With the approach of this holiday season, we’d like to take a megabyte to feature our amazing makers! Why not set aside a little bit of your gift budget this season to support EMDA students who share their creativity through product design?
I was late to the party! I didn’t decide to pursue an EMDA minor until my final year at SOU, but I’m so glad I did. The instructors helped me learn interactive media skills that mesh well with my Business degree. After I graduated and landed a job, my manager even told me I was chosen based on my experience with interactive media.
“It’s aliiiiive!” That’s how founding director Bobby Arellano describes the growth of the university’s ten-year-old academic major in Emerging Media and Digital Arts (EMDA). Quoting Gene Wilder in the movie Young Frankenstein is just one way Arellano and SOU alumni talk about “this weird degree that has to be explained to people,” Arellano said.
I have been working as a Visual Information Specialist at Little Rock Air Force Base for the last 5 years. My responsibilities include developing print and digital graphics for internal and external audiences; I also develop short animations for a base-wide digital marquee system.
EMDA is a winning program because it allows students to ideate and find their voice in the digital world. The mindset to have when heading into a class is to know that you are learning how to learn.
The EMDA idea was built on projects like the Applied Multimedia Unit (AMU) and Digital Media Foundations (DMF) courses over a decade of innovation, curriculum development, and a vision for interdisciplinary design at SOU.
My EMDA degree has given me such a wide variety of skills and has pushed me to try things I never would have tried on my own!
Having started my higher education back in 2008, prior to the formation of EMDA as a major at SOU, I can safely say I love this program! One of the things that I feel you will hear often about EMDA is the diversity in the curriculum: the nature of it being emerging will continue to keep things fresh and varied.
Early in the 2019 Winter term, Arellano enlisted two all-star EMDA students, Andrew Masek, and Quinn Jacobus, to model 3D rooms based on the original writing in the recovered HTML files. Masek and Jacobus have since created, in just 12 weeks, the first iteration of Hypertext Hotel – VR.
SOU students Michael Fields and Matt Krause, both seniors in the university’s Emerging Media and Digital Arts (EMDA) program, showcased their 3D imaging abilities this winter by participating in the X-Taon Car Texturing Contest.