Wiess made use of a high contrast lighting setup to take team portraits for Beer Bike and used Adobe Photoshop on the DMC workstations for post-production editing. The look was achieved by using some of the lights to light the backdrop and then having an intense primary light source with no diffusion for the subject, casting deep and long shadows.
Rice’s crew team used the new lighting equipment and colored gels in the Photo/Video Studio to create dramatic team portraits. Images courtesy of Eduardo Ruiz.
Images courtesy of Zeisha Bennett
Photography Lecturer Angela Chen brought her FOTO 205 and FOTO 210 classes to the DMC for a demonstration on use of the lights and backdrops in the Photography/Video Studio. The new seamless paper backdrops and high output lights give a lot of flexibility and allow for creativity in lighting schemes, which a number of the students made use of for their projects.
As of Summer 2022, the DMC’s Photo/Video Studio has undergone a drastic transformation. We have acquired 6 high output LED lights with large soft boxes and white, black, and dark blue seamless paper backdrops which make the studio ideal for professional quality headshots. Using a simple 3 point lighting setup, the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department took headshots for the incoming graduate students for their department website. The studio can be reserved up to one month in advance just as you would a piece of DMC equipment using the self-booking feature in Primo. Photo/Video Studio Reservation Page
If you have any questions about how to use the equipment in the studio, ask DMC staff or refer to our Photo/Video Studio written guides
In lieu of a traditional final, BIOS 201 students now have the option of recording a podcast as a small group project discussing some recent advance in stem cell, organoid or genome editing research focusing on a few of a curated list of original research papers in the field. As BIOS 201 is a very large class, the equipment demand is sizable. As such, the DMC assisted the class with equipment rentals, providing a list of recommended podcasting equipment and how to set up the different styles of microphones to record. As the DMC has limited copies of audio recorders or specific mics, in all likelihood there will be some variance in which each student group uses to record their podcast. The DMC Audio Studio was also proposed as an option for those interested. As for editing the podcasts, the class was directed to the DMC’s written guides and recorded short courses on Garageband and Audacity.
SOCI 389 seeks to investigate the representation of race, gender, and class in film, how it may change over time, and what the cultural and sociological implications of that representation are. The class focuses on critical analysis of representation in cinematic media and the interplay of it with prevailing public perception of specific groups. The culmination of this course is a group project consisting of a roughly 12 minute short video focused on analysis of representation of a particular group in film. In support of this final project, the DMC provided an in-class session on editing video in Adobe Premiere Pro.
MUSI 762 is a class aimed at introducing a wide range of practical techniques and knowledge for the working musician in the modern age. As part of this, the DMC offered a two part crash course in various essential aspects of digital media literacy for the practicing musician. The students learned how to create a WordPress website, create a basic promotional flyer in Powerpoint, basic video and audio editing techniques with Adobe Premiere, and the basics of portrait photography. DMC staff demonstrated these various techniques primarily via in-class sessions (in this case, via Zoom), with an optional out of class in-person (socially distanced) session for demonstrating portrait photography, in which DMC staff took headshots for those who participated. Additionally, students checked out video cameras and audio recorders from the DMC to self-record their performances.
HIST 238 introduces how people in different parts of the world have understood why we get sick and how we get better. As part of students’ exploration of different frameworks for dealing with disease and the body, they are asked to conduct original research and produce a podcast to effectively communicate their findings in an engaging way. To that end, the class made use of our in-class workshops to learn audio editing techniques with Audacity and Garageband, which they were then able to employ in our audio studio to record their final projects. Additionally, they made use of our digital lab’s scanning resources to scan tracings they made of various medical images from cultures around the world, which they then were able to print at large scale using the DMC’s high resolution inkjet plotter.
The class website with the completed projects can be viewed here.
ENG 308 leads students through an introduction to the ever-expanding medium of podcasting, specifically radio storytelling. In the process of exploring the various techniques and trends in a wide variety of audio media, students are expected to develop both an understanding of and proficiency with the basics of audio media creation. In support of this goal, the DMC provided in-class tutorials to learn audio editing techniques with Garageband and Audacity, as well as proper use of the Zoom H4N audio recorders that they rented from the DMC for their projects. Additionally, some students used the DMC’s audio studio for their projects to record high-quality narration. With the aid of these tutorials and the borrowed resources, students created podcasts, developing a storytelling style and identity of their own in the process.
The class website with the final projects can be viewed here.
With much of the world still shut down due to COVID-19, traveling to tour college campuses has become infeasible for many prospective students. Seeking instead for a way to bring Rice to the student, the office of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies reached out to the Digital Media Commons to create a virtual tour of campus that offered more immersion than a standard video. The resulting project produced a 360 degree video made up of panoramas of places of interest around campus, which when paired with Google Cardboard headsets allow a prospective student to pan around the scene and take in the sights.
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Ian produced the video by shooting a series of photos of each location, taking multiple passes rotating around a stationary point to create a sphere. Then, those individual photos were organized, aligned, and stitched using Agisoft Metashape, resulting in a 360 degree panoramic output. Finally, the completed panoramas were compiled into a single 360 video using Adobe Premiere Pro, adding in the narration and background music.