Graduating Design | Media Arts seniors looking for employment
should stop worrying and just do it ““ with software.
“I worked on Beck’s music video
“˜Girl,'” said Matt Motal, a UCLA Design | Media
Arts alumnus. “I’ve done Reebok, Cadillac, Lenovo.
We’ve got a bunch of Hewlett-Packard spots ““ the hands
campaign, stuff like that.”
Motal, who graduated in March 2005, can now add Nike to that
list.
Motal and three other UCLA alumni ““ Michael Chang, Gabe
Dunn and Josh Nemoy ““ worked through Motion Theory, a
production and visual effects house located in Venice, to create
two commercials for Nike’s line of golf equipment, using a
computer language developed by a UCLA professor.
The advertisements feature the Nike One golf ball as well as the
Nike Slingshot iron.
Dunn, who had worked at Motion Theory for about a year before
Motal came on board, helped Motal get his foot in the door at the
company.
“The UCLA alumni status is nice. There are a lot of us out
there and it really helps (us to) make connections,” Motal
said.
Another connection between the alumni involved shared
experiences at UCLA, which had given them familiarity with
professional software.
The design team at Motion Theory used a programming language
called Processing to develop the commercials, which aim to express
the engineering process as a marriage between Tiger Woods’
athletic expertise and Nike scientists’ innovations.
This effect was achieved by creating a computer-generated system
of symbols and mathematical theorems roving around the
engineers’ heads for a compelling visual effect.
“It was just an insane system of what we called
satellites,” Motal said. “We’d create satellites,
how they were controlled, and how they moved around. It was really
elaborate and innovative, and I had never seen anything like that
before. We pushed Processing further than I had ever seen it
go.”
Motal first got his hands on Processing when he enrolled in a
Design for Programming course taught by UCLA Professor Casey Reas,
one of the co-creators of the Java-based language.
“Processing is a software application, but it’s also
a programming language specifically designed for artists and
designers,” Reas said.
The program is making waves in the design community because it
fills an area that was empty before.
“Because it’s really made for programming images,
people from the arts community are really comfortable with it. And
because the programming language is structured very similarly to
the Java language, people from the computer sciences can also use
it very easily,” Reas said. “So it fits well between
the arts and the engineering businesses.”
Although it has been five years since Processing’s
conception, the language is still in its developmental phase
because it is an open source, non-proprietary project.
In the meantime, Reas continues to teach a class exploring the
functionality and limits of Processing.
Guthrie Lonergan, a graduating fourth-year Design | Media Arts
student and former student of Reas, has found that the software
makes his work easier.
“Processing makes programming, which is traditionally very
technical, accessible and simple,” Lonergan said. “You
get to take complete control of your computer and make it do things
way more interesting than MySpace.”
Three graduate and 14 undergraduate students in Reas’
Design | Media Arts 152A and 252A classes presented a visual music
concert on May 31, showing off the program’s
capabilities.
The 17 artists interpreted experimental music pieces through
video and stunning visuals. Some of them integrated interactive
components into their pieces, using a joystick or musical keyboard
to place images on screen.
Reas hopes familiarity with the software can help recent UCLA
students such as Motal achieve their professional aspirations.
“We’ve used Processing to get the undergraduates to
think about computers and software as an artistic medium and as
something beyond just a tool,” Reas said. “The idea is
to expand their thinking so that they can build their own software
to do things more unique to their goals.”