
 
Now here’s one final example that has a similar look but was produced using a slightly different method. Instead of using the D&B plugin to desaturate the background in this photograph I first reduced the color by adjusting the saturation and vibrancy sliders in Aperture:
Then I sent the image to the Dodge and Burn plugin and using the Saturate setting I added color back into the photograph by carefully painting the bride’s dress and the flower lei each is wearing.
Spend some time with the Dodge and Burn plugin and I think you’ll find it can do some interesting things to your photographs.  These are the same techniques you will learn in this summer’s Digital Photography and Photoshop courses at Digital Media Academy.
Or, you can learn Photoshop with DMA on a Final Cut Pro and Photoshop Cruise this summer! Learn more about DMA on the Sea!
Cartoon Creation with Toon Boom Studio
Digital Media Academy News + Events | March 25th, 2009 by Ben
Hi! This is Ben Jaffe, one of the instructors for DMA’s Adventures Program. We are very excited to offer several new classes this summer. I’d like to talk a bit about our new Cartoon Creation class.
In the class, we’ll be using Toon Boom Studio to teach animation techniques. This software is very flexible and fun to use. I’ll tell you a bit about the features of this software package, and how your child can learn about animation with DMA.
At the core of all animation are “keyframes”. We find them in other animation applications, video apps, compositing apps, and even audio editing applications. Keyframes are what allow us to move our characters, animate them, change the lighting, move the camera, and make their lips move. Without keyframes, there would be no movement or change. In other words, we’d just be working with still images without keyframes, and that’s not nearly as much fun!
Keyframes simplify animation by allowing us to modify our drawing over time, instead of manually drawing every single frame individually. Animating with keyframes is kind of like cutting out your character from paper and pushing him around the table. He moves smoothly, and you can reuse objects you have already drawn. The alternative is frame-by-frame animation; this is like making a flip-book, and redrawing the character on every page.
We also cover frame-by-frame animation. This is how they made the classic Disney cartoons. Toon Boom Studio has an onion-skinning feature built in to help with this kind of animation. It outlines the drawing from the previous frame, which gives you a good reference for the position of the next frame’s drawing. Unfortunately, animators didn’t have it this easy back in the ’70s!
Toon Boom Studio has many powerful drawing tools built in. Even things like shading are easy to manage. In the picture below, the darker shading on the left side of her face was created with the shading tool. Adding shadows for characters is as easy as dragging and dropping a shadow in. The shadows even automatically update. Once we put the shadows in, we don’t have to worry about them anymore. We can even draw with gradients, instead of plain colors. Check out the star in her hair. It’s a smooth ramp from orange to yellow, and gives the character a subtle touch of realism.
Toon Boom Studio has a lip-syncing engine built in. This lets us record an audio track and sync the lips of our characters to fit our recorded dialog. Toon Boom Studio takes the monotony out of lip-syncing. We get to make the character speak with our voice, and the software does the tedious part of the process for us! That’s pretty exciting!
One of the most exciting things about Toon Boom Studio is its compatibility with file formats that animators already use. We can import Adobe Illustrator vector files, Flash .swf’s, all kinds of raster image formats, video formats, and sound formats. This means that we can use almost any source material that we can find to animate. Do you know any artists who use Adobe Illustrator? You can bring their work right into Toon Boom Studio, with no loss in quality, and no conversions!
And even more exciting is the export formats. Believe it or not, the projects you create in our course can be exported to Adobe Flash files! Flash is the industry standard for animations on the internet, so this is extremely exciting. This means that everyone with the Flash player installed can view your animation. (98% of computers with internet have Flash installed, so that’s a big deal!) You can put your animations online for the world to see, or to share with friends and family! You can also export your animations to video, for use in a DVD, or a video project.
I’m very excited to see this Cartoon Creation class offered this summer. We get to create dynamic and rich animations that we can share with anyone and everyone, and our animations will play on almost any computer. It’ll be such a blast!
I hope to see you in the summer!
-Ben
Make a Music Video at Film Camp this Summer!
Digital Media Academy News + Events | March 24th, 2009 by Philip Harding
Want to learn how to make amazing music videos?
Come to DMA Film Camp this summer! Learn how to shoot film on HD cameras, record and edit audio samples, mix the video and audio together, and produce a complete music video!
The band Coldplay continues to come out with innovative and very creative music videos. Almost everyone can remember the music video created for their song “The Scientist” in 2003. This movie was very interesting since the entire movie appeared to be shot in reverse. The music video won three MTV music awards for the video’s reverse narrative effect.Â
One of Coldplay’s newest music singles is “Life in Technicolor ii”. This is such an entertaining and fun music video. This is just another example of what you can do with your film skills and some good creativity. Get inspired, and we’ll see you at DMA Film Camp this summer!
- -- - Here is Coldplay’s award-winning music video from 2003, ”The Scientist”  Â
View all DMA Teen Summer Camps and Film Camps
Music Video Production Course with The John Lennon Bus
A Closer Look at Adobe Photoshop
Digital Media Academy News + Events | March 24th, 2009 by Ben
Hi! I’m Ben Jaffe, one of the instructors for Digital Media Academy’s Adventures Program. I want to give you a closer look at Adobe Photoshop CS4. We use Photoshop for image creation and modification in our Web Design class.
Photoshop is the industry standard for image manipulation and creation. It’s even become a verb! “That looks Photoshopped!” Usually we use that term to describe photographs that look like they have been modified. Photoshop is good for many other purposes too. In this case, we’re looking at a simple header for a website that we’ve created in Photoshop.
A header goes at the top of your website. Often, it is an image that includes elements related to the site. For example, if we are making a site about different kinds of ducks, we might make the header image look like a pond and put ducks in it!
On the far left of the above image, we can see our tools stacked vertically. We cover all the tools, but focus on the most important ones. On the right, we have several panes where we can modify the image in different ways. There are also pop-up windows that you can access in various ways, shown below.
This can all seem very overwhelming. Photoshop is an extremely deep application, which is why it is the standard for image manipulation in several industries (film, photography, print, etc). As complex as it is, with the proper guidance, it can be easy to learn even for young children. It’s much like a car. For example, you don’t need to know how to change the oil or replace the tires in order to get gas at a gas station. And you don’t need to know how to install a spark plug in order to change the oil. As with most things, people learn Photoshop modularly, piece by piece.
There are always different ways to accomplish things in Photoshop. Everyone I know takes a slightly different approach. We teach the kids several techniques for getting different effects, and with guidance from us, we let them take the route that is most fun for them. Your child can learn basic and some intermediate techniques in Photoshop, create graphics for an incredible website, build the website, and add animation, all in a week at DMA!
I hope to see you this summer!
-Ben Jaffe
Amazing 3D Flash Website with "Real" Interactivity : Learn How to Make a Website at DMA
Digital Media Academy News + Events | March 23rd, 2009 by Philip Harding
Learn how to become a web designer at DMA!
This is such an exciting time to be a web designer! Web users are getting more web savvy every day, online software applications are becoming the norm, the internet has become a part of most people’s daily lives, people are connected almost everywhere they go, half of everyone’s life is help somewhere on the net, and internet connections are faster than ever! This is a great time to be a web designer!
At DMA you’ll learn the web design skills and techniques to build amazing websites. Digital Media Academy’s pro web courses are built around Adobe’s web creative suite of applications including Dreamweaver, Photoshop, and Flash.
Earlier this week I came across a CNN “Breaking News” video clip that demoed a new site by GE. This site uses 3d animation, live video, and Flash technology together with a tangible piece of paper you print out from the site. They are calling this “Augmented Reality.” The website uses your computer’s built-in camera and microphone to interact with website. Check it out! It is a very interesting site that shows a little of what is possible when combing your web developer skills and a good chunk of imagination. Creative web designers and web developers continue to push the limits of what is possible on the new web frontier.
