First Look Festival, Other Worlds Thesis Exhibition, TEDxUSC, and the Whirlwind Week of Showcase Shenanigans!

There’s a ton of screenings and end-of-the-year bashes going on this week at USC, especially with the School of Cinematic Arts’ three day First Look Festival at the Director’s Guild of America, showcasing the best and brightest of the film, animation, and interactive projects.  Tomorrow night, First Frame shows off some really incredible student animation work, some of my favorites are featured below.  I’m looking forward to mingling with the savviest animators at SCA, and hopefully getting a chance to pitch to some of them about an upcoming virtual reality project I’m producing.  Great animators are a joy to have on any interactive team, so we’ll see how it goes!  And my personal picks:

I’m super pumped for First Move on Thursday night, where we demo a bunch of projects from the Interactive Media Division.  I’ll be showcasing Shayd Mobile, our virtual reality experience for the iPhone, and talking with folks about the upcoming full-scale Shayd installation in May at the Other Worlds Thesis Showcase!  No kidding, the next two weeks are literally our personal showcase paradise.  In addition to Other Worlds which runs for five days straight May 5-10, we’ll be showcasing Shayd at TEDxUSC alongside the Mixed Reality Lab from the Institute of Creative Technologies.  I can’t wait!!  You check out even more events going on at our Shayd Events page.

Last but not least, of course, here’s some killer short films that I really liked this year from the production students. These have been showing the past few weekends at the First Film screenings. It takes an incredibly amount of energy, heartbreak, passion, and catering to successfully pull of a thesis film, and these filmmakers totally rocked it. Forgive my cinema-envy, its my guilty pleasure: