#MakeMerry this holiday

The Learning Studio and Maker Lab want to help you #MakeMerry this holiday season. This Christmas we want to help you use the break to make something with Adobe Creative Cloud.

Never used Photoshop or Illustrator? No problem! All day Dead Day we’ll help students download Adobe’s pro-level design and media tools to put a little making into your holiday (download at acu.edu/adobe-cc).

Join us next week to #MakeMerry, beginning with holiday snacks and downloads on Dead Day.

Make It with Adobe Creative Cloud

Our holiday promotion is focusing on Adobe CC because we’re half-way through our first year of CC access for all students and faculty. This year we’ve seen some great projects and we want to share just a few of them with you this next week.

Adobe Creative Cloud lets you build on a platform used by professionals in design, media, web production and storytelling, and students all over campus are producing some remarkable work with Adobe CC.

Follow us on @learningstudio (on Twitter or Facebook) and @acumakerlab (on Facebook) or share your latest work with #MakeMerry.

Branding Photography Workshop

This fall we brought back Asia Eidson to lead a hands-on workshop introducing ACU students to photography for social media branding.

In the all-day workshop, she introduced the visual decisions professional photographers make when taking pictures that affect the way viewers feel/think/experience a product. Technical choices of specific lighting, props, and depth of field can affect the way others feel about a brand.

Asia worked with local businesses to provide students real-world projects to tackle: “I think the strongest part of the workshop was that the images these student photographers designed, shot, and edited went straight into the hands of small businesses to use.”

If you’d like to hear about future student workshops, email us at learningstudio@acu.edu to get on our mailing list.

Web Portfolio
http://www.photobyjoy.com

Image Credits: Karina Hernandez, Meagan McBride

Outdoor Drawing in Albany

This fall we took faculty to Albany for our first Outdoor Drawing workshop as part of the 20/20 Teaching Innovation program. Dan McGregor, Art & Design, introduced the basics of contour drawing, one and two-point perspective through a series of drawing challenges faculty completed in pencil and ink. Participants were challenged to look closely and draw what they see rather than the stereotypes that are in our head. As Dan said, “Drawing is an act of love, seeing the subject as they are not as you want them to be.”

ACU 20/20: Envisioning the Future of Education is a 5-year program of Teaching Innovation Grants that “builds on the skills and insight of our excellent faculty, strategically exploring new models of teaching . . . in order to impact student learning across campus.”

The Learning Studio will continue to partner with the Adams Center for Teaching and Learning to support individual grant recipients and to offer additional faculty development workshops that spark new approaches to familiar classroom challenges. Thank you, Dan McGregor, for your patience, energy and expertise.

If you missed out this semester, email us at learningstudio@acu.edu to get on the waitlist for future workshops.

Kicking off with Creativity

We kicked off the semester with our first faculty workshop for the 20/20 Teaching Innovation program. Mike Wiggins, Art & Design, and Kyle Dickson, director of the Learning Studio, introduced a range of approaches to creativity to faculty from across campus. Participants worked together in a series of hands-on projects to consider creative processes from entertainment and design with potential applications to research, teaching and learning.

ACU 20/20: Envisioning the Future of Education is a 5-year program of Teaching Innovation Grants “builds on the skills and insight of our excellent faculty, strategically exploring new models of teaching and drawing from existing bodies of research in order to impact student learning across campus.”

The Learning Studio will partner with the Adams Center for Teaching and Learning to support individual grant recipients and to offer a series of faculty development workshops for the campus. Thanks to Mike Wiggins for helping us kick things off this fall.

If you missed out this semester, email us at learningstudio@acu.edu to get on the waitlist for future workshops.

FilmFest brings Filmmakers to Abilene

Last week, ACU’s 12th Annual FilmFest gave students the opportunity to screen original films at a red-carpet gala at the Paramount Theatre. This year also provided students unprecedented access to training and feedback from filmmakers on campus and around the country. Production teams began work in the fall developing story ideas and technical skills through workshops led by Nathan Driskell and Mathew Bardwell in the Learning Studio.

For the first time this fall and spring, students had the opportunity to meet one-on-one with returning judges to develop their films. In November, Randy Brewer, class of 1993 and founder of Revolution Pictures, came to campus to work with production teams as they began to refine story ideas.

FilmFestJudgesBrentThen in March, Brent McCorkle, whose recent work includes editing the 2015 feature Woodlawn, spent the day with directors and editors to talk about rough cuts of their films, leaving several weeks for them to fine-tune and in some cases rewrite and reshoot portions of their films before the April 1 premiere.

Again this year, the FilmFest weekend concluded with critique sessions on Saturday morning, allowing each production team to hear from judges about everything from basic story structure to the technical aspects of their finished films.

We’re grateful to the remarkable panel of filmmakers and writers who joined us in Abilene this year—including Will Bakke (director, Believe Me [2014]), Randy Brewer (Revolution Pictures), Al Haley (writer in residence, ACU), Brent McCorkle (director, Unconditional [2012]), Adrian Patenaude (writer), and Kyle Smith (writer).

If you missed FilmFest, you can see this year’s student films and a list of winners at the FilmFest Blog.

Still from "Ultra Super Secret Spy"