Cogswell College, a leading educational institution offering a unique curriculum fusing Digital Art, Engineering and Entrepreneurship, has announced that senior class students participating in the school's "Star Thief Studio" project have created and produced an original short animated film and interactive iPad book app.
Entitled "Drawn Home," the animated film/interactive book app is a charming, transformation story about a 6 year old boy who feels he's lost his mother's love. The boy runs away from home, getting lost in the forest, only to find that when he returns home, his mother's love was there for him all along.
Star Thief Studio is one of several on-campus project-based learning studios offered by Cogswell College. These studios mirror professional production studios and allow students to collaborate with their peers - whether they are artists, animators, technical artists, engineers and/or sound designers - to create outstanding projects on a large scale.
About COGSWELL'S STAR THIEF STUDIO
Star Thief Studio is guided by Cogswell College faculty with industry experience, and student work is regularly critiqued by industry professionals. Participants are focused on creating engaging story-driven content in the form of animated shorts and interactive stories.
Development artists at Star Thief Studio work in a dedicated studio space and use everything from pencil, paint and clay to Maya, Zbrush, Mudbox, Photoshop, Renderman and Fusion. Much of the digital painting and sculpting for these projects is done on Cintiqs. Star Thief Studio engineers use tools like X Code, Flash Professional, and Maya, writing code in Objective C, C++ Maya API, Action Script, Mel Script and Python.
Star Thief Studio offers students the opportunity to play an important role within a major project that will deliver a great experience, film credit and professional quality content for their demo reels. The large group, project-based environment of Star Thief Studio gives students the opportunity to develop and exercise the skills they will need to work effectively with a team over an extended period of time after graduation.
Skills taught within the Star Thief Studio curriculum include: communicating professionally, being a team player, taking initiative and learning to lead, as well as managing time-sensitive tasks and completing work within deadlines. In the end, students will have original new work for their portfolios - work which has been refined to an extremely high standard and has been used within a major animated and interactive project.
About COGSWELL COLLEGE
Designed as a "fiercely collaborative, living laboratory," Cogswell College is located in the heart of the legendary Silicon Valley in Sunnyvale, California. The school is a WASC accredited, four-year institution of higher education with a specialized curriculum that fuses digital arts, audio technology, game design, engineering and entrepreneurship.
Numerous alumni of Cogswell College have secured prominent positions within the entertainment, videogame, technology, computer, animation, and motion graphics industries throughout California and beyond. Several of these alumni have established careers with such high profile companies as Activision, DreamWorks Animation, Disney, Electronic Arts, Pixar, and Microsoft Game Studio. Many other alumni have launched their own creative ventures.
Recent Cogswell alumni were members of the Academy Award-winning production teams which worked on the blockbuster films "Frozen" and "Life of Pi." Some of the other well-known consumer projects to which Cogswell alumni have contributed include the feature films "The Boxtrolls" and "The Avengers," and the popular videogames "Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare," "Halo 4" and "Battlefield Hardline."
Additionally, animated short films conceived and produced by Cogswell students have gone on to win prestigious awards, including those presented by the California International Animation Festival, the Colorado Film Festival, the Oregon Film Festival, the Miami Film Festival, the Philadelphia Film & Animation Festival, the San Jose Short Film Festival, and Canada's International Film Festival.
Cogswell College is located at 1175 Bordeaux Drive, Sunnyvale, California, 94089. For more information, please call 1-800-264-7955 or visit:
http://www.cogswell.edu/
