Archive for May, 2016

Here’s how magic happens: Two people meet in training when they start teaching at CSULB and they both have ideas to better their student experience. Over 9 years those ideas are shared, supported and made into reality by the hard work of many parties; three professors (Perry LaMarca, Aubry Mintz and Johannes Muller-Stosch) realized their students could all benefit from working together. With the help of two very supportive departments (Music and the School of Arts) they paired two classes of talented animation and film score students and a highly skilled 60-piece orchestra and set out to make magic.  Animation students working on their Senior Projects are paired with Music students taking an Advanced Film Scoring Project class. “It would cost thousands and thousands of dollars to rent an orchestra for a film out in the real world,” says Prof. Mintz, “and now our students have music that is specifically tailored to their films advancing their stories to a whole other level for everyone involved.” Films of recent award-winning alumni Alex Balaban and Rodrigo Tello were both scored with the help of the CSULB Musicians, and as these collaborations continue, there will be many more awards and accolades to come!

CSULB Illustration/Animation alumni Alex Balaban and Rodrigo Tello both won Animation Awards at the Society of Illustrators 2016 Student Scholarships Competition, held in New York City. Mr. Balaban took home “First Place in Animation” for his film “Shimai” which was completed while he was a senior at CSULB. In addition, CSULB alumnus Rodrigo Tello won 1st runner up for his film “The Waiting Game.”

Congratulations Alex and Rodrigo!!!

CSULB Art History Lecturer Julia Friedman will be taking part in UCLA Hammer Conversations: Art Critic Dave Hickey & Art Historian Julia Friedman at the Hammer Museum, on May 11, 2016. For the UCLA talk, Mr. Hickey and Dr. Friedman will present Hickey’s new books Wasted Words: The Essential Dave Hickey Online Compilation and Dustbunnies: Dave Hickey’s Online Aphorisms, which Dr. Friedman both compiled and edited. Between June 2014 and April 2015, Dave Hickey posted almost 3,000 digital comments on social media, prompting nearly 700,000 words in response from art lovers, acolytes, and skeptics. Wasted Words is an unedited comprehensive transcript of these exchanges. Its pendant publication, Dustbunnies, distills Hickey’s richly aphoristic comments, extracted from various discussion threads. Unlike Wasted Words, which is inherently contextual and discursive, Dustbunnies stresses the timeless character of Hickey’s unique authorial voice. Always provocative and often shocking, Hickey’s pronouncements are perfectly suited for the jab-like nature of the social media platform. In a delightfully ironic twist of fate, some two decades after the onset of the digital revolution, a critic known for his paragraph-long verbal riffs blasts away at digital natives in the under-140-character idiom they understand. Dr. Friedman will also be participating in another talk with the celebrated Art Critic on his book 25 Women: Essays on Their Art which “constitutes a body of work that reflects Hickey’s deep and prolonged engagement with influential contemporary artists.” The event will take place at the Hauser Wirth & Schimmel courtyard, in Los Angeles on Thursday, May 12.