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Project CA clutches 1st Prize Animated Documentary at CICFF

Superhero Training Center: Cultural Awareness Day, a 3D animated documentary created in Fall 2008 at ETC-SV, obtained the 1st Prize Animated Documentary award at Chicago Children's International Film Festival (CICFF). It was a tremendous honor to receive such an award at CICFF because it is the only children's film festival that is an Academy Award qualifying festival.

Visiting NAMCO BANDAI Games America Inc.

Feb. 5th, 2009, Students in ETC-SV visited NAMCO BANDAI Games America, which located in Santa Clara, California.

About NAMCO BANDAI Games
NAMCO BANDAI Games is a combined company aiming at developing video games to inspire and entertainment people to the full. In 2005, Japanese toy giant BANDAI and game publisher NAMCO(Pac-Man developer) joined operations to leverage their core strengths to increase their competitiveness in intense entertainment industry. Earlier this year, they announced their new manga-based action game Afro Samurai, which was developed in U.S. headquarter.

Talks Given by Company Managers
Our tour around NAMCO BANDAI started with Diana Ross, Director of Human Resources, giving us a general introduction about company business. She also told us some interesting back-stage stories on developing Afro Samurai.

Later on, Makoto Iwai, Executive Vice President and COO, explained to us how NAMCO and BANDAI decided to merge and shift their focuses to western market. As Japanese video game market shrinking and development cost increasing, two companies figured out to merge their operations in order to make more competitive and profitable products. Meanwhile, the company began to open up new studios in US and Europe, expanding into larger entertainment market. Moreover, Mr. Iwai mentioned NAMCO BANDAI America is in really good shape hiring more talents while other companies are undergoing a lot of laying off. He encouraged us all to apply to NAMCO BANDAI Games.


Lastly, Roger Hector, Financial Manager, also a video game veteran, gave us a talk on evolution of character design for video games. In his talked, he showed us how artists designed characters on paper in old days versus nowadays sophisticated 3D technology. Besides, Roger told us how Toru Iwatani created the character Pac-Man. Mr. Iwatani got the design of Pac-Man when he was looking at a one-slice-off pizza. With the thought of everyone loves eating, he designed Pan-Man an eating game with this cute yellow character.
During the second half of Roger’s talk, he went through all NAMCO BANDAI games with us. It is interesting to see that most of NAMCO BANDAI games are manga-based. Roger explained to us this is a strategy to build company image.

Tour the Working Space
After the talk, Veronica Guzman toured us throughout their working space and gave us NAMCO BANDAI goodies. People working there are very welcoming. We can also feel the various cultures blend very well there. It is an especially friendly place for foreign students.

At the end of the day, we learned a lot about the company and got nice gifts. It was an amazing visit.

Visual long-term memory has a massive storage capacity for object details

Last Monday (01/26/09), ETC-SV students, faculty and some other people were invited to a test with respect to the storage capacity of visual long-term memory. We were asked to view sequences of images and took 5-minute breaks in between. After several iterations, testers were handed a set of test papers with paired images on it. The images were paired in this way:
1) In the novel condition: the presented image was paired with a different categorized image to test the category memorization of the long-term memory.
2) In the exemplar condition: the presented image was paired with a phycally similar image to test the appearance memorization of the long-term memory.
3) In the state condition: the presented image was paired with a exactly the same but in different state image to test the state memorization of the long-term memory.
Testers needed to circle the image which appeared in the previous slices.

These images were our test results. From the tests we could know that: 93% of novel questions were correctly answered, 88% of exemplar questions were correctly answered, and 87% of state questions were correctly answered. The result indicates that our memory is as good at detail(shape and state) recognition as at category(nobel). This leads to a conclusion that our long-term memory is capable of maintaining detailed representations of thousands of images.

From the game developer’s perspect of view, players’ memories should not be under-estimated. If making a role playing game, the hints for a puzzle should not be too easy or too obvious to get. If making an action or a shooting game, the tempo should not be too slow so that players have enough time to observe the environment and react. Also, for both games or movies or any other works, the character , the NPC, and the world information need to be well-designed so that nothing will be illogical or mismatched when the story goes.

Visit to Namco Bandai Games

ETC-SV visited Namco Bandai Games on Thursday 02/05/09. Throughout the studio, we were welcomed by the warmth and positive attitude of the Namco Bandai Games developers. It was a tremendously fun and insightful visit.

Go Steelers!

Jiyoung hosted a Superbowl party today that was well attended by west coast ETCers, past and present. She also had an ample supply of 3D glasses for the half time commercials. Thanks Jiyoung!

Last Thursday, we were invited to a special event which was hosted by Dreamworks. The speaker, Jeffery Katzenberg, who is CEO of DreamWorks, was giving a presentation of select 3D footage from the animated film, MONSTERS VS. ALIENS (It will be released this March).

He started by saying that “3D film is the evolution of cinema, following sound film and color film.” A 3D film makes the audience feel a three-dimensional effect significantly with 3D glasses, based on the principle of using two different images. Actually, this technology isn’t completely brand-new, we feel somewhat familiar with it. Most people have experienced watching a 3D movie wearing glasses with blue and red color lenses.

But what makes this 3D movie special is, while the traditional way of making 3D movies is to develop 2D first then convert it into 3D, this 3D movie is developed on the base of 3D technology at the very beginning. In order to support this new technology, DreamWorks had to collaborate with Intel which has a well known reputation for making graphic chips, embedded processors, and other devices.

Even though we didn’t finish the whole movie, the scenes from MONSTERS VS.ALIENS were very exciting. Various sizes of monster characters made a dramatic landscape and maximized a three-dimensional effect. And since the background of that movie is San Francisco downtown, where we were at that time, we enjoyed it even more.

According to Jeffery, it seems like 3D films are going to be the big shift in the near future. Popular movie directors, such as James Cameron, Steven Spielberg, and Peter Jackson are focusing on developing this kind of film currently. But the important thing is that 3D technology cannot make a bad movie good but can make a good movie special, as Jeffery emphasized.