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Watch the CNN Video Clip!
(Opens in New Window)Â
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Learn more about web design training courses and summer camps at DMA!
Video Games Fight the Economy: Making Video Games + Playing Video Games = Making More Money & Feeling Better!
Digital Media Academy News + Events | March 23rd, 2009 by Philip Harding
We all know video games improve your life, right?
This morning I pulled out my digital newspaper (iPhone), espresso, and bowl of Wheaties… I watched my CNN video news update on my iPhone. Who reads real newspapers anymore? I enjoy listening to Marc Andreesen, (creator of Netscape, founder of Ning, etc..) who is calling for all newspapers to stop the presses – saying print is dead. Interesting idea… but I digress.
What I found very interesting was one of the CNN top stories involving the video game industry. Even though there are a few supposed rumblings going around about a struggling economy and some crazy idea about a recession, the video game industry is fighting back and stronger than ever. The video game industry earned $1.3 billion dollars in video game and console sales in January! This dollar amount is up 13% from January 2008! This is a great time to switch job careers and become a video game designer at DMA!
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“Video Games also Reduce Stress and Anxiety!”
After digesting my morning digital news, I switched over to one of my favorite iPhone Apps from Howcast.com (in about 30 seconds I can watch a video and learn how to make fortune cookies or talk my way out of a speeding ticket – one of the best time-wasting Apps you can download from the iTunes App Store). One of the top videos in the list was “How to Reduce Anxiety“. Researchers have found that playing a video game eased anxiety in young patients awaiting surgery better than a prescription tranquilizer! Way to go Mario! Goal oriented video game play boosts dopamine in the brain – a chemical linked to positive feeling!
Making video games & playing video games never felt so good! This is a great time to be a video game designer!
Video Game Courses for Adults
Video Game Courses for Teens
Video Game Camps for Kids
Adventures: Kids Learn Video Game Creation
Digital Media Academy News + Events | March 17th, 2009 by Ben
I’m Ben Jaffe, one of the instructors for Digital Media Academy’s Adventures Program. I teach Game Design and Web Design.
On the surface, the Game Design class may look somewhat straightforward. But it’s much more than simply creating fun games with our students. In our classes, we also teach important programming concepts, which can be the foundation for a future programming career.
Game Building can be frustrating for somebody who has never done it before. As games become more and more complex, the instructors are there to help them understand how to build their games well. Programmers call it “extensibility.” Here’s an example of how students encounter this in DMA’s Adventures Game Design class:
A few days into the week, we usually start working on an RPG game. The player controls a character who interacts with bystanders in the game to get information or collect items. The students quickly discover how frustrating it is to program actions for every single bystander in the game individually. The same goes for other objects in the game, such as allies, enemies, keys, coins, and projectiles. It’s much easier to group them together, and make a rule saying, “Whenever the character talks to any bystander, run this action.”
Extensibility is not the only programming concept that we teach to the kids. They learn the importance of game planning, bug testing, and proper pacing to effectively meet deadlines. They also develop an understanding of variables, and an introductory understanding of object-oriented programming. Instead of lecturing to the students, we let them discover and understand the concepts by themselves, with guidance.
Most importantly, we teach the kids programming concepts without them even realizing it! If they pursue a career in computer science or game design, they will already understand the importance of extensibility, testing, planning, and pacing. Though it may seem like just another fun summer course, every student gets much more out of it – skills they can use for the rest of their lives.
See you in the Summer!
Camp Fairs Raffle (Drawing #1) Winner Announced!
Digital Media Academy News + Events | March 11th, 2009 by Lara
Announcing the first DMA Camp Fair Free Tuition winner!
Congratulations to Tiffany Miller for winning the raffle for free tuition to the Digital Media Academy from our first round of camp fairs! Tiffany can choose from our many great courses.
DMA attends many camp fairs across the country. Attendees are able to enter their name for a chance to win a free summer camp course by Digital Media Academy.
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