This course explores the fundamentals of storytelling through animation and takes students from traditional animation techniques to contemporary forms. In the first part of the course, students will focus on traditional animation, from script to storyboard through stop motion and character-based animation. The course then examines opportunities afforded by new technologies, such as interactivity, projection mapping and game engines. Drawing skills are not necessary for this course, however students will keep a personal sketchbook.
Category Archives: IMA Electives (Legacy Structure – Media & Entertainment)
Courses that count in IMA’s Media & Entertainment category
Designing for Well-Being (ITPG-GT 3000)
This course would focus on the questions of 1) what makes people healthy? and 2) how can we design tools and environments that support healthy lifestyles? Key topics to be covered include public health concepts like the multiple determinants of health and the social-ecological framework, plus a little evolutionary biology; the role of behavior in health, key tenets of behavioral economics and behavior change strategies; and systems thinking concepts from Donella Meadows and others. Students will come away with a much more sophisticated understanding of the complex system of factors and forces that affect people’s health; understanding of key systems concepts and some techniques for understanding systems; and experience designing for behavior at scale. A potential final project could be to reimagine/redesign a popular commercial service so that it would have a more health-producing impact — or, alternatively, to focus on designing changes to the ITP environment that would promote better health for students, faculty and staff. About Steve Downs: www.stevedowns.net
Interactive Telecommunications (Graduate)
2 credits – 6 Weeks
Sections (Fall 2025)
ITPG-GT 3000-000 (11381)10/24/2025 – 12/05/2025 Fri12:00 AM – 2:00 PM (Early afternoon)at Brooklyn CampusInstructed by Downs, Stephen
Modern Artifacts: Interactive Public Art for the People (ITPG-GT 3005)
Credits: 4
Duration: 14 Weeks
Dates: Thu
Duration: 14 Weeks
Dates: Thu
Interactive Telecommunications (Graduate)
4 credits – 14 Weeks
Serious Games (ITPG-GT 3001)
This introductory course will focus on giving students a practical understanding of how to make ‘serious’ video games. That is, games that challenge the player to think and learn. This is a class where we will be ideating and producing playable games each week over 7 weeks using the open-source Godot game engine. By the end of the course, you’ll have a small portfolio of ‘serious’ games to show and build upon. Throughout the course, students will become familiar with concepts such as iterative design, play testing, object-oriented programming, user-interface design, animation and basic art for 2D games. They will take a design-based approach to content creation, developing a proficiency in the Godot game engine and the overall indie-game development pipeline.
Interactive Telecommunications (Graduate)
2 credits – 8 Weeks
Sections (Spring 2023)
ITPG-GT 3001-000 (22327)01/23/2023 – 03/20/2023 Mon3:00 PM – 5:00 PM (Late afternoon)at Brooklyn CampusInstructed by Grewell, Christian
Media-making as Healing Practice (ITPG-GT 2358)
Where does healing reside in media-making? How do we approach creating artistic processes and tools that move towards minimizing harm, supporting collective care, and understanding what healing means for ourselves and with one another? This course examines socially-engaged artistic processes and frameworks that reconstruct, reclaim, and decolonize ‘healing.’ Together, we will gather embodied data from our bodyminds, build language through readings, and map out artists in the field exploring disability, racial trauma, queerness, and diaspora within media and performing arts. Subsequently, we will develop our own processes as our final project: weaving together storytelling, embodied strategies, tool-making, performances, and/ or space-making.
Interactive Telecommunications (Graduate)
4 credits – 15 Weeks
Sections (Spring 2023)
ITPG-GT 2358-000 (22317)01/25/2023 – 05/03/2023 Wed3:00 PM – 5:00 PM (Late afternoon)at Brooklyn CampusInstructed by Lin, Yo-Yo
Through the Lens: Modalities of AR (ITPG-GT 2368)
Credits: 2
Duration: 7 Weeks
Dates: Thu
Duration: 7 Weeks
Dates: Thu
Interactive Telecommunications (Graduate)
2 credits – 7 Weeks
Future Mapper (ITPG-GT 2362)
Credits: 4
Duration: 15 Weeks
Dates: Tue
Duration: 15 Weeks
Dates: Tue
Interactive Telecommunications (Graduate)
4 credits – 15 Weeks
The COVID-19 Impact Project: Extracting Stories From Data (ITPG-GT 2338)
This course will use the open source COVID-19 Impact Dashboard as a basis to explore ways to humanize the unfolding data on the coronavirus pandemic. Students are invited to collaborate on the COVID-19 Impact Project. Students will discover how data flows from public github repositories and tools needed to visualize the data. We will review other data-centric open source projects related to COVID-19 and discuss the questions they are trying to answer or problems they are trying to solve. We will examine historical and contemporary data visualizations. Using data visualization as a scaffold, we will explore ways to support community driven mourning and memorialization. Students can choose to participate as javascript coders, p5js explorers, UI/UX designers, citizen journalists, or data science explorers.
Interactive Telecommunications (Graduate)
2 credits – 8 Weeks
Sections (Spring 2023)
ITPG-GT 2338-000 (22314)01/23/2023 – 03/20/2023 Mon3:00 PM – 5:00 PM (Late afternoon)at Brooklyn CampusInstructed by Thompson, John · Jones, Shindy
Blessed/Blursed/Cursed (ITPG-GT 2088)
This course will explore the history and meaning of the ubiquitous concept of “cursed” media, and provide students with a survey of digital art tools for the creation of their own cursed animation, video, photography, music, and web art. Many people were first introduced to the concept of cursed media when it exploded into mainstream internet discourse in 2016 with the @cursedimages Twitter account, which posted found photos bound by their unsettling effect on the viewer. Cursed media predates this account, however, stretching back to medieval notions of cursed objects. We will demonstrate how throughout time, cursed media has functioned like a slip of the tongue that provides a window into the cultural unconscious, where we encounter uncensored thoughts and feelings about race, gender, class, and what it means to be human. From Amazon Muzak generators to Artbreeder’s GAN tools for image creation, from machine learning text generators to robots who work at Walmart, cursed media and tools for its creation bring into view the ways that that culture reacts to tension between the increasingly precarious position of human beings in the capitalist 21st century and the threat of human erasure by the powerful forces of nature. Students will be introduced to digital art tools for creating music, manipulating photography and video, working with 3d animation, and building web art. Students will attempt to create their own cursed media, and in the process will gain a deeper understanding of the unconscious biases and ethical implications of contemporary digital creation tools.
Interactive Telecommunications (Graduate)
4 credits – 15 Weeks
Sections (Spring 2023)
ITPG-GT 2088-000 (22312)01/26/2023 – 05/04/2023 Thu6:00 PM – 8:00 PM (Evening)at Brooklyn CampusInstructed by Tarakajian, Catherine · Rokhsar, Adam
CAD for Virtual and Reality (ITPG-GT 2086)
Credits: 4
Duration: 14 Weeks
Dates: Mon
Duration: 14 Weeks
Dates: Mon
Interactive Telecommunications (Graduate)
4 credits – 14 Weeks
Noodles Prototyping in Performance (ITPG-GT 2367)
Cooking programs with an image based language is a fundamental skill in the production and design of modern digital processes. Visual programming is not only an alternative way to code, but a solution to approach generative and interactive media. This class reviews the past, present and future of visual programming languages used to procedurally generate and manipulate media such as Max/MSP(Nato.0 55 3d), Isadora, Quartz composer, Touch designer, Houdini, cables.gl and Unreal Engine among others. The core of this course is the study of Unreal Engine’s Blueprint Visual Scripting system as a way to produce an interactive program in an executable form using only Visual Programing. We will study how to create actors, functions, interfaces and how they communicate with each other. We will also take a look into 2 other visual editors, The material/shader editor for the creation of HLSL like shaders and visuals and the new Metasound editor for the manipulation, generation and sequence of sound within the engine. A general understanding of Unreal Engine is a prerequisite for this class. Students will learn how to use blueprints to produce an interactive program that can be a video game, an installation or a Real Time digital Performance.
Interactive Telecommunications (Graduate)
4 credits – 15 Weeks
Sections (Spring 2023)
ITPG-GT 2367-000 (22316)01/23/2023 – 05/08/2023 Mon12:00 AM – 2:00 PM (Early afternoon)at Brooklyn CampusInstructed by Morales, Victor
World-Making with Unity (ITPG-GT 2369)
Computational simulation and videogame engines offer thinkers and makers a new way to reflect on the question “If I can make a world, what would it be like?” In Worldmaking with Unity, students will be exposed to various theories and approaches of worldmaking, and realize their own creative visions by constructing an original, conceptual, and playfully simulated world with indie game development engine Unity. This seven-week seminar/studio course will include a gentle introduction to computer programming, 3D modeling, character and scene design, and rendering techniques with Unity, as well as related production tools such as Blender. Projects may address system, agency, narrative, generative design, critical computing, and more. Student projects created in Unity can be compatible with augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR). This course is designed as an intro-level game design and development course. There is no prerequisite. More advanced production techniques such as shader language and AI might be introduced as optional topics only. More information at: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1UppRjSyFlMpGPNLMowqKmP7wwq29s5Oexnpvrj4Gubs/edit?usp=sharing
Interactive Telecommunications (Graduate)
2 credits – 7 Weeks
Sections (Spring 2023)
ITPG-GT 2369-000 (22315)03/23/2023 – 05/04/2023 Thu6:00 PM – 8:00 PM (Evening)at Brooklyn CampusInstructed by Qi, Zhenzhen
Sound Art: Listening (ITPG-GT 2328)
Listening is not something we do through hearing alone. Engaging with multiple perspectives, from Deaf studies and critiques of ableist hearing ideologies, to the possibilities and pitfalls presented through machine listening and imaginative sonic speculation, we will playfully deconstruct and question what it means to listen at all. Each week, readings will be assigned and students are asked to respond to prompts in the form of light-weight exercises that will orient most of our in-class discussion. Time will be spent discussing readings, presenting, and providing critique for each other’s projects in order to help draw connections between theory and practice. Through in-class presentations, we will encounter works by Christine Sun Kim, George Lewis, Pauline Oliveros and read from Jennifer Lynn Stoever, Tina Campt, and François Bonnet. The class has no technical prerequisites, and students are welcome to respond with works using tools and techniques from other classes (audio/video presentation, programming and physical computing, installation and fabrication, etc.). Through this work, we will unpack how the way in which we attend to the physical world and its inhabitants through our listening has real consequences. In much the same way our interpretation of the world is informed and influenced by factors outside of ourselves, our capacity to listen is conditioned through societal, political, economic, historical, and racial dimensions. We will disentangle listening from hearing and consider listening as a practice that begins not with how we hear sounds but how it allows us to (or prevents us from) interfacing and relating to our exteriors (and interiors). By the end of the class we will attempt to converge and coalesce our own ideas and perspective of what it means to listen.
Interactive Telecommunications (Graduate)
2 credits – 7 Weeks
Sections (Spring 2023)
ITPG-GT 2328-000 (22308)03/24/2023 – 05/05/2023 Fri3:00 PM – 5:00 PM (Late afternoon)at Brooklyn CampusInstructed by Diedrick, Johann
Introduction to 3D (FMTV-UT 1110)
This is an introductory course to the fundamentals of 3D computer animation. Through in-depth discussions and hands-on assignments, students will gain a thorough beginner’s understanding of the 3D production process. Using industry-leading Autodesk Maya running on high-end Mac Pro workstations, students will learn the basics of modeling and proceed through UV layout, texturing, rigging, animation, lighting and final render. At the end of the class students will have completed a series of exercises that will culminate in a final scene that showcases all they learned.This course allocates as a Craft for Film & TV majors. COURSE SUBJECT TO DEPARTMENTAL FEES.
IRL/URL_Performing Hybrid Systems (COART-UT 212)
This course is a unique collaboration between the Collaborative Arts and IMA Tisch departments, and CultureHub based at La Mama. During the pandemic many performing artists moved their work online, leading to an increasing acceptance of experimental practices that their predecessors developed in on-line work for the past 30 years. In Experiments in Hybrid (IRL/URL) Performance, students will have the opportunity to design, prototype, and present collaborative projects that build on this tradition, blending both physical and virtual elements. Over the course of the semester, students will have the opportunity to study at the CultureHub studio where they will be introduced to video, lighting, sound, and cueing systems. In addition, students will learn creative coding fundamentals allowing them to network multiple softwares and devices generating real-time feedback systems. The class will culminate with a final showing that will be presented online and broadcast from the CultureHub studio. Modeled as an accelerated intensive on methods of collaboration, students will work together in groups of 4 to produce new performance work to be presented to an invited in person and online audience. Participation in class discussions and in-class movement workshops are mandatory, and always based on each student’s physical ability. All body types and abilities are welcome and needed for this course to be successful.
The Virtual Producer: Beats & Beatmaking (REMU-UT 1016)
This course will cover various professional Music Production Techniques & Strategies such as: Sampling (& Sample Chopping), Drum Programming / Drum Design, Synthesis & Sound Design, Music Theory (in the context of Music Production), MIDI Editing, as well as numerous Mixing Techniques. Over the course of the class, through the utilization and knowledge of these various skills, students will learn how to create Original Music Compositions & Productions. The primary DAW platform for the course is Ableton. While a Beatmaker / Composer / Producer must be well versed in the application of various software and hardware tools, as well as the many Production skills & techniques, they must also have artistic vision and creative efficacy. So while the course is about Music / Beat Construction and the tools involved, there will also be a strong emphasis on innovative envision, inventive mobility, and how to think / strategize like a Music Producer.
3D Game Studio: Unreal (GAMES-UT 326)
3D Game Studio: Unreal is a practical course that introduces students to the methods, tools and principles used in developing three-dimensional games. This class builds on the foundations laid by the Intermediate Game Development course, but moves into the popular Unreal engine as a technical platform instead. Over the course of the semester, students learn all the technical and design fundamentals that are peculiar to the development of contemporary 3D games: geometry, light, materiality, the camera, use of 3D space, and ways of seeing. The focus in this class is on solo work, since it aims to build the specific set of skills that students will need to make 3D games in later classes. Only basic code skills are required, however.
The Garden of Forking Paths: Exploring the Interactive Story (ARTS-UG 1642)
Credits: 4
Duration: 15 Weeks
Dates: Thu
Duration: 15 Weeks
Dates: Thu
Arts Workshops (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 15 Weeks
Future Reality: Trends and Impact of New Media (ARTS-UG 1643)
Credits: 4
Duration: 15 Weeks
Dates: Fri
Duration: 15 Weeks
Dates: Fri
Arts Workshops (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 15 Weeks
Game Design Workshop (GAMES-UT 50)
Game Design (Undergraduate)
2 credits – 6 Weeks