Online courses directory (88)

3D modeling and animation have transformed numerous fields, including filmmaking, computer games, architecture and product design. Yet the underlying basis of high-quality 3D production originates in traditional design and animation methodologies. This course provides an introduction to the exciting world of 3D content creation, while emphasizing its connection to the creative thought process. Students will learn an overview of the artist workflow as it relates to modeling, texturing, animation, lighting and rendering. This course offers a new dimension to the process of filmmaking and design.

This four-session course explores a practical approach to composing and producing music with Native Instruments Kontakt. We will cover the most important technical and aesthetic aspects of creating music with the industry-standard Kontakt sampler. Weekly assignments will give you practical experience in putting these technical skills in a musical context. Topics include Kontakt library, signal flow, layering, working with drums, building custom sampled instruments, file management, modulation, audio FX, automation, and DAW integration. At the end of this course, you will have created four original compositions with Kontakt, in addition to numerous custom sampled instruments.

Over the past fifteen years, many of the music industry’s greatest artists have made public valuable information about how they created their iconic sounds. Through the release of memoirs and interviews, their techniques—once considered closely-guarded industry secrets and the keys to their success—are now available to anyone who wants to use them. The information, however, is scattered amongst hundreds of sources. This class strives to gather up that information and assemble it in a way that allows the student to witness the historical evolution of the industry and, even more importantly, make immediate use of each technique as it is presented.

This course extends our existing background in Deep Learning to state of the art techniques in audio, image and text modeling. We'll see how dilated convolutions can be used to model long term temporal dependencies efficiently using a model called WaveNet. We'll also see how to inspect the representations in deep networks using a deep generator network, leading to some of the strongest insights into deep networks and the representations they learn. We'll then switch gears to one of the most exciting directions in Deep Learning thus far: Reinforcement Learning. We'll take a brief tour of this fascinating topic and explore toolkits released by OpenAI, DeepMind, and Microsoft. Finally, we're teaming up with Google Brain's Magenta Lab for our last session on Music and Art Generation. We'll explore Magenta's libraries using RNNs and Reinforcement Learning to create generative and improvised music.

You know what creative systems you need for a successful practice. But what business systems do you need? This course outlines the primary financial statements used to track progress towards creative goals. We’ll measure “worth,” manage cash, spot variances, and protect your assets. All in a creative context.

A series of 4 exercises exploring various principles of design, time-based media, and animation while learning industry standard 2D animation software Adobe After Effects. These exercises will focus on the design, editing, timing, and animation skills needed to complete our larger class project "Title Transformation". Individual exercises will be graded separately. There will not be a final critique of the work, but there will be brief daily feedback from the instructor, and students are encouraged to seek feedback and critique from each other. Although there's a lot of software to learn during this exploration, we must never lose sight of the fact that we are designers and communicators first, and software operators second.

"Projectionists -- pull curtain before titles" This note was attached to cans of film reels containing Otto Preminger's 1955 classic, The Man with the Golden Arm. Before this, movie theaters didn't even open the curtain until the opening credits were over. The Man with the Golden Arm marked a turning point when film titles became more than just a dull roll of credits and became part of the artistic statement of the film itself. Preminger had collaborated with legendary graphic designer Saul Bass (Links to an external site.) to create a simple but arresting cut out animation that changed how we view the title sequence forever. Since that time, title sequence design has become an art form of it own, blending graphics, typography, as well as both traditional and experimental film and animation techniques to create unique visions that are sometimes more fascinating than the movies and television shows they were created for.

The role of the music technologist has changed throughout history, though one trait has stayed consistent: the necessity for the individual to operate across multiple mediums and disciplines. This project-based course provides an opportunity to synthesize the key concepts and skills learned in the Foundations of Music Technology Program, and enables students to establish meaningful connections between the contents of each course. The course will have students acquire real-world artistic experience, through the critical examination of historical works, and the completion of a final project, which demonstrates their ability show how they themselves have become The Modern Music Technologist.

This course explores the role of computation in the conception and representation of shape and form. With a recognition that artists, architects and designers learn best when creating new work, programming will be taught as a creative medium. In the Python language, students will develop, analyze and critique algorithmic approaches to digital drawing, modeling, and projection. Specifically, the powerful, robust, and well-documented Python Rhinoscript library will be introduced and explored in detail. This API allows Rhinoceros modeling software to be scripted with text-based code. Scripting in this manner can automate existing processes and can lead to novel kinds, relationships, and orders of shape and form. Architects, sculptors, and any artists or designers interested in the either fabrication or communication of form and shape will recognize the importance of projection–the the transformation of three-dimensional geometry onto a two-dimensional picture plane, cut sheet, paper or screen. As a result, this course focuses not only on the generation of geometry, but the output of geometry. In parallel to extending students' technical proficiency, this course will touch on the conceptual and theoretical implications of algorithmic design. Each of the five lessons will build upon each other to develop an understanding of the Python language, algorithmic strategies, and digital geometric craft (the interrelated structures and topologies that make up digital models). Beginning with the most primitive geometric element–the point–the course will build curves in two and three dimensions, organize those curves to function as the input for methods that generate surfaces. Subsequently, the course will return to the realm of drawing as surfaces will be used to generate lines and curves in concert with orthographic and perspective projection.

If the negative comes alive in the darkroom, then a film comes alive in the edit bay. There is a lot an editor must know to keep organized and hold onto the director’s creative vision. In addition, a videographer with knowledge of how the footage will be cut and assembled will be a much stronger shooter. In this class you will jump into the art of editing your work, exploring the tools, workflows and practice of editing.

In this course, we will introduce you to the basics of programmable electronics using Arduino. We will start off with simple concepts around designing and creating light sculptures with LEDs that blink to create a variety of patterns and sequences. The course will expand this project to show you how to dim and fade LEDs using a technique called Pulse Width Modulation (PWM). This same technique will be used to mix colors of a tri-color LED to re-create any color in the rainbow and produce your very own disco light show!

Throughout this course, we will introduce the basics of programming in Arduino, introducing a handful of useful constructs in C \ C++ programming.

The Practical History of Typography serves as an introduction to The Complete Typographer, and provides a historical appreciation of the art and science of typography: display lettering (both hand drawn and mechanically generated), and text typefaces—a “historical bucket” approach. The course examines typefaces associated with key design and technological developments of the 20th century—the Bauhaus, the New Typography, etc.—with an eye towards critical analysis of form, moving right up to 2017, including advances in generative type and variable fonts for web.

This course proposes a deepened survey of current practices in generative arts and computational creativity with an emphasis on the formal paradigms and algorithms used for generation. In this advanced class, we study how evolutionary computing, neural networks, and procedural generation can produce novel and valuable artifacts. We survey advances in search-based methods and procedural generation. We look at how to formalize aesthetic measures and learn how creative systems can be evaluated.

We illustrate how these algorithms have been used in numerous examples of past and current productions in visual art, new media, music, poetry, literature, design, architecture, games, moving images, and robot-art. Students get to practice these algorithms first hand and develop new generative pieces through assignments and projects in MAX.

Finally, we discuss the societal and ethical implications of the automation of creative tasks, from the fear of artificial intelligence to the algorithmic bias, and from the most technophobic visions to the most technophilic ideals.

This 4-session survey course covers the main designers in Parisian Fashion from the 1990s to today, focusing closely on one iconic creative individual for each decade. Their work is discussed in light of the cultural and political context of the time, which students learn about through video lectures, assigned readings and discussions. In addition to learning about specific designers and key sartorial techniques and trends, students learn about the main phenomena in the fashion business for each decade. Students are shown how the past influences and shapes the present.

The first session focuses on the 1990s, globalization, and the designers Jean-Paul Gaultier and Issey Miyake. The second session highlights four top Anglophone designers: Marc Jacobs, Tom Ford, John Galliano and Alexander McQueen. The third session summarizes the main changes in business models and the arrival of large luxury conglomerates at the beginning of the century. It also features Christian Louboutin as a designer. The final session is devoted to students’ final presentations and projections about the next developments in technology, business models and media.

In addition to weekly quizzes on designers and techniques, students are required to complete readings and participate in weekly online discussions and the course culminates with a personal research project in which students use primary sources to research the influence of French fashion on a contemporary designer of their own choosing.

This course provides an overview of strategic planning for a creative career, with particular emphasis on budgeting tools, insights, and analysis within creative careers and building diverse sources of income.

The media of mixed reality allows for increasingly immersive experiences that blend the virtual and real, and that change how we perceive and think about what is real. This course attempts to place the evolution of mixed reality in the long history of humans hacking perceptions of reality: from pyramids to cathedrals to google earth VR, from cave paintings to novels to film to immersive cinema.

This course will introduce you to the different forms mixed reality takes. We will:

• Learn about the different hardware platforms mixed reality spans, and understand their differences.
• Practice creating by taking a short story from Italo Calvino and seeing how it translates into Mixed Reality.
• Understand the context of mixed reality as it relates to philosophy and psychology.
• Critically review currently available mixed reality experiences to be inspired and understand best practices.

The systems we built in Course 2 become real as they morph into tax reporting obligations. This course provides an overview of U.S. income, consumption, and employment taxes, and connects the U.S. tax system requirements to tools we use in a professional creative practice.

This course presents five sessions in which the student is introduced to playing the piano and reading music. Each session contains a video lecture presented by the Instructor, piano practice assignments and graded assignments that include a quiz about music terms, theory and/or ear training and a video assessment of the student playing selected piano technique and repertoire. The course also includes a graded assignment for two concert reviews, which can be completed at any time during the course, and a final exam in which the student will improvise a piece. This course presents five sessions in which the student is introduced to the fundamentals of piano playing and music reading. Each session contains a video lecture presented by the Instructor, piano practice assignments, and graded assignments that include a quiz about music terms, theory and/or ear training, and a video submitted by the student of playing selected piano technique and repertoire. The course also includes a graded assignment for a concert review and report, which can be completed at any time during the course.

This class will provide an understanding of the camera settings and gear that is used in professional DSLR and mirrorless video production. We will cover the basics of camera systems and lenses, including achieving perfect exposure and great color, and will also dig into lighting and camera support. This course will lead you through a smooth transition from still photographer to video professional.

Creating for Mixed Reality involves a variety of disciplines and tools that need to be brought together into a single pipeline. Rarely does one person contain the experience to do everything to satisfaction, it takes a village. In this course we will discuss the wide array of disciplines (architecture, vfx, animation, game design, interaction design, character design) and look at different approaches to creating content including shortcuts to achieve a more lifelike experience with less effort.