Emergent Cinematic Arts
Shaping worlds.
Immerse audiences in your stories with state-of-the-art and interactive technology.
Building on the foundation of the groundbreaking UT3D initiative, we offer a variety of production courses in digital and emergent media to equip you with the necessary technical and critical-thinking skills to take your cinematic stories to the next level.
For questions about these courses, contact Ben Bays at benbays@utexas.edu.
Spring 2020 Courses
About UT3D and the development of RTF's digital media curriculum
RTF 329C DIGITAL MEDIA PRODUCTION-WB • BEN BAYS
Animation, Visual Effects, Digital Painting and CGI are used to produce digital content for a variety of media including films, animation and interactive formats like video games and VR/AR. This course is an interactive, online experience designed to teach you the foundational Digital Media Production tools: Photoshop, After Effects, Adobe Animate (Flash) and Maya. Through creative hands-on challenges, you will apply digital media tools and techniques to a variety of tasks in the pipeline of production from concept, storyboard, layout to compositor, VFX, CG and interactive design. In the end, you must choose: Will you become a generalist across all digital media production, will you specialize in one discipline or will you define a new role in digital media production? OPEN TO MAJORS AND NON-MAJORS. PRE-REQUISITES WILL BE WAIVED FOR ALL UPPER DIVISION STUDENTS.
RTF 344M CG FOR FILM AND GAMES • BEN BAYS
This course is a production-based overview of Maya, with a focus on modeling, surfacing, lighting, and particles. Topics include interactive environments and CG compositing and lighting.
RTF 344M INTERACTIVE MEDIA AND GAME DEVELOPMENT • DEEPAK CHETTY
This course provides students with the fundamentals of interactive media through digital game creation. The course focuses on two areas: (1) general principals of game design and game development, and (2) development of simple 3D games.
RTF 344M INTRO VFX & MOTION GRAPHICS • BEN BAYS
This is a production course designed to introduce and expand your knowledge of the world of motion graphics and special effects. Credits, transitions, greenscreen, filters, masks, mattes, all sorts of things. In contrast to the animation course, this class will focus on advanced compositing and techniques to enrich your video, stills, typography and to get exactly what you want to see onscreen. You will not be required to draw anything (complicated). Consider this more of a course in design than art. We will take the elements of design: line, shape, value, texture, color, direction, size, perspective and space and add one more thing to them: time.
RTF 344M POST PRODUCTION TECHNIQUES • SIMON QUIROZ
This course examines the necessary processes and best practices to finish and deliver a film or a media piece after the offline edit is done. From preparing assets for online editing and sending them to sound design, integration of VFX to color correction, grading and mastering. While we will cover a great deal of color grading, this course will also emphasize on the technical elements that allow us to deliver the best quality of images possible for different platforms with the assets given from production and preparation from editing. Ideally, the students should come with a pretty good understanding of nonlinear editing software.
RTF 344M WRITING FOR INTERACTIVE GAMES & MEDIA • SUSAN O'CONNOR
Interactive storytelling is a form of dramatic writing, just like theater or television. What makes the medium unique is that the author does not control the story; the audience does. Creatives have only just begun to explore the storytelling possibilities of this field. In this class, you will begin to develop the skills & knowledge necessary to write for interactive mediums such as video games, digital media, VR, and augmented reality. Your final deliverable in this course - a narrative design document - will serve as a writing sample for your portfolio.
RTF 344N IMMERSIVE FILMMAKING • SIMON QUIROZ
By relying on stereoscopic 3D production and post-production techniques as our foundation, the goal of this course is to explore different ways and techniques of what makes immersive filmmaking as it applies to 360 spherical video and/or Stereoscopic 3D. Students will complete at least one short piece to be viewed via a Head Mounted Display, a 3D monitor, or on the web.
RTF 344N MOTION CAPTURE STUDIO • DEEPAK CHETTY
Utilizing a combination of hardware (motion capture suits and facial capture techniques) and software (Unreal Engine, Motion Builder), students will write, direct and virtually shoot and edit a completely computer-generated film within Unreal Engine using an actual human performance. The course will also cover the history of motion capture techniques and their utilization within the world of cinema, gaming and non-entertainment related fields.
RTF 344T GAME DEVELOPMENT CAPSTONE: 3D GAMES • PAUL TOPRAC
The Capstone Game Development course brings together students from Computer Science, College of Fine Arts, and Radio-TV-Film to form small teams in which each student will contribute specialized knowledge to the group creation of 3D games for mobile, online, and social technology platforms. Students will gain a thorough understanding of the 3D game development process, through modeling of the environment and practices that are used in game studios.
*If interested, please read instructions to apply.
RTF 351D ADVANCED 2D ANIMATION • LANCE MYERS
Students will use the basic 2D animation skills learned in the 351C Intro to 2D Animation class to focus on the production of longer animated projects. Additional techniques including some motion graphics, stop motion, and advanced 2D will also be covered in class.